SOCIAL MOVEMENTS VERSUS THE THIRD SECTOR: REBELLION VERSUS AN INSTRUMENT OF NEOLIBERAL PRIVATIZATION OF THE STATE, PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION AND SOCIAL PUBLIC SERVICES
Social movements, organized civil society, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are essential for implementing Welfare States and participatory, deliberative democracies, with civil society acting as an agent of change and oversight of public authorities. However, since the 1990s in Latin America, neoliberalism has generated radical privatizations, transferring profitable activities to the market and for-profit private initiative, and social public services such as education and health to so-called “third sector” entities, on the discourse that they would be more efficient and less bureaucratic.
As a result, public health and education have been transferred to entities such as Social Organizations (OS), Civil Society Organizations (OSC), and Civil Society Organizations of Public Interest (OSCIPs) in Brazil and Latin America, referred to as the non-state public sector, generating problems of a return to patrimonialism and an escape from the administrative legal regime.
Thus, organized civil society, through NGOs that until the 1980s and early 1990s were instruments of redemocratization in Latin American countries that had undergone military dictatorships, went from being critical questioners to becoming docile and hungry for public funds in order to assume state social functions, rather than remaining a focus of democratic and social resistance.
