We hate it here, please let us stay! Irish social partnership and the community/voluntary sector’s conflicted experiences of recognition

Abstract

This article critically assesses the outcomes of community and voluntary sector participation in the partnership processes that have dominated the Irish social policy scene for the last decade. As community organizations have embraced the state sponsored corporatist project in both its local and national manifestations, they have been given official recognition by government as de facto representatives of the socially excluded. State policy discourses have celebrated this development as evidence of its own enablement of civil society and as reflective of participatory democracy in action. However, because the state has taken such an instrumental role in the initiation, funding and direction of community organizations at the local level, the actual autonomy and independence of the community sector has been grievously undermined. At a national level, community and voluntary organizations have found that because they lack economic clout - the basis of political influence in Ireland’s neo-liberal climate - they have been granted only a marginal influence over the substance of policy decisions. The article concludes by urging that community organizations begin to cultivate alternative alliances outside the state controlled sphere of social partnership, in order to challenge neo-liberalism’s hegemony and to promote the political interests of those they claim to represent.