Intersectional Justice Claims under Austerity: Minority Women's Third Sector Activism in France and the UK

This paper examines the rise of ‘enterprise’ as a dominant ideological frame for NGO action in the UK and France. In our pilot project exploring the challenges facing non-governmental organizations (NGOs) during the current economic crisis and subsequent austerity we found that the logic of free market relations had penetrated and embedded itself into the rationale and practices of the third sector in these countries. Principles of competition, the accumulation of assets and the commodification of services and products offered by NGOs had either been imposed onto individual organisations by the local or national state or organisations had actively adopted these ideas in order to survive austerity. The marketisation of relations in the third sector, while not new, has continued apace during the crisis.

We argue that enterprise is not a neutral concept and practice for NGOs. Rather, enterprise is an unacknowledged political stance that reshapes the ways in which NGOs define social problems, develop their programmes of activity and enact their social practices. Questions remain about what the marketisation of the NGO sector means for the most marginalised groups in France and the UK—minority women. We suggest that the ability for minority women to articulate and take action on intersectional social justice claims within the sector is under threat because these claims may well be silenced and/or misrecognised due to the prevailing marketised logic of the sector.