Interactions Between Local Government and Voluntary Organizations: Theoretical Perspectives

This chapter develops an analytical model suited for empirical investigations of the interactions between local government and voluntary organizations. Public authorities and voluntary organizations interact through conflictual, complementary or cooperative relationships. We contend that, in addition to macro-institutional structures, that is the welfare state, meso-level institutional structures characterizing different policy fields define the modalities of interactions between public authorities and voluntary organizations. The authors identify two institutional regimes of voluntary sector-public sector relations—competitive pluralism and participatory governance—characterized by the ways they institutionalize the role played by voluntary organizations in policymaking and policy implementation and the degree of symmetry and hierarchy characterizing the relationship in these two arenas of interaction. Further, the authors show that these two regimes correspond to the mobilization of different types of power and trust in the interaction.