Introduction

This chapter proposes a way of thinking about care as a value relevant to contemporary concerns about the way in which we live together and decide together: concerns that are variously conceptualised within policy discourse by reference to community cohesion, social inclusion, community involvement and civil renewal. A particular aim is to offer a critique of policy discourses of civil renewal from an ethic of care perspective. Civil renewal, as elaborated in Home Office publications (particularly those written by David Blunkett when he was Home Secretary), promotes normative notions of the responsibilities of citizenship. Citizens are exhorted to become involved in voluntary action or participatory projects in order to enhance community cohesion and promote the general social good. I want to contrast the way in which responsible citizenship is conceptualised within this discourse with how people speak about their motivations for involvement in groups of service users and citizens seeking to bring about policies capable of achieving social justice for marginalised or disadvantaged groups.

In order to make this comparison I draw on feminist writing on an ethic of care. My argument is that ‘care’ is usually absent from official discourses of citizenship, participation and civil renewal (see also Balloch, Chapter Two, and Quilgars, Chapter Ten) and, indeed, has also become devalued in the context of those policy areas with which it has been more strongly associated – community or social care. We need to understand why this devaluing has taken place in the context of policies ostensibly and explicitly focused on ‘care’ and why the notion of care is seen as a somewhat irrelevant if not embarrassing value to appeal to in the context of broader policies concerned with social inclusion and community engagement.

The problem with care

Community care discourse has been profoundly influenced by collective action among those who use social care services (for example, Barnes, 1997; Barnes and Bowl, 2001). The disabled people's movement has had considerable success in gaining recognition of disability as a rights issue (see Campbell and Oliver, 1996). Access to physical environments, to education with non-disabled peers rather than in ‘special’ environments, to paid work and the capacity to travel within and between social spaces are all seen to have nothing to do with ‘care’, but to embody everyday human and civil rights.