ISTR Fifth International Conference Cape Town, South Africa / July 7-10, 2002 Transforming Civil Society, Citizenship and Governance: The Third Sector in an Era of Global (Dis)Order

Nicholas Acheson email

This paper reports on work-in-progress on the impact of local area based partnerships between state agencies and community based organisations on the social inclusion of marginal groups of people within marginalised area based communities. It will argue that area based partnerships are not necessarily a panacea for addressing profound problems of social exclusion experienced by certain "out" groups and can run the risk of reproducing deep structural inequalities between groups at local level (Taylor, 200 1).

Social exclusion is the outcome of powerful social forces that result in the marginalisation of substantial sections of the population even within more developed economies. Partnerships become relevant to the issues only insofar as they can take the for m of mediating structures that to some degree redress the balance of power (Couto, 1998).

Disability, it is argued, is a particularly hard test of the capacity of these new structures to address social exclusion in the light of the marginal, dependent and mostly silent state of disabled populations, a state largely defined by powerlessness (Ch arlton, 1998).

The paper reports on and consider evidence that is emerging from a study being conducted in Northern Ireland on the extent to which new partnership structures and forms of local governance both embed the interests of disabled people and are able to respon d in ways that address their powerlessness. Following an introductory discussion of the key terms of "social exclusion", "partnership" and "powerlessness" as it applies to disabled people, the paper is divided into three sections.

Section One sets the scene in Northern Ireland and relates the development of partnerships both to the specifics of the Northern Ireland Peace Process and the more general trends evident in governance. It describes the development of the partnership str uctures with particular reference to current developments and the main ways they can be distinguished from often similarly named entities in Britain and the Republic of Ireland.

Section Two consists in a detailed case study of one partnership experience and considers the factors that lent themselves to the outcomes that were observed. In this case there is clear evidence that the partnership structures did result in greater citi zen engagement among disabled people.

In Section Three, the paper concludes that the factors that lead to outcomes that benefited disabled people were associated with the experimental and novel features of the partnership structures. Changes to these structures currently underway, that are d esigned to embed them more formally as part of local governance structures provide evidence that in future there are likely to be fewer opportunities for this sort of development. This is associated with a relative and accompanying loss of power among vo luntary and community organisations that are in a position to represent the interests of powerless groups, or stand in for them, as the structures evolve. The promise of partnership governance will remain just that - a promise, based as it is on an inade quate understanding of the relationship between voluntary and community organisations and the structural nature of deeply embedded inequalities.

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