Exploring local patterns of voluntarism in Wales: Session: Geographies and landscapes of civil society

In the UK, volunteers, community groups, and third sector organisations are increasingly relied upon to assist with, or assume responsibility for, the delivery of a range of local public services. Previous research, however, highlights an uneven landscape of voluntary action and infrastructure in the UK, which suggests that a civil society-based model of service provision may result in spatial variations in levels of accessibility to those public services most reliant on third sector support. Surprisingly, given the emphasis on promoting active citizenship and community self-sufficiency in the UK’s approach to public service delivery, there is currently little available evidence on local patterns of voluntarism. Synthetic estimation is a term which describes a number of approaches whereby individual-level survey data collected and aggregated to represent larger spatial scales, such as regions or countries, are re-estimated for smaller spatial units where such data are not otherwise available. Drawing on such techniques, this study estimates local levels of volunteering across Wales, UK using data obtained from the National Survey for Wales. In this study we seek to construct local indicators of levels of voluntarism that could help to identify geographical patterns of potential unevenness in civil society activities. This in turn will enable policymakers to detect areas potentially less resilient to the loss or reduction of statutory services. This paper details the construction of the small-area estimates, explores the local patterns, and discusses the relevance to the broader landscape of civil society in Wales.