discourse became commonplace through popular media and television programmes such as ‘Benefits Street’ in England and ‘The Scheme’ in Scotland (Mooney and Hancock, 2010; Marriott, 2017). As Clarke and Elgenuis (2014) argue, the Coalition government’s ‘skivers v strivers message is inflaming resentments between those affected by the economic slump’, while ‘benefit crackdown leads to divide and rule within poor communities’, essentially breaking down civil society. Furthermore, the new public management approaches are changing the nature of volunteering, with negative effects on attracting and retaining volunteers, who become subject to the culture of performance indicators and an emphasis on competing with other civil society organisations to win contracts. The concept of ‘joyless volunteering’ (Dunn, 2017) has emerged, whereby volunteers are often expected to participate in strategic decisions concerning service provision and staff redundancies, and to be on the front line of hard-pressed services for citizens, bearing the brunt of expressed frustration.
Finally, we return to the idea of civil society as the ‘public sphere’, which goes beyond service delivery and focuses on the role of civil society in critiquing and shaping public policy (Williams and Goodman, 2011). This is where tensions arise in civil society organisations, whereby their role as the voice of the disempowered may contradict with their dependence on state funding and the delivery of services that are commissioned by the government. Both of these may hamper their willingness to confront and question government policy (Alcock, 2010), and compromise their autonomy and advocacy role, especially for disadvantaged communities. As a study by Hemmings (2017: 59) shows, austerity, the shift to the ‘contract culture’ (Bode, 2006), competition, professionalisation and ‘self-muzzling’ has restricted the ability of the voluntary sector to advocate for disadvantaged groups, and to challenge government policy – a role that was further curtailed by recent legislation.2
In many ways, the aforementioned empirical cases reflect the theoretical critiques of the public sphere as a static, essentialised and neutral space. Instead, scholars (notably, Chantal Mouffe) consider the public sphere as a contested space. Here, ‘passive observance of moralist comprehensive doctrines’ that underpin the liberal views of the public sphere is replaced with ‘proactive engagement and sifting of ideas and actions’ by political actors, who have ‘their own visions and versions of the common good’ (Baker, 2018: 258). This dynamic and relational perspective combines political values of agonistic pluralism with ethical values of shared civil imaginaries, which are ‘mediated through rules and norms of conduct that help create a common bond and public concern’ (Baker, 2018: 259). For us, it is this understanding of civil society as a contested ‘public sphere’ that presents hope in the dark (see also Davoudi and Ormerod, 2021).
Concluding reflections
This chapter comes to a conclusion at a time of a global health crisis – the COVID-19 pandemic. We, the authors, are self-isolated in our homes. Businesses are shut down. Shops and schools are closed. Cities are eerily empty, quiet and locked down, and ambulance sirens are constant reminders that hospital beds are filling up and many lives are being tragically lost. While everyone is exposed to the virus, it is becoming evident that some are more vulnerable than others, not just due to their age, but also because of persisting social inequalities. Those who have borne the brunt of austerity measures are also the most vulnerable to the effects of the pandemic. The COVID-19 crisis has shone a light (if we can call it that) on the plight of those in poverty, without a job, without a home, without food and with poor health. The virus has exposed the cracks in our societies – cracks that have been widened by decades of austerity measures and disinvestment in public services and social safety nets. All this makes it hard not to think that it is ‘the worst of times’.
In the midst of such despair, we look out of the window and see civil societies in action: neighbours are helping neighbours; volunteers are delivering food to families; charities have ramped up their work despite dwindling donations; and hundreds of thousands of people are volunteering to reduce the burden on essential public services, notably, the National Health Service (NHS) – the only legacy of the post-war welfare state that has not yet been fully privatised and neoliberalised. To further blur the boundaries of the so-called three sectors, businesses are providing free services to communities: laundries are washing key workers’ uniforms; restaurants are delivering hot meals to hospital staff; hotels are opening their doors to homeless people; and supermarkets are donating to food banks. Similarly, public sector key workers – notably, nurses, doctors and carers – are working around the clock to save lives, and the government is promising to ‘do what it takes’3 to protect businesses and families. All this makes it easy to think that it is ‘the best of times’.
Thus, there is no escape from the entanglement of hope and despair. And nor should there be because lying in their intersection is a political force that enables us to imagine how we might be otherwise, and engenders the condition of the possibility for alternatives to neoliberal social orders. The COVID-19 pandemic will abate sooner or later but its wider socio-economic impacts will last for many years to come. There will be a ‘new normal’ but what it will look like depends largely on the mobilisation of civil society, understood not simply as the provider of voluntary services, but crucially as a contested ‘public sphere’ infused with power and politics in which tensions and contradictions are played out, with uncertain outcomes. It is in this sense that civil society can be seen as the embodiment of hope in the midst of multiple and related crises, and the mobiliser of what Block (1986 [1954–59]: 43) famously called an ‘ontology of the Not Yet’, enabling citizens to step out of the undesirable present, rather than staying hopeful in it.
Notes
1The value of goods and services produced over a specific period of time.
2The Transparency of Lobbying, Non-party Campaigning and Trade Union Administration Act 2014 (the Lobbying Act 2014).
3The phrase first used by the UK Chancellor of Exchequer when he presented the government budget in February 2020.
References
Alcock, P. (2010) ‘Better get used to bitten fingers’, The House Magazine, University of Birmingham, 19 April.
Bailey, N., Bramley, G. and Hastings, A. (2015) ‘Symposium introduction: local responses to “austerity”’, Local Government Studies, 41(4): 571–81.
Baker, C. (2018) ‘Aiming for reconnection: responsible citizenship’, in S. Cohen, C. Fuhr and J. Bock (eds) Austerity, Community Action, and the Future of Citizenship in Europe, Bristol: Policy Press.
Barry, B. (2005) Why Social Justice Matters, Cambridge: Polity Press.
Block, E. (1986 [1954–59]) The Principle of Hope, Volume 1,
