"White Paper on Catalonia's Civic-Social Third Sector": current reflections

 

Original article published in Catalan on 03/25/2025

In recent weeks, I have been reading the first edition, from July 2003, of the White Paper on the Civic-Social Third Sector of Catalonia[1] (Castiñeira, A., & Vidal, P. (Eds.).(2003)). Although almost 22 years have passed, I believe it is a very good book to understand who or what the Third Sector is Civic-Social in Catalonia, as well as strengths, weaknesses, and future challenges.

After reading it, however, I have been left with a certain feeling of concern, as many of the challenges that were detected then, I consider to still be very much in force in 2025, making me aware of the slowness of changes and asking myself what we can do to accelerate transformations that have been identified as necessary for years.

We find ourselves in a moment of high social complexity, in which it continues to be more necessary than ever to work on and reinforce democratic values, and here the third sector (TS) and the Administration have a very important role. To respond to current and future social needs, it will be essential to continue working jointly TS and Administration, but perhaps certain collaboration scenarios will have to be rethought. Probably both the Administration itself and the TS will have to go through transformation processes in order to move forward. Working side by side, from mutual recognition, for and with the citizenry, with agile, innovative formulas that guarantee a minimum sustainability. A joint work focused on the impact of what is intended to transform and seeking how to reduce excessive bureaucratization. Bureaucratization that in many cases does not add value, but rather causes entities to "waste" a significant part of the scarce resources they work with. All this paradigm shift will undoubtedly have to involve greater recognition labor rights of the professionals of the TS, if we do not want this sector to become increasingly weakened in a society where the risk of social exclusion is reaching more and more diverse people.

Thus, with the will to continue putting on the debate and on the current agenda what should be the role and paper of the third sector and its relationship with the Administration to respond to current and future social needs, I detail some ideas that I found interesting from the book (which I transcribe in italics) that I will complement by providing my current perspective:

-        The Third Sector usually arises to reach where the public sector and the for-profit private sector have not generally reached to cover specific needs of a certain group. However, we must bear in mind that it does not imply that some of the member organizations of the first two sectors are not capable of doing this work successfully. That is, the condition of "for profit" and "public" does not necessarily imply that an institution cannot do the same work as those in the third sector.

It is important to keep in mind what are the differential values that the Third Sector brings compared to the Administration and the Market (for-profit sector): rootedness in the territory; community organizations; proximity and therefore close knowledge of the people it serves; its capacity to generate knowledge through the practical development of its activity; vocation for political advocacy to transform and improve the well-being of people; more flexible and internally participatory organizations, with the capacity to innovate by obtaining and applying the knowledge it has in the field of intervention; capacity to see, foresee, and anticipate new social needs and complexities that are already emerging in the present. It will be thanks to all these differential traits that it will be able to contribute to co-designing and co-producing innovative public policies with the Administration. One of the challenges we currently have is how to facilitate all this happening.

The book also points out that in recent years the TS has been strengthened because new social needs have arisen that require a greater degree of flexibility and proximity.

This point reaffirms that the flexibility and proximity of TS entities, as differential values, have contributed to strengthening them. They are therefore values that will need to be preserved both by the entities themselves and by the Administration.

-        The relevance of the TS goes beyond the figures. There is also a added qualitative value to the practices of the entities, because it is through these that the moral reinforcement of groups and associative cells is achieved, which give social cohesion to the citizenry. Governmental institutions are incapable on their own of increasing the feeling of urban belonging, civic consciousness, and national identity. The TS is an essential element for the consolidation of democracy and the channeling of citizen participation; it is also an excellent bearer and generator of social values (such as equality, justice, or solidarity), and contributes to giving voice and public projection to the interests and demands of marginalized or excluded groups.

Starting from this relevance of the TS and in a moment like the present, in which it is necessary to reinforce both democracy and its values, we have the challenge and the responsibility to recognize the value that the TS brings and work to strengthen it. A few weeks ago, Joan Subirats wrote an article in the ARA newspaper titled “How to defend ourselves from the Trumpist wave”[2] in which he said that “We need to rebuild the idea of the public response to social needs (which continue to exist, in a more complex, more diversified form and with a serious danger of generating irreversible exclusion processes) enriching the necessary institutional response with community and mutualistic components. Making it so that when we talk about public responses to social problems, we do not limit ourselves to talking about public administrations and their institutional responses, but that we add the great capital, which we continue to have and which must be strengthened, the social initiative, of the poorly named third sector (which is more like the first), of community action”.

Thus, I would again highlight the importance of promoting joint work between the Administration and the TS.

-        Non-profit organizations, in general, have flexible organizational structures. This flexibility allows them to adapt to changes more quickly. In any case, flexibility, which is often associated with a lack of definition and organizational structuring, poses a difficulty in consolidating organizations and relating to other entities. From this perspective, the lack of organizational clarity, or in other words, the lack of reflection, definition, and assignment of functions is an important weakness in most of these organizations.

The TS also faces the challenge of rethinking its organizational models, it must be prepared to be able to manage the growth and strengthening of the sector, maintain and improve the quality in the care of the people it accompanies with greater professionalization, continue innovating, advance in digitalization, incorporate technologies, artificial intelligence... but all this without forgetting the essence and differential trait of the TS: internal participation, democratic management, the basis of volunteering and solidarity, participation of the people served themselves... We could say that the TS must position itself at the level of 21st-century organizations but without adopting organizational models that are not its own. Therefore, it will also have to transform itself in organizational models. As pointed out in the book itself: “we are facing an environment that forces organizations to formalize their structures and, at the same time, to be imaginative in the way of doing so. This task, surely, requires a collective reflection as a sector to arrive at defining adaptable structure models for the different types of organization.”

-        The development of new paradigms of relationship with the public Administration is key in the new environment that is emerging. Thus, we think of a paradigm shift that leads to a greater role for civic-social organizations in the definition of public policies and that allows establishing a collaborative relationship, based on the existence of common objectives, between the Administration and the third sector. (...). This would involve redefining some mechanisms:

o   Redefine criteria for awarding contracts: that price is not the element that weighs most in the awarding of the contract.

o   The need for subsidies to be longer than one year and to be directed towards innovation. o Changes in the control paradigms: until now they have been budgetary and not impact-based, in addition to a lot of bureaucracy.

o   It is necessary to change control mechanisms for systems that allow evaluating efficiency (resources used vs. objectives), effectiveness (achievement of objectives), and respect for certain criteria.

o   The civic-social organizations have the great challenge of designing mechanisms for impact evaluation. The sector should work to design these evaluation mechanisms.

In this vision of developing new paradigms of relationship with the Administration, I believe there is much work to be done. The mechanisms that the book pointed out as necessary in many cases are still pending, I would even dare to say that some aspects have even worsened. The current situation is that 22 years after that diagnosis, the TS still continues to fight for: valuing social clauses; that price is not the most important element in public contracts; that cost breakdowns are correctly done in contracts and public procurement; claiming multi-year subsidies; claiming that subsidies are not granted retroactively and that therefore either the entities have incurred costs at risk (those that can) or even not being able to dedicate the total resources granted due to lack of execution time... In this sense, the current proposal for the Third Sector Law should facilitate moving towards a new legal framework that guarantees an improvement in economic sustainability beyond subsidies, while also allowing the participation of the TS in the design, production, and monitoring of public policies in the social sphere. This is in the parliamentary processing phase, pending debate and approval.

The book also pointed out the need to advance in designing impact evaluation of its intervention. The TS must be able to evaluate how it improves the lives of the people it accompanies and therefore, how it contributes to the Welfare State.

-        The TS must expand spaces for relationship with the Administration: currently, relationships are centered on the granting of subsidies, contracts, or transfer of spaces. (…) situation that does not favor the consolidation of the sector, while reducing its real weight within society. We believe it is necessary for the sector to make a commitment to recover and consolidate its role as spokesperson and source of social pressure and denunciation.

How can different spaces of relationship with the Administration be articulated? The TS should not only be a service provider; its role, as stated in the book, is one of denunciation, innovation in responding to social challenges and needs, and all this must be able to be co-designed and co-produced with the Administration.

Most likely, this entire redefinition will involve analyzing and understanding how the Administration's own organization and intervention influences and conditions the Third Sector, both in its organization, in the impact, the capacity to influence and co-produce public policies. Bearing in mind that the value that the TS contributes in co-production lies in its differential values that I mentioned at the beginning, we will have to analyze how the legal frameworks with which it relates to the Administration can at the same time condition it to bring out or annul these values and therefore its contribution in the design, production, and monitoring of these policies.

Towards the end of the book, several experts give their vision on the Third Sector. One of them, Joan Subirats, synthesizes in a matrix the “Various stages and ways of understanding the relationship between public authorities and society”. He does so in three moments:

-        in an old system (1970s)

-        in the new democratic legality (from the transition to the end of the 20th century)

-        towards new models of relationship (the one we are just now beginning, he said in 2003)

Pointing out in each of these moments how the relationship between public authorities and society was or would be according to five aspects:

-        characteristics of the system of government

-        political relations and people

-        emphasis on participation

-        type of power

-        conception of public space

This being the resulting matrix:

 

This table, I believe, should continue to give us many clues about where the Third Sector and the Administration should continue to move forward. Moving towards new models of relationship between public authorities and society: models of participation in governance; making policies with the people; learning by participating (many times participation will equal greater efficiency); rethinking who is in charge? advancing towards general interests collectively constructed; and finally conceiving public space as a collective responsibility.

Picture of Anthony in Pexels

[1] https://www.tercersector.cat/sites/default/files/llibre_blanc.pdf

[2] https://www.ara.cat/opinio/defensar-l-onada-trumpista_129_5299970.html