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The idea of mapping civil society organizations and developing an index to measure civil society strength goes back to the 1990s, shortly after the Eastern European regime transitions. It started with the efforts by Anheier and Salamon and their Johns Hopkins initiative to map non-profit associations throughout the world (Anheier and Salamon, 1998). This was soon followed by similar mapping exercises in East and Central Europe financed by the large international donors, and implemented by academics such as Goran Hyden (for UNDP), Marc Howard, and James Manor (IDS, Sussex). Stimulated by the interest in the role of the non-governmental sector in governance programmes, these projects wanted to establish some sort of benchmark to judge civil society strength in its organizational dimension (see Heinrich, 2005: 214–5).

These efforts were not always successful, as they were hampered by contradictory views on the meaning of civil society. As a political concept civil society had re-merged in the 1970s in a neo-Gramscian sense when Latin American opposition groups organized themselves against the dictatorships in Chile, Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil. Civil society initially was shorthand for opposition to human rights violations, and the good versus the evil of the military juntas. A decade later the intellectual leaders of the peaceful transitions in East and Central Europe hailed civil society in its neo-Tocquevillian sense as the source of hope for freedom, which had been so constrained by rigid state institutions. Later, civil society was equated with an elite-led NGO sector building up considerable distributive power based on increased …