Susan Kenny

Active Citizenship: An Empirical Investigation

This paper reports on a study of what active citizenship means from the perspective of citizens who are active within third sector organisations. It is based on an empirical study involving 1,610 respondents across 11 towns in six countries. The study explored how active citizenship is manifested, by gathering data on attitudes towards social changes and the forms and practices of active citizenship. There are two major, and apparently contradictory themes emerging in the data. The first theme provides a portrait of active engagement, proactively, and sometimes oppositionally working for a better world. On the other hand, citizens by and large avoid active oppositional engagement in the political process. They prefer to work collaboratively with government and to work at the local level. This second theme can be understood as social maintenance, support for existing structures that facilitates community cohesion, while providing relief for the disadvantaged, often with a conservative charity or welfare orientation. Following the work of Touraine, the study revealed how citizens act at the local rather than the national level, and focus on concrete issues and interpersonal relations rather than political action aimed at wider policy change. While this form of citizenship action can reflect a conservative form of maintenance, it is equally a creative new form of association and mutual support.

Challenging the Third Sector: Global prospects for active citizenship

This is the first book to explore the different relationships between active citizenship and civil society, particularly the third sector within civil society. In what ways can the third sector nurture active citizenship? How have the third sector and active citizenship been constructed and reconstructed both locally and internationally, over recent years? To what extent have new kinds of social connectedness, changing forms of political engagement and increasingly complex social and environmental problems influenced civil society action? Written by experts in the field, this important book draws on a range of theory and empirical studies to explore these questions in different socio-political contexts and will be a useful resource for academics and students as well as practitioners.

Capacity Building in Indonesia: Building What Capacity?

The idea of capacity building can be traced back to the years immediately following World War II, when it was associated with the need to build the administrative capacity of governments and the public sector in developing countries (Pearson, 1969; Morgan, 1994). By the 1980s the scope of capacity building was extended to cover issues of long-term sustainability and ways of ensuring responsiveness to change, which tended to mean that wider structural adjustments were required (Morgan, 1994; McGinty, 2003). At the same time the categories of subjects requiring ‘their capacity to be built’ expanded from government institutions to businesses and civil society institutions, such as non-government organisations (NGOs) (Morgan, 1994). While there are now many definitions of capacity building, in its most general sense the term refers to the process of developing skills, abilities, behaviours and resources within a group so that members can take control of their wellbeing and future directions (see for example Chaskin et al., 2001; Eade and Williams, 1995). Capacity building tends to be identified with the skilling and resourcing of organisations and institutions. For example it has been indicated as a means for ensuring the continued existence of organisations by building institutional strength and reducing reliance on key individuals (Straussman, 2007). Effective capacity building allows an organisation to continue its work despite staff turnover or changes in operating environment.

Reconceptualising development: the turn to civil society?

The renewal of interest in civil society in contemporary development policy and practice can be traced back to the 1980s and 1990s, at a time when there was growing disillusionment with the reliance on the state and the market as key organising institutions in society. As we moved through the 1990s, ‘development’ became an increasingly contested concept. At the same time, policy makers, researchers and practitioners began to consider how the institutions of civil society could offer approaches, methods and processes that were organised around participatory processes and were putatively better suited to effective, sustainable development than the development institutions established after the second world war (Bhatnagar and Williams 1992, Chambers 1983; Eade and Williams 1995). The last decade of the twentieth century witnessed a paradigm change for development, much of it based around the conceptual and theoretical armoury of civil society (Bennett and Roche 2002; Edwards 2004; Hinton and Groves 2004; Howell and Pieterse 2001; Kaldor 2003; Long 2001; Pieterse 2001). But how far have civil society discourses provided satisfactory responses to the challenges to development theory? What forms of civil society frameworks have been invoked? What have civil society approaches looked like in practice?

Conclusion: Critical Capacity Building

As discussed in this book, capacity building as a concept and a set of practices is now well settled into development projects in both the North and the South, regardless of whether these projects are operating through large international agencies, humanitarian programmes, local government initiatives or community-based organisations. Yet the concept has different applications. For example, in some circumstances the description of a programme as capacity building is simply a piece of rhetoric to give credibility to the implementing agency. Alternatively, it may be that the implementing agency is genuine in its commitment to building capacity (in whatever guise) and initiating activities to do just that. Regardless of the use and application of the term, though, the authors of the book have pointed out that the idea of capacity building carries a heavy normative load. Perhaps because of its heavy normative load, there has been little critical interrogation of the concept in the relevant literature. As with many of ‘buzzwords’ within development, it is generally been adopted without appropriate review.

Welfare and the Voluntary Sector in Australia

While the database gives some idea of the shape of the sector across Australia, it provides no information on how the organizations are constituted or operate. To address these issues, 14 focus groups were conducted with workers and participants from the community sector across Australia between February 1995 and August 1996. Groups were arranged using a random sample of towns and metropolitan suburbs and their listed organizations from the database, stratified in order to ensure national coverage within all states and territories and reflect population levels.1

Approaches to the Study of Voluntary Associations

So far in this book we have focused on the theoretical and conceptual bases of voluntary association. We now turn to look specifically at some of the emerging literature based on empirical research into the scope and operation of voluntary associational sectors around the world, before considering our own research into the voluntary welfare sector in Australia.

Community welfare organisations in Australia: Activism or industry?

Abstract This paper reports on an investigation of the work undertaken by community groups in Australia. Specifically, it highlights the role of community welfare organisations in socio-political contexts undergoing change. Different operating rationalities, corresponding to shifting political and economic imperatives, are examined. An overview of the development of the community welfare sector since 1970 reveals tendencies towards bifurcation and convergence as strategic responses to different socio-political conjunctures. Analysis of the contemporary preoccupation with the rationale of the market indicates a rehearsal of the bifurcation tendencies that characterised the sector in the 1970s. Yet shifts in the organisational relations between the state and the community welfare sector and the appearance of new strategic responses to the operating logics of the market also suggest that it is time for the development of different discursive frameworks in which to think about work in the community welfare se...