Neoliberalism and the Voluntary and Community Sector in Northern Ireland

Abstract

With a focus on the history, politics and economics of voluntary and community sector activity in Northern Ireland, this book explores the region’s neoliberal policy reforms and their implications for the sector, communities and governance. We chart the repeated ‘partnership turns’ in government rhetoric and policy, the networks and relationships that have developed between VCS actors and the state, and assess the nature and role of the sector after decades of financial and rhetorical support from governments and international funders. We will see how these developments had offered the voluntary sector a privileged role in the governance of a region that was making a transition to both relative peace and a highly localised version of neoliberalism. As this book will illustrate, the optimistic ‘glue that holds society together’ narratives that surrounded the sector in the decades of the peace process, and the ‘partnership’ policy discourses of the peacebuilding and New Labour heyday, are constantly resurrected in policy narratives that surround voluntary and community action in the region. However, such discourses are increasingly giving way to narratives and practices that are unapologetically grounded in neoliberal notions of civil society.