Using Volunteering Infrastructure to Build Civil Society

Volunteer centres are agencies established with the purpose of promoting, supporting and revaluating volunteering in general. They operate at the national, regional and local level and together form an infrastructure for volunteering. The subject of this dissertation is the development of volunteering infrastructure since the 1970s. It addresses the reasons that volunteering infrastructure has been established simultaneously in many widely differing countries, identifies the functions that volunteering infrastructure provides in the various countries and discusses the possibility that volunteering infrastructure can be captured with a single, general definition. To lay a foundation for understanding this development, Section 1 begins by presenting a definition of volunteering, followed by an outline of its social context (Section 1.2). Section 3 then focuses on the societal and political need to promote volunteering. Section 1.3 and the following sections of this chapter outline my research questions. Sections 1.4 and 1.5 describe the academic and societal need for this research. This chapter concludes in Section 1.6 with a description of how this dissertation is constructed.