What can be learned from national and regional and variations across the UK?
University of the West of Scotland, 2nd February 2009
Presentation summaries
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Regional governance – back to the future?
The United Kingdom has undergone a form of devolution in the last fifteen years, involving a multi-speed hybrid of administrative decentralisation alongside the creation of new democratically accountable bodies in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. In England, however, administrative decentralisation has gone much further than the creation of political accountability.
This creates tensions which have not been easy to solve, and there have been a series of partly-implemented ‘fixes’ which have remained ultimately dissatisfying: regional chambers, sub-regional partnerships, city-regions, regional select committees and Ministers for the regions have all had to tread carefully around the fact that there are now large administrative structures in the regions which have a very limited capacity to engage ethically and intellectually with ‘their’ civil society at much beyond a user/ funding recipient level.
Part of the problem has been that there has been a continual sense of urgency demanded of regional institutions, which can be argued to have reduced their capacity for more strategic engagement and thinking. Overlapping ten year Regional Economic Strategies, three year business plans and one year operational plans for the RDAs lain alongside European funding timescales, periodic government consultations (e.g. regional funding allocations) have created a sense of frenzy. The problem for all bodies seeking to engage with the new regional tier is that this freneticism encourages fixation on the issue of the day, with the result that when the issue changes, previous engagement and learning processes are discarded.
This paper seeks to get beyond this and understand the wider ‘real’ environment for engaging with the regional structure which exist in the current system of English regional governance. This paper seeks to create a wider framework for the remainder of the seminar to focus more closely on the practicalities of voluntary and community sector activities, ethics and engagement in the context of an increasingly devolved UK-polity.
The Voluntary Sector in a devolved Northern Ireland.
I propose to start by presenting the size and structure of the voluntary and community sector in Northern Ireland and the reasons for it. I will then discuss Government policies which have an impact on the sector and the difference which devolution has made. I will also set out the challenges which lie ahead.
Democratising the Non-Profit Sector: Opportunities and Barriers to Accountability, Participation and Democracy in a Scottish Voluntary Organisation.
The paper argues that if the non-profit sector (NPS) in Scotland is going to achieve its attributed potential in welfare and service delivery, it is essential that non-profit organisations (NPOs) have an internal democratic structure.
The paper firstly outlines the impact that the changing political and policy context has had on the NPS in Scotland, before focusing on the larger, more formal NPOs and the perceptions their employees have of the opportunities for participation in the governance of the organization, and mechanisms instigated to achieve accountability and democracy. In relation to this, lessons are drawn from a case study of a Scottish voluntary organization from the sphere of criminal justice. Although it is accepted that democracy in Scottish NPOs is relative to the context, and therefore excessively broad conclusions cannot be drawn from one case study, it is anticipated that some relevant themes and issues will be captured that are generaliseable to larger organizations in the Scottish NPS.
The qualitative evidence shows a lack of accountability to employees, due to insufficient opportunities for participation and democracy, caused by mission drift. Building on this evidence the paper endeavours to demonstrate that there remain significant opportunities for increased accountability, participation and democratization within the sector. However, the substantial barriers to democratisation should not be underestimated and, therefore, the paper identifies the most salient ones. This is important as recognising the deficiencies of the sector, in relation to the principles of accountability, participation and democracy, is a pre-requisite of being able to address them.
Volunteering Policy at National and Regional Level: Divergence or Convergence?
Since 1997 volunteering has been high on the policy agenda of the UK government. In particular it has been strongly connected with policy development in employability, health, active citizenship, community safety and social cohesion.
Since the inception of the Scottish Parliament in 1999, however, volunteering has been a devolved matter and this has enabled the development of a particularly Scottish approach to volunteer development. There continues to be reserved areas such as immigration which can impact on volunteering but increasingly policy is being delivered at a regional level and developed around regional needs, with welfare reform being a noticeable example of this.
This presentation argues that the current policy landscape in characterised very much by policy divergence, and developments at the UK level will increasingly have little impact on the development of volunteering in Scotland. It suggests that, in fact, development within the different institution of the European Union may come to be of greater significance
Informal volunteering in deprived Scottish communities: pathways into, out of and between voluntary activity throughout the lifecourse.
Claims are increasingly made for relationships between volunteering and social capital, active citizenship and social inclusion. In encouraging formal volunteering however it has been argued we are focussing on participation more characteristic of affluent communities, whilst the nature and extent of informal volunteering remains relatively under-researched. This paper reflects on researching the nature and extent of informal volunteering in socio-economically marginal communities in Scotland across the lifecourse, including any potential relationship(s) between informal and formal volunteering and any implications the ‘professionalisation’ of certain formal voluntary activity may have had.
Where we might place activities including ‘community action’, ‘helping out’, ‘formal volunteering’ and ‘time banking’ to name but four along a ‘spectrum’ of voluntary activity is outlined. This produces a research framework allowing biographic interviews, semi-structured key informant interviews and focus group studies in three deprived Scottish communities to be undertaken. At the conclusion of the first case study area, emergent themes and their implications for the volunteering landscape are discussed. These include the ways in which individuals conceptualise the formality of the activity with which they are engaged, motivations for and barriers to undertaking both formal and informal activity and those experiences, norms, perceptions and lifecourse events which shape this.
