Introduction

How to thrive in today's turbulent times is a challenge for communities around the world in an age buffeted by ‘rollback’ and ‘roll-out’ neoliberalism, with governments cutting public expenditure, promoting privatisation and deregulation, and individualising social risks and responsibilities. This age of austerity has now been compounded by the anxieties of the COVID-19 pandemic, with its heavy toll of lives and livelihoods. Drawing on innovative cases and strategic initiatives from the North East of England, this book has explored multiple ways in which communities responded to neoliberalism and austerity. The aim has been to provide deeper insights into the efficacy of these approaches and their relevance and interest nationally and internationally, and to offer insights for addressing the post-pandemic challenges ahead.

This volume began by posing some difficult questions about the role of civil society in an age of austerity (see the chapter ‘Islands of hope in a sea of despair’). Should we celebrate the contributions of civil society in mitigating the impacts of rolling back the state, or lament civil society's role in masking the state's abdication of its role in serving its citizens? Should we embrace the activities of civil society as resistance to austerity and neoliberalism, or criticise civil society for enabling and facilitating these? Have civil society's responses to austerity constituted real alternatives to neoliberalism (sparks of renewal), or only isolated, temporary respite (flickering candles in the wind)? Has civil society perforce become subject to, and a servant of, neoliberalising hegemony through its need for funding and for credibility? In sum, what should be our balance between hope and despair?

The opening chapter also elaborated the concepts of austerity and civil society, introducing themes that have been threaded through all the case-study chapters of this volume. The importance of place has been introduced by taking the North East of England, with its distinctive history, culture, institutions, assets and challenges (as discussed in the chapter ‘The North East of England’), as a lens to explore critical social and political shifts. The case studies have offered examples of ways people in the North East, sometimes in collaboration with university staff and students, have negotiated neoliberalism and austerity during this period.