Place-based solidarity: Crisis, austerity and the devolution of responsibility

Abstract

This paper explores how the specificities of place can mediate the effects and outcomes of national austerity policies. Based on semi-structured interviews with local stakeholders in Liverpool, UK, we argue that “place-based solidarity” can complicate austerity urbanism’s ‘downloading’ of austerity to the local state and its ‘offloading’ to the third sector. The paper details the complex webs of contractual relationships, responsibilities and networks of support which have emerged in response to austerity, arguing that this constitutes a form of place-based solidarity. This manifests in three ways: in the “pro-poor” policies of the local state; the partnerships between third sector organisations and local state; and in everyday caring practices. The paper explains how these practical solidarities are born out of a shared commitment to place and a desire to keep services running, theorising this as a form of resistance. It emphasises however, that such resistance is not a sustainable, long-term solution to the withdrawal of the state, detailing the complex and interlocking crises both service-users and service-providers are now facing as a result. In doing so, it seeks to bridge geographies of solidarity with place-based understandings of austerity and raise questions about the shifting nature of the relationship between national and local government, the third sector and the individual.