Governance and Competition: The Role of Non-profit Organisations in the Delivery of Public Services

The movement away from a unified public service towards the development of quasi-markets based on the involvement of private firms and non-profit organisations can be viewed as the most radical change to state-society relations since the advent of the modern welfare state. While there is a growing literature on the value this contracting regime has for governments, we know almost nothing about its impact upon the service delivery styles and mission of non-profit agencies. This study used focus groups and survey data from agencies involved in the Australian Job Network and its predecessor Working Nation . The results show that this contracting regime produced a convergence of service delivery strategies among different types of agency, higher caseloads, reduced attention to the needs of individual job-seekers and greater 'creaming' of the easiest clients at the expense of those more disadvantaged.     

From subjects to authors – reconnecting community organisations to their core practice

ABSTRACT

The widely observed erosion of the policy capacity of governments and their public services is mirrored by decay in the practice and program capacity of community organisations. This capacity once depended on the practical expertise of a values-driven workforce employed in organisations focused on a social purpose. Governments relied upon this core competency to inform their approach to investment, program design and the delivery of community services, but this has changed. Social purpose in community service organisations have been frustrated by a preoccupation with funding models, procurement approaches and contract details at the expense of the delivery of outcomes. It has resulted in community organisations becoming subjects of service delivery rather than authors of it. The paper frames these dilemmas and provides a theoretical framework for community organisations to reposition from subjects to authors in the system. The paper takes the form of a reflective assessment from a practice perspective.     

Outsourcing the Business of Development: The Rise of For-profit Consultancies in the UK Aid Sector

While much attention has been paid to the ways in which the private sector is now embedded within the field of development, one group of actors — for-profit development consultancies and contractors, or service providers — has received relatively little attention. This article analyses the growing role of for-profit consultancies and contractors in British aid delivery, which has been driven by two key trends: first, the outsourcing of managerial, audit and knowledge-management functions as part of efforts to bring private sector approaches and skills into public spending on aid; and second, the reconfiguration of aid spending towards markets and the private sector, and away from locally embedded, state-focused aid programming. The authors argue that both trends were launched under New Labour in the early 2000s, and super-charged under successive Conservative governments. The resulting entanglement means that the policies and practices of the UK government's aid agencies, and the interests and forms of for-profit service providers, are increasingly mutually constitutive. Amongst other implications, this shift acts to displace traditional forms of contestation and accountability of aid delivery.     

Common Counsel,Common Policy: Healthcare,Missions and the Rise of the ‘Voluntary Sector’ in Colonial Tanzania

Analysis of the voluntary sector in sub‐Saharan Africa has tended to focus on the role of the NGO, and the types of relationships this institution establishes and maintains with donors, national governments and the communities with which they work. The voluntary sector in Africa is therefore usually defined through, and often treated as synonymous with, the institution of the NGO. As a result, the boundaries of understandings of the ‘third sector’ space occupied by the vast number of NGOs — its origins, the nature of the relationship of voluntary sector actors to the state, the types of organizations that characterize the sector — have tended to reflect a narrow concern with the NGO type and its experiences. This article suggests that this view is too narrow in its gaze. The voluntary sector was not a creation of a post‐colonial (and especially post‐1970s) development crisis. It emerged from an evolving relationship between colonial‐era non‐state (voluntary) actors and governments determined to demonstrate that they were meeting their commitments to the welfare of Africans under their charge. Missions and mission welfare services, expanding across much of rural sub‐Saharan Africa by the beginnings of the twentieth century, and increasingly coordinated from the late 1920s and early 1930s, created the foundations for the emergence of sub‐Saharan Africa's formal voluntary sector as it exists today. This matters for more than just historical accuracy. To understand the constraints, challenges and opportunities faced by NGOs, we need to move beyond a narrow focus on the institution of the NGO itself, and look in addition to the environment in which it operates: its history, its evolution and the shifts that created those conditions.     

Government and Community Development in Ireland: The Contested Subjects of Professionalism and Expertise

Abstract: This paper historicises the recent and ongoing professionalisation of community development in the Republic of Ireland. The term professionalisation refers both to the designation and accreditation of a distinctive community work occupation and a wider set of processes that effect more strategic approaches to the planning, delivery and evaluation of community organisations. The paper reviews some tensions associated with professionalisation; tensions that closely relate to community work's reputation as a “bottom‐up” or “participatory” strategy. It also interrogates community development's place as a strategy of government in contemporary Ireland. In so doing it reconsiders the assumed separateness and distinctiveness of the state and community sectors, arguing that the state has been centrally implicated in calling the community sector into being. In their turn community development organisations have shaped and mediated policy delivery on the ground. It is these processes of hybridisation, co‐operation, antagonism and struggle that have given professionalisation its momentum.     

Voluntarism and long-term care in the countryside: the paradox of a threadbare sector

This article contributes to the burgeoning literature on the geographies of voluntarism by addressing how voluntary sector providers in rural communities respond to the downloading of responsibilities for health and social care associated with public service restructuring. Drawing on a qualitative analysis of long-term care in Ontario, it focuses on the consequent actions of non-profit organizations, community support groups and volunteer caregivers in three different rural settings. Despite evidence of increasingly disproportionate levels of voluntarism amongst rural communities, the results reveal sector- and place-specific opportunities that allow voluntary sector providers to overcome the limitations of the rural service environment. The findings suggest that in the longer run, however, the growing dependence on local solutions will only exacerbate the uneven geographies of health and social care across rural space. Resolving this paradox remains a critical yet neglected challenge for sustainable rural services and communities.     

Voluntary Environmental Programs in the Public Sector: Evaluating an Urban Water Conservation Program in California

Solving conflictual environmental policy problems is increasingly falling under the purview of local governments and public agencies. Nonregulatory approaches, such as the development of voluntary environmental programs (VEPs), could offer a useful policy alternative as they often have greater political traction and flexibility. However, there has been little work examining the use of VEPs in the public sector. This article uses a new dataset from California to examine how political institutions affect decisions by local governments and public agencies to participate in a voluntary urban water conservation program and whether this program has improved the water conservation performance of its members. The results show that special district governments, private utilities, and water suppliers dependent on purchased water are more likely to participate in the program and to join early. However, urban water agencies that have joined the program have not reduced their per capita water use more than those that have not. These results underscore the influence of political institutions in public‐sector decision making and demonstrate that, as in the private sector, commitment to a VEP by local government and public agencies does not guarantee implementation or environmental improvements. While voluntary programs offer political and administrative advantages, in order for VEPs in the public sector to be effective they must be accompanied and supported by credible enforcement mechanisms, performance standards, and rigorous monitoring programs.     

Dimensions of proximity in knowledge-based networks: The cases of investment banking and automobile design

The competitiveness of firms and regions is increasingly dependent on their capabilities to organise knowledge processes that unfold between different knowledge providers. In this article it is argued that this knowledge management in networks is a cognitive process that uses different dimensions of proximity. As much of the knowledge required is 'tacit' in character, 'embedded' social interaction becomes crucial. There are, however, conflicts of interest in business networks. The organisation of knowledge processes thus becomes a complex governance task that depends to a large extent on the characteristics of the learning processes of the sectors involved. This paper offers some empirical evidence from the service sector with the case of M&A activities and from the manufacturing sector with the case of automobile design.     

PUBLIC SECTOR UNIONISM AND TAX BURDENS: ARE THEY RELATED?*

One factor that has affected state and local politics since the 1960's is the growth of public sector unionism. Conventional wisdom assumes that the “fist generation” of public unionism has been a major cause of the fiscal problems faced by many state and local governments in the 1970's. State level cross-sectional analysis (1960–71) questions this widely held assumption with respect to the impact of strike activity and collective bargaining legislation on the tax burden across the states.     

Protecting the honour of the daughters of Eire: welfare policy for Irish female migrants to England, 1940–70

Across the middle decades of the twentieth century, approximately 500,000 people left Ireland for Britain. Around half were young, single females migrating alone. Drawing on archival material in Ireland and England, this paper analyses the ways in which Catholic and secular agencies became aware of female Irish migrants; and how they understood and responded to their needs. Catholic organisations focused on maintaining religious belief and practice as a means of avoiding social problems in migrants. Some female migrants, such as nurses, were considered exemplars of Catholic and Irish femininity. However, female sexuality was problematised when associated with single motherhood, prostitution and cohabitation. The Irish hierarchy expected to lead policy development for migrant welfare. The framing of female migrant social needs within a moral and religious discourse led to solutions prioritising moral welfare delivered by Catholic priests and volunteers. Both the Irish government and British institutions (state and voluntary) accepted the centrality of Catholicism to Irish identity and the right of the Catholic Church to lead welfare policy and provision for Irish female migrants. No alternative understanding of Irish women's needs within a secular framework emerged during this period. This meant that whilst the Irish hierarchy developed policy responses based on their assessment of need, other agencies, notably the British and Irish governments, did not consider any specific policy response for Irish women to be required.     

British voluntary hospitals, 1871-1938: the geography of provision and utilization

This article examines the distribution of beds, staff and in-patients in voluntary hospitals in England, Wales and Scotland between 1871 and 1938. The findings bear upon two theoretical debates; first, the concern of historians of social policy with the extent to which charity and mutual insurance delivered a satisfactory level of institutional care before the NHS, and second, the broader issue of whether the localism of voluntary sector provision tends to produce a geographically uneven service. We survey the chronology of voluntary hospital growth pointing to reasons for foundations. We then analyse the levels of beds, staff and in-patients per head of population in counties, county boroughs and large burghs. This evidence suggests that despite the expansion of the sector and the narrowing of differences between places, considerable variations in provision and utilization remained. We argue that these variations were likely to have had an impact on the health of individuals. We conclude by tracing the emergence in political and public discourse of the perception that geographical unevenness was a failing of the voluntary system.     

The Politics of Caring for the Poor: Anglican Responses in 1890s Tasmania

Relieving poverty amongst skilled but unemployed workers during the Tasmanian economic collapse in the 1890s challenged both a conservative government's policy of avoiding public debt by initiating minimal relief and the limited financial and human resources of voluntary philanthropic agencies, the Anglican Church amongst them, whom the Tasmanian governments expected to carry the burden of delivering relief to those deemed to deserve it. With labour organisations too weak to lead, and amidst the silence of church leaders, it fell to individuals like the Reverend Archibald Turnbull to articulate a Christian socialist critique of government policies and values and to advocate the desperate plight of the poor. In this context, this study examines how contemporary government and Anglican Church leaders responded to Turnbull's political and pastoral initiatives in Hobart in 1893–96.     

Constituents of Confidence and Mistrust in Australian Institutions

Survey research on public confidence in political and other organisations can be used to evaluate popular endorsement of their performance. Without examining proximate factors in detail, this paper considers the value of predictions about the constituents of confidence and mistrust in Australian institutions. These predictions derive from theories about political, social and cultural causes of dissatisfaction with government, and are linked to notions of a crisis of democracy, 'new politics', the impact of economic change on different social groups, traditional political divisions, and accumulation of 'social capital'. This paper explores the arguments and analyses their validity.     

Out from the (Green) shadow? Neoliberal hegemony through the market logic of shared urban environmental governance

Recent work in critical geography describes the neoliberalization of urban social service provision through a transition from state provision to civil sector delivery. The concept of a ‘shadow state’ is deployed by some social theorists to describe this process by which nonprofits with government contracts increasingly adopt a state-oriented agenda for the execution of social entitlement programs. Possible linkages between the neoliberalization of urban environmental service provision and a shadow state are lacking by comparison. I, therefore, use qualitative data concerning three organizations in Milwaukee, Wisconsin to demonstrate that civil sector groups are stepping up as local government diminishes its markets for municipal environmental labor. However, the diverse compositions of these shared governances potentially complicate the efficacy of a shadow state thesis for describing environmental provision in inner-city Milwaukee. Instead, I argue that a Gramscian interpretation of shared governance better accounts for the neoliberalization of environmental service provision as government agencies and civil sector groups relate to one another through hegemonic market logic. I argue that this provides a more nuanced picture of how governance concerning the urban environment is constructed by the government, market, and civil sectors to further shape human social reproduction.     

Hospital restructuring in smaller urban Ontario settings: unwritten rules and uncertain relations

Important changes are underway in the management and provision of welfare service activities in advanced capitalist societies as governments scale back their responsibilities and commitments to social security and health care. In order to understand the processes by which the reform imperatives of the central state are implemented at the local level, it is necessary to account for particular organizational and place-based contingencies which influence decision making and strategic response. This paper presents a framework for understanding the context of executive decision making in the human services sector and uses the framework to illustrate issues of locally designed hospital restructuring in smaller urban centres in the province of Ontario, Canada. Specific experiences of the Chief Executive Officers of two non-metropolitan hospital settings are examined to explore the unwritten rules of hospital conduct and the relations of uncertainty that characterize efforts to restructure hospital services through formal arrangements with other independently governed hospitals and health care delivery organizations.     

‘To Women in the Year 2000’: Norwegian Historians of Women,c.1900–c.1960

The lives and writings of three women who during the first half of the twentieth century wrote books on women's history are the subject of this article. Ragna Nielsen, a teacher and an amateur historian, in 1904 published her account of women's lives during the first part of the nineteenth century, stressing the sad consequences of patriarchal attitudes, but also the importance of women's contribution to the maintenance of a national identity. Anna Caspari Agerholt and Mimi Sverdrup Lunden, both with masters' degrees in history, belonged to the next generation. Agerholt is mainly remembered for her impressive book of 1927 on the Norwegian women's movement, while Lunden's books of 1942 and 1948 on women's work were important contributions to social history. The writings of these three women's historians are related to dominant positions within Norwegian historiography of their times, highlighting how they helped change central concepts by adding gender to class analysis and to the process of constructing a national identity, stressing the importance of voluntary organisations to the formation of politics and widening the concept of work.     

Sex Trafficking to the Federated Malay States 1920–1940: From Migration for Prostitution to Victim or Criminal?

ABSTRACT

This article analyses the relationships between the colonial government in the Federated Malay States (FMS), international social movement organisations, the League of Nations and sex trafficking. While there is considerable scholarship on social movement organisations and the League of Nations, far less is known about the links between internationalism, colonialism and sex trafficking.

After the First World War, trafficking became the focus of social movement organisations and the League of Nations, but colonial regulation of prostitution and tolerated brothels complicated international responses to trafficking. Colonial administrators saw prostitution as an essential service, whereas feminist and international social movement organisations saw prostitution as an impetus for trafficking. This article engages with newspaper reports, colonial correspondence and Chinese petitions, archival material from social movement organisations, and reports by the Association of Moral and Social Hygiene, the League of Nations and the Chinese Secretariat to extend the literature on the historiography of trafficking and the British Empire.     

Making Space for “Neo‐communitarianism”? The Third Sector,State and Civil Society in the UK

During the 1990s the urban became an important "institutional laboratory" for state‐initiated policy experiments to address the social costs and political repercussions of economic polarisation and social exclusion associated with neo‐liberalism. One such policy experiment has been neo‐communitarianism, emphasising the contribution of the "third sector" to improving social welfare and reinvigorating a sense of civil society. Focusing on the UK, I examine the background to and implications of the emergence of a neo‐communitarian strategy under the "new" Labour government, which came to power in 1997. First, I consider the repositioning of the third sector within contemporary policy discourse as a result of the Labour government's programme of welfare reforms and Prime Minister Blair's "Third Way" political philosophy, which attempts to combine neo‐liberalism with a neo‐communitarian stance of stressing the importance of civil society for social cohesion. Then, I draw on Foucauldian notions of governmentality to examine how Labour's neo‐communitarian agenda has involved a fundamental reconfiguration of the governance of the third sector, centred on the creation of government–voluntary sector "compacts" at national and local levels. These compacts are of strategic importance for the restructuring of the UK third sector and so the local implications of such restructuring are then considered. In particular, case study evidence from Glasgow is used to critically evaluate government claims that the third sector can contribute to the "reinvigoration of civic life" by highlighting the importance of the internal characteristics and political environment of local third sector organisations for the differential development of social capital and citizenship.     

Neoliberalism and the Institutions for Regional Development in Australia

This paper examines some effects of the pursuit of neoliberalism on regional development policy and practice in Australia, and in particular on the activities and effectiveness of regional development organisations. The paper interprets data from a survey of 505 regional development organisations across Australia through the framework of Jessop's contribution to state theory and his identification of four key trends in economic management under neoliberalism. Regional development policies are seen as a response of governments to electoral pressure from regions, but a response that is constrained by the dominance of neoliberal ideology. The objectives of regional development are predominantly economic, but are often limited to the role of facilitation and the provision of information. Some responsibility for regional development has been shifted downwards to regions, but the effectiveness of the organisations given this responsibility is reduced by the short‐term and competitive nature of much of their funding, the lack of coordination between regional development actors at the local level, the proliferation of agencies and the competition between them. The paper concludes that regional development agencies in Australia are in many ways a product of neoliberalism, since they represent one way in which governments can be seen to be responding to regional pressure for assistance but they can do so without incurring significant costs. Yet regional development bodies are also a victim of neoliberalist thinking, since it denies them the resources and the powers they need to be more successful in their work.     

Privatizing Social Reproduction: The Primitive Accumulation of Water in an Era of Neoliberalism

Abstract: Recent years have witnessed a resurgence of critical works seeking to extend Karl Marx's radical understanding of “primitive accumulation” in order to describe the increasing penetration of capital into new spaces and social relations in the contemporary era of neoliberal globalization. This paper will argue that the intensification of the commodification of water may be understood as an ongoing mechanism of primitive accumulation and that this process generates contradictions and tensions not solely for capitalist relations of production, but more crucially, for relations of social reproduction. Further, while recent years have witnessed the emergence of a new discourse on water governance that advocates a more active role for governments in the water sector and for the incorporation of the “voices” of women and the poor in the development of sustainable and equitable water policies, this new discourse ultimately remains informed by neoliberalism's individualist ontology and its material and discursive dedication to economic growth above broader social considerations.