Foreword.

• Author: Pole, Nicholas

In this issue of the Social Policy Journal of New Zealand, we pay tribute to the work of the volunteers of our society, in honour of the International Year of Volunteers 2001. We have devoted most of Issue Seventeen to papers that examine the policy dimensions of what the authors refer to as "the third sector", "the community", "non-profit organisations" and "voluntary activity". Our contributors come from government agencies, the academy and community organisations, and apply their diverse perspectives to the different facets of volunteering, as well as to several other arenas of social policy, including social indicators, research models, health and justice.

The changing role and responsibilities of voluntary organisations are explored in several papers. Among these, and focused on the field of health, Peter Crampton, Alistair Woodward and Anthony Dowell explore the devolution of primary care to the third sector. Carla Wilson, Anne Kerslake Hendricks and Rachel Smithies identify changes in volunteering that have been brought about by the move to contracting out the provision of social services. The government, as the contracting body, typically identifies very specific forms of accountability from community organisations. Mark Barrett argues that community groups should be accountable to all their stakeholders and that stakeholders can be very broadly defined.

Community development is an important theme, whether discussed in terms of capacity building or social capital. Sally Casswell provides an analysis of how different kinds of community initiatives may contribute to the processes of development as well as to achieving identifiable social goals. The CIVICUS conference, reviewed by David Robinson, featured the civil society index project, which attempts to measure this sort of endeavour and thus produce a rounded picture of civil society. David Robinson and Tuwhakairiora Williams focus on the different ways in which Maori and Pakeha conceptualise these activities, and the need to acknowledge these differences and take them into account in making policy.

Two other contributions draw, respectively, on the disciplines of history and anthropology to provide additional perspectives on voluntary organisations. Margaret Tennant surveys the themes used to discuss the relationship between government and the voluntary sector in the history of welfare, while Hal Levine explores the place of Urban Maori Authorities in New Zealand and their claims...