Asymmetric Engagement: The Community and Voluntary Pillar in Irish Social Partnership by Joe Larragy

Asymmetric Engagement: The Community and Voluntary Pillar in Irish Social Partnership by Joe Larragy

Author:Joe Larragy [Larragy, Joe]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Volunteer Work, Ireland, Europe, Social Science, History, Sociology, General
ISBN: 9781526110572
Google: pm-5DwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 22560772
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Published: 2014-09-04T00:00:00+00:00


7

Community or demos? The Community Workers’ Co-operative

Introduction

The Community Workers’ Co-operative (CWC, the Co-op) had a key role in the creation and evolution of the CVP. The Co-op emerged as an association of people committed to community work values and practice, engaged with marginalised communities and minorities, and focused on empowerment through local and national engagement with statutory institutions. The philosophical roots of the Co-op were in building capacity from below rather than in the voluntary-philanthropic tradition. A focus on the CWC and its role in social partnership thus also serves to highlight the unusual local dimension in the hybrid of corporatism and other types of local partnership entities implicated in the Irish model, which have been a source of confusion in accounts of Irish social partnership, particularly in a comparative perspective. The experience of the Co-op within social partnership also brings out important issues in relation to the distribution of power. A brief chronology is provided in Table 7.1.

This chapter starts by examining the origins and outlook of the CWC in the early 1980s, highlighting its focus on community empowerment, which informed its practice over subsequent years. In the next section, the focus is on the Co-op’s shift from critique to engagement and negotiation by the CWC with government. From the late 1980s, this engagement centred on the use of EU Structural Funds to support a new local development and social inclusion programme. This discussion sheds light on why central government effectively bypassed representative local government structures and, instead, directly supervised the rolling out of parallel local development partnership bodies in the 1990s. The Co-op was a key player in facilitating this roll-out and during the 1990s many CWC members participated on behalf of the community sector, alongside the ‘conventional’ social partners, on area-based partnership boards. A further stage of the CWC’s engagement with the state developed through the NESF from 1993. For the CWC, the NESF was a bridge between the world of local partnership and that of tripartite social partnership. The Co-op used the NESF as an opportunity to develop alliances with other national associations. With the Labour Party in coalition on its highest ever poll share, the Co-op was better able to give added impetus to a broad equal status agenda alongside the expanding social inclusion agenda. The NESF was a significant stepping stone towards social partner status for the CWC.

Table 7.1 Community Workers’ Co-operative landmarks

Year Landmark

1981 Establishment of Community Workers’ Co-operative

1987–89 CWC sets up Structural Funds sub-committee and develops expertise and proposals for local development

1990 PESP includes proposals for 12 local area-based partnerships on unemployment

1990/1 Co-op submissions around Barrington Report on local government reform focused on deeper reform and greater local participation

1992 Area Development Management (ADM, later Pobal) established as national agency overseeing local area partnerships, with CWC representation

1993 CWC enters National Economic and Social Forum in ‘disadvantaged’ strand; interaction with INOU, NWCI and others; submissions to PCW talks directly and through NESF

Contributes to NESF report on new national development plan and local development social inclusion



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