Governing the third sector: new technologies, but also new alliances?

Since the end of the twentieth century, it is increasingly becoming clear that the architecture of modern welfare regimes is changing (Jessop 1999; Ilcan 2009; Rose 1996, 2000). Under the influence of a (discursively constructed) crisis of/in the welfare state, alternative mentalities and modes of governing welfare are emerging. This means that the way welfare is defined, and connected to this, the way welfare is delivered today has undergone significant transformations (Jessop 1999; Rose 1996). Briefly worded, literature reports on a shift from welfarism to post-welfarism coming to expression through the emergence of a neoliberal governmentality (Peck and Tickell 2002; Jessop 1999, 2002), involving a problematization of the existing ‘regimes of commitment’ (Ilcan 2009), and an accordingly market-led economic, social and spatial restructuring of state capacities (Fyfe 2005; Peck and Tickell 2002; Jessop 1999, 2002; Ilcan 2009) towards an extension of competitive forces and a drawback of state intervention (Peck and Tickell 2002). Regarding the latter, state functions are selectively transferred upwards, sideways and downwards (Jessop 1999, 2002). As such, the shift towards the neoliberal governmentality is interwoven with a transition in the modes of governing welfare, identified as a shift from government through ‘hierarchy of command’ by the state, to governance in the appearance of ‘heterarchy of self-organization’ (Jessop 1999:351, 2002; see also Bode 2006, 2012). At the local level, these changes are translated in a new policy agenda which comes down to ‘government through community’ (Rose 1996, 1999, 2000). Through a double movement of autonomization and responsibilization, the third sector is engaged in its own governance and expected to foster active, responsible citizenship (Rose 1999; Ilcan & Basok 2004). However, beyond this general diagnosis, little is known about how these tendencies are perceived and enacted as lived experiences by the third sector: do they reconcile with this policy agenda, or do they resist it? Informed by the Foucauldian governmentality perspective, we propose to see these recent policy changes at the local level as new ‘governing technologies’ to realign the third sector with the policy agenda of governing the population (Rose 1999; Rose and Miller 2010). Nevertheless, we assume that third sector actors are not mere passive recipients or enactors of this policy, but that they also actively intervene and align with their own stakes (cf. Rose 1999; Rose and Miller 2010). Therefore, taking the Flemish third sector as a case, and based on evidence obtained through twenty-five in-depth interviews with key figures in, and related to the third sector, we want to gain deeper insight in these new governmental technologies, in what ways they are developed, introduced or imposed to the third sector, and to what extent new alliances are forged and/or resisted by the third sector. Very specifically, we want to detangle these complex processes of making governmental technologies work and not work, by looking at two key governing technologies operative in this context, namely ‘responsibilization’ and ‘participation’ (Schinkel and van Houdt 2010). 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