Suchergebnisse

Since the announcement of the Irish recession in 2008, there has been much media and popular speculation regarding the apparent failure of the Irish people to collectively resist austerity. The socialisation of private banking debt and successive fiscal 'adjustments', which have seen huge reductions in public spending, disproportionately impacting on the Irish community and voluntary sector (Harvey, 2012), have not generated sustained opposition from civil society. Apocryphal stories of Greek protesters chanting 'we are not like Ireland' or the current Irish Minister for Finance Michael Noonan's threats to print t-shirts with the slogan 'We're not Greece', belie a more complex reality. Evidently, as Laurence Cox (2012) has observed in this journal 'responses from working class communities and social movements' have been 'minimal' In the absence of a widely-shared and enacted anti-austerity politics, there have been regular manifestations of localised or sectoralised opposition to welfare retrenchment, service withdrawal, and the introduction of new levies or charges (Allen, 2012). It is important to note, however, that their achievements to date have been variable.

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.

Abstract
This article introduces and outlines the rationale for a 'Themed Section on Territorial Stigmatization'. It explains how 'territorial stigmatization' is conceptualised and understood, within the wider academic scholarship, and within the four articles that follow in this section. This introductory article outlines some key lines of academic debate and inquiry about the stigmas that adhere to communities of place and it acknowledges the pioneering theoretical contribution of Wacquant in particular. The article also discusses how the articles in this themed section of the CDJ can contribute to our ability to recognise and respond to territorial stigma as an ongoing challenge for community development theory and practice.