‘Plugging Gaps, Taking Action’: Conceptions of Global Citizenship in Gap Year Volunteering

This paper presents ethnographic data from a third sector organisation in 2009, as it set up a development education programme to enhance its standard gap year volunteering experience. Beginning with returned British volunteers, the organisation aims to ‘cascade’ more elements of development education into their work so that the principles of international development are embedded into its organisational mission. The stated aim of the programme is to create a community of active global citizens by building on volunteers’ experience of working on development projects, improving their knowledge of international development goals and teaching them campaigning techniques to enable them to design their own ‘actions’ to promote international development. The paper analyses the approaches of the programme, exploring the constraints and competing interests invested in the scheme by different actors and how these impact on the type of ‘global citizens’ that are crafted through this programme. By reflecting on how development issues are presented and taught to the volunteers, the paper explores what notion of global citizenship emerges in the organisation. As the programme is funded by the UK government, the auditing requirements are quantitatively focused. This concern with numbers shapes, unintentionally, the possibilities for what the programme can be. Due to these limits, the practices of citizenship that emerge from the programme result in individualised actions. These global citizens take on individual responsibility for social problems and global issues and seek to change their own behaviours, rather than reflecting on or tackling political, economic and structural causes collectively. In consequence, the programme represents another form of individual responsibilisation that has become common in the neoliberal political economy. This is at odds with the stated ethos and mission of the organisation, but symptomatic of the co-option of much of the third sector into neoliberal goals and aims