Introduction to the Special Issue: New Contexts for Collective Action: The Politics of Parenting, Partnering, and Participation

What are the possibilities for collective action and public participation in contemporary Western welfare societies? How are new political opportunity structures and new discursive environments impacting on collective actors, particularly those concerned with intimate and family life? How are the changing relationships between the national state, local forms of government, and the institutions, organizations, and movements of civil society reframing political claims, policy demands, and public values? What does all this mean for those of us concerned with the future of progressive feminist interventions on the terrain of social politics? These are some of the questions that this special issue seeks to address.

This collection of articles has its origins in the Collective Voices around Parenting and Partnering Project, which is part of the UK Economic and Social Research Council's Research Group for the Study of Care, Values and the Future of Welfare (CAVA). CAVA is a research program investigating changing practices of and values associated with parenting and partnering, and the implications of these for future welfare policies.¹ Its empirical projects have been concerned with exploring a number of dimensions of social change inthe realm of care, family lives, and personal relationships and, in the case of the Collective Voices Project, with researching the practices and values of collective actors—national and local voluntary organizations, trade unions, and grassroots, self-help, and campaigning groups—working on a wide range of issues around parenting and partnering.

As part of CAVA's activities, we organized an international seminar around the theme of our research project, bringing together a number of leading sociologists, social policy analysts, and political scientists who were working on cognate issues. The seminar had two main aims. It sought to cast a cross-national gaze on the social movement dimension of our project, by soliciting works from scholars who were carrying out research on collective actors operating within the same broad field of contention—that around parenting and partnering, or what might once have been called family politics. In different terms, we were also concerned to explore what had happened to some of those forces that thirty years ago had turned the personal into the political. It was also designed to facilitate discussion of the particularities of the political, policy, and cultural context that set the parameters for collective action and public participation in New Labour's Britain. We therefore invited contributions from academics who were engaged in research on a range of aspects of public participation, asking them to speak about the ways they understood modes of governance to be changing in Britain and how this relates to public participation. Following the seminar, this issue is therefore divided into two sections.

Part I focuses on collective interventions around parenting and partnering and contains four articles, each addressing the specificity of different national or cross-national contexts: Alexandra Dobrowolsky and Jane Jenson on Canada, Fiona Williams and Sasha Roseneil on the United Kingdom, Solveig Bergman on the Norden (the Nordic states), and Anna Gavanas on the United States. These articles offer detailed case studies of particular mobilizations around parenting and partnering issues. The first and third focus on the changing relationship between state actors and social movements around the perennial women's movement issue of child care. The second examines the public values that are articulated by voluntary organizations working around parenting and partnering, and the fourth explores the internal discursive and political tensions within the fatherhood responsibility movement.

Taking the case of political mobilization and discourses around child care, Dobrowolsky and Jenson examine the consequences for women of the redesign of citizenship in the postneoliberal, "social investment" Canadian state. Their article starts from a perspective that sees social movements as profoundly shaped by the policy directions of the governments they seek to influence, while also recognizing the salience of the internal dynamics and strategic decisions of the movements themselves. Tracing the twists and turns of Canadian political contestations about child care over the course of forty years, they show how the rights and needs of women have slipped from the political agenda to be replaced by a focus on the...