Privatizing Responsibility: Public Sector Reform Under Neoliberal Government (Essay‪)‬

CURRENT RESEARCH AND WRITING FROM AUSTRALIA, Canada, United States, United Kingdom and other parts of Europe, and elsewhere, suggest that we are witnessing a change in how we think about and practice our responsibilities. (1) Many groups of people in diverse parts of the world are being mobilized to take on greater responsibilities. This situation is increasingly demanding action in the present, and compelling a degree of obligation and an active orientation toward the future. Through valuable time and labor, volunteers are being trained to take on greater responsibility for the disadvantaged, the vulnerable, and the marginalized. The unemployed and underemployed are being encouraged to act responsibly by re-educating themselves in order to acquire salaried employment. New solutions to poverty are highlighting the responsibility of individuals, private institutions, and international organizations to secure social and economic rights to citizens. These and other examples can help us to visualize a host of changes that foster new relations of responsibility and responsible citizenship. They also make it possible for us to picture what problems are to be solved, what objectives are to be sought, who and what is to be targeted for change, and how our actions are to be shaped differently. In the welfare states of Canada, United States, Northern and Western Europe, and elsewhere, welfare provision has shrunk in recent decades and led to the privatization and outsourcing of various public services. As a consequence of such transformations in liberal social government, a shift of emphasis from social responsibilities to private responsibilities has emerged. This shift reflects a neoliberal governmental style of thinking about and acting on problems that I term privatizing responsibility. As I argue, privatizing responsibility is neither a homogeneous or tightly knit structure or arrangement nor a model of cause and effect. Instead, it comprises diverse elements, shapes forms of conduct, and takes part in various forms of governing. A key argument developed in this paper is that it coexists alongside of governmental strategies, operates as a mobile assemblage that brings into play actors, groups, practices, events, and domains of conduct, and manifests in different parts of the world often to the detriment of people's lives and livelihoods. However, privatizing responsibility has different outcomes and does not apply universally to all groups or populations. The kinds of conduct it aims to create, and the kinds of relations between people, resources, institutions, or organizations it intends to achieve, are diverse.