State, voluntary work and charity: Redistributive ideas and practices in a southern Italian town

Abstract

This article examines how the tension between an ideal view of the state as guarantor of social well-being and its problematic and incomplete realization unfolds among Caritas volunteers in a southern Italian town. In the last decade, austerity politics undermined national welfare systems, devolving large segments of social assistance to voluntary associations and Third sector organizations. Through the ethnography of Caritas voluntary work, the article analyses the interaction between formal and informal circuits of food distribution in the framework of welfare transformation. Focusing on the bureaucratization of food distribution entailed in the management of public resources, the article mobilizes the concept of moral economy to explain the coexistence of different redistributive ideas. Volunteers react to the delegation that characterized welfare decentralisation, by making moral distinctions between the redistributive practices that coexist in their voluntary work. The state involvement in charity activities and the volunteers’ involvement with state bureaucracy of social assistance, nourish the contradictions between the volunteers’ ethical commitment and their expectations of the role of the state.