Paper short abstract:

This paper examines how English state initiatives to tackle ‘homelessness’ have generated a fragmentary landscape of homeless organisations that are engaged in everyday relations of mistrust and suspicion. It explores how organisational actors hold each other morally and personally to account.

Paper long abstract:

Over the past decade, the English state has facilitated the re-proliferation of ‘homelessness’ organisations through fragmentary and piecemeal funding initiatives, resulting in a markedly compartmentalised institutional landscape. These organisations are well characterised by fragility: they depend heavily on state funding and other scarce non-state resources – these are all unpredictably changeable and competitive in nature. Rather than engaging in the collaborative partnerships that are encouraged by New Public Management, I illustrate how disparate yet co-dependent organisations in a locality I call Castlebury were engaged in everyday relations of mutual mistrust and suspicion. This was facilitated by, and reinforced, interorganisational opacity and secrecy, corresponding with forms of loyalty felt to one’s organisation and to the new class of patrons who head these organisations. I explore how staff and volunteers in Castlebury’s homeless sector crossed these opaque compartmental boundaries to hold each other to account, often through gossip and other concealed methods. In the context of an ambivalent state that sponsors these organisations yet does not hold them uniformly to account, a new politics of accountability emerges: agents of the public good in Castlebury appraise the moral value of each other’s projects whilst seeking to uphold the ostensible legitimacy of one’s singular, public persona. This politics of accountability often entails the evaluation of individual agents’ personal character and is animated by personal histories of tension and alliance among individuals. This analysis illustrates the heterogeneity and contestation among humanitarian organisations and the potential intractability of opacity in contemporary projects of the public good.