Background
Civil society has always played a central role in shaping Norwegian society. Traditional popular movements such as language advocacy, the labour movement, welfare, temperance, and religion have historically contributed to establishing formal organisations that enabled collective action. One strategy for many of these movements was to incorporate their perspectives into the state, thus making the public responsible for many of the values they aimed to promote. What happens in local communities when the public is forced to reduce its engagement? Statistics Norway's population projections show a clear trend: population growth is occurring in large municipalities and central areas, while many smaller municipalities experience stable or declining populations (Leknes & Løkken, 2022). This project focuses on rural areas with depopulation, where public services risk being reduced or centralised. Volunteer organisations have several important societal functions: as social meeting places, service providers, and mediating actors between the public and individual citizens. There are higher levels of volunteering in rural areas in Norway (Arnesen et al, 2023), but we have limited knowledge about the role of civil society in the most population-threatened municipalities.
Research Questions:
- Is civil society important for formulating and conveying the local population's views on public policy affecting the residents?
- Can civil society play a role in creating meeting places and establishing social structures (to replace public institutions that disappear)?
- Does civil society contribute to meeting service needs to a greater extent in depopulation-threatened municipalities than in other municipalities?
- Are new strategic collaborations being established, for example, between civil society and business or between civil society and the municipality?
Project Approach
The project will use both quantitative and qualitative methods to investigate the role of volunteering in rural municipalities with low populations compared to central municipalities. We will use surveys on voluntary effort from 1998 to 2023 to study trends based on centrality. To gain a more detailed picture, we will conduct new surveys with additional samples from the 145 municipalities not expected to have population growth by 2050. We will also analyse data from local branch surveys and the Voluntary Register to examine the development in the registration of volunteer organisations within health, social, and welfare in less central municipalities.
The qualitative part will consist of case studies in six selected local communities in group 6 of Statistics Norway's centrality index. These cases will be spread across the country, with particular attention to the position of rural schools and what happens when rural schools are threatened with closure.
