Who Wants to be an Active Citizen?: The Politics and Practice of Community Involvement

Abstract

The notions of active citizenship and community involvement have become increasingly prominent in political discussions and policy practices within Britain in the past 15 years. This is a significant development as the modus operandi of modern liberal democracies has been a representative mode of government in which the wider citizenry has a passive role. This paper contextualizes active citizenship in terms of the interrelationship between civic society and the political realm. The Foucauldian-inspired literature on governmentality has made a concerted attempt to examine such issues. Governmentality regards government, not in the conventional sense as the provenance of centralized institutions, where interest groups and ideologies play their part, but as a complex and ever-changing process that forges ways of thinking about governing with a myriad of practices that proliferate throughout society. Whilst it is informative, it is questioned whether this analytic approach can fully explain and illuminate political developments like active citizenship, given its rejection of realist and critical approaches to government. The second half of the paper addresses such concerns. Here, community involvement is regarded as a contested notion and one where the central state has played a prominent role. To highlight these analytical points, the historical development and political configuration of community involvement over the past 20 years is traced. It is shown that central government, through policies influenced by contrasting ideological conceptions of citizenship and political expediency, has played a key role in shaping community involvement.