Placing Voluntary Activism in Neoliberal Welfare States:
A Cross-National Comparison

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Institute for Health Research, Lancaster University, Lancaster LA1 4YT, UK
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Award reference
RES-000-23-1104

 

 

 

 

 

About the study

The purpose of this two year, ESRC funded research project is to explore and compare the experiences of people who are active in local voluntary and community organizations in Manchester, UK and in Auckland, Aotearoa/New Zealand. In both of these places, governments have adopted 'partnership' policies as a means of addressing locally-based social welfare issues. These partnerships are part of a shift from top-down government to more participatory styles of governance which have been adopted in most Western countries over the past decade. We have chosen to compare developments in Manchester and Auckland because both places are comparable in terms of size, population, structure and the political environment in which they operate. Background information about the political, social, and economic contexts of these two cities is available in Reports and Papers.

Looking closely at the development of voluntary/community activism in these two cities, the project aims to answer three main questions:

  • To what extent do local cultures and traditions inform the development of voluntary and community organizations and the people who are active within them?
  • How are voluntary and community organizations, working within locally-based partnerships, affected by differences in the political environment at local and national level?
  • What 'career pathways' do activists and people active in the voluntary sector develop in relation to voluntary/community, governmental and private sector organizations (for example, how do they develop their knowledge and expertise and to what extent do they move between sectors)?

To consider these questions, the study will focus on two sub-sectors of voluntary activity: mental health (defined broadly enough to include drug and alcohol misuse) and community safety (including crime and disorder reduction as well as harm prevention). These two areas form significant areas of community and voluntary activity in Manchester and Auckland, and both are important for addressing social exclusion and deprivation. Both cities have ethnically diverse and relatively deprived populations for whom the establishment of these local partnerships is particularly important.

We will begin the research by sending postal questionnaires to all voluntary and community organizations working in the fields of mental health and community safety in order to map the terrain of voluntary/community action on these issues in each city and to identify people who might help us to answer our key questions.

We will then explore these questions in more depth in interviews with representatives of three different groups of people:

  1. those who are (or have been) active in community and voluntary organizations;
  2. the staff of particular voluntary and community organizations in these two fields that operate at local, regional and national level; and
  3. people working in local, regional and national government.

The findings of the questionnaires and interviews will be analysed and reported on this website, in scholarly publications, in a freely available bound report, and at a mini-conference at the end of the project.

The results of the research will contribute to improved, cross-national understandings of voluntary/community activism in the context of new, partnership modes of governance. We hope they will also be of interest to policy makers who are concerned to know what encourages or constrains activism at the local level, and to practitioners who might learn from the thoughts and experiences of people in similar positions within the local voluntary sector.

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