Resisting or enabling? The roll-out of neoliberal values through the voluntary and community sector in Northern Ireland

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe efforts of political and economic elites to instill in wider society cooperative dispositions that will value ‘partnerships’ across gradients of power are an important aspect of the neoliberal project. Neoliberalism must embed a benign cooperativeness in society in order to deliver the social stability necessary for a deregulated market economy to function. A central part of the neoliberal project is the creation of the conditions whereby subordinate groups will reject conflict for ‘the virtues’ of partnership, cooperativeness, pragmatism and consensus. Using Northern Ireland (NI) as a case study, this paper will illustrate how the voluntary and community sector has been both an object of elite policies aimed at regulating civil society activity and an instrument of that policy. Through a historical sketch of the repeated ‘turns to civil society’ of successive administrations in the UK and NI, and through interviews with voluntary and community sector staff and government officials, this paper demonstrates how the voluntary and community sector came to eschew conflict for compromise and pragmatism. The end result of government’s partnership policies, and the sector’s embrace of these policies, is a sector that would struggle to act as an agent in the development of counter-hegemonic narratives.