'Self-Organization' of welfare-services in deprived and wealthier urban neighborhoods in the Dutch Participation Society

This dissertation investigates the Dutch policy turn towards more volunteering in neighborhood-based welfare services, and its effects on poorer and wealthier urban neighbourhoods. Over the last two decades, various Western European governments have become more attentive and supportive to citizens’ voluntary organisations in the fields of social cohesion, care and emancipation in the neighbourhood. In the UK, the so-called ‘Big Society’ policy frame has become very influential. Inspired by this example, the Dutch national government has expressed that the Dutch welfare state is to transform into a ‘participation society’. The dissertation project empirically tests one of the critiques on the Dutch participation society. This critique holds that deprived urban areas have less potential to self-organize welfare services and that, consequently, the level and quality of welfare services will be lower in these neighborhoods than in richer neighborhoods. Therefore it is feared that more support for welfare self-organisation will eventually exacerbate existing social inequality in the city. The research has consisted of interviews and observations of almost all year-round welfare service providing volunteer groups in four Rotterdam neighbourhoods. This showed that the groups are actually more numerous in the poorer than in the wealthier research neighbourhoods: the deprived areas have twice as many groups. Analysis of all 2014 funding applications to the Rotterdam Resident Initiative fund, also shows that deprived boroughs have more groups than wealthier boroughs. To understand deprived neighbourhoods’ higher number of groups per inhabitant, it proves necessary to look also at self-organization leaders’ motivations for volunteering. My interview data indicate that for many higher educated leaders, volunteering is related to paid work. In the second place, higher educated leaders working in low-income neighbourhoods are quite often ethnic minority volunteers who work to help their own ethnic group. Thirdly, I found that many volunteers are non-working citizens (retired or unemployed) who are motivated by the opportunities for social contact and useful or pleasurable occupation of their leisure time. The motivation perspective helps to explain why more groups were found in the deprived research neighbourhoods: in these areas also more un(der)employed people and ethnic minority communities are present. Furthermore, the research investigates how the socio-economic profile of the neighbourhood influences volunteer groups’ opportunities to acquire material resources they need. It finds that the municipality strongly supports that residents make application to its funding program, especially in the deprived neighbourhoods, but that due to budget cuts this funding is often less generous than before. Together, the empirical data show that the relatively large number of self-organizations in the lower income research neighborhoods is mostly due to higher activation. It also indicates that the services that are self-organised in Rotterdam’s participation society are often well adapted to local welfare needs. At the same time, this self-organised welfare landscape is quite fragmented along ethnic lines and sometimes also class lines. Furthermore, the supply of welfare services is difficult to supervise or steer for local government. Lastly, even though deprived neighborhoods have relatively more welfare service groups, this is still a very small number in absolute terms, and the losses that come with Rotterdam’s participation society policies are most tangible in these areas. They used to have much more state-funded welfare services than the wealthier areas of the city. The fact that these have been largely scaled down in budget cut operations, impacts residents’ daily life more strongly in the deprived than in the wealthier neighbourhoods.