Voluntary Labor, Responsible Citizenship, and International NGOs

Abstract

This article focuses on the relationship between volunteer labor and responsible citizenship in an international NGO context. Situated within critical assessments of the voluntary sector, the article examines how voluntary labor is increasingly shaped and steered by the initiatives of advanced liberalism. Under advanced liberalism, diverse tasks of government are redirected from state bureaucracy and distributed to various organizations, agencies, individuals, and citizen groups. Within this context, it explores some key social transformations that have led to an increasing reliance on voluntary labor in both government and international NGOs. It emphasizes that a range of authorities establish the contemporary voluntary sector as a site for providing answers and solutions to social and economic problems that are now determined to lie outside the reach of the formal domain of the state. Through the use of substantive international examples on voluntary labor in the international development NGO sector, the authors argue that this sector is increasingly implicated in assembling volunteers as ‘responsible citizens' in the delivery of public services. This responsibilization process produces new effects and plans of actions that are different from the way traditional liberal approaches viewed volunteers and volunteerism. The work calls attention to contemporary concerns underscoring voluntary labor and international NGOs, and raises broader questions pertaining to issues of social justice.