GOVERNMENTS AND VOLUNTARY SECTOR WELFARE: HISTORIANS ’ PERSPECTIVES

This paper examines recent themes in the history of welfare as they apply to the relationship between government and the voluntary or non-profit sector. These include a shift from a focus on the welfare state to a “mixed economy ” or “moving frontier ” of welfare, and the emergence of a long-term view that shows a centuries-old contestation between public and private provision for social need. The rehabilitation of past philanthropy has helped to reinforce the profile and legitimacy of the voluntary sector in the present, while recent attention to the actual encounters between providers and recipients of welfare has complicated earlier social control theories. Gender studies have illustrated the respective roles of men and women in the different welfare sectors, the voluntary sector providing a sympathetic space in which women, in particular, have attempted to exercise social power. Typologies derived from internationally comparative studies of the non-profit sector have tended to emphasise the complementary nature of its relationship with governments. This paper suggests some distinctive elements in New Zealand’s history which shaped such interactions in the past, and which now impose constraints, as well as suggesting pathways for the future