Learning to have a life: how a local development association and its adult learners cope with this challenge

Abstract

In recent times, one faces the emergence of shifts, even if still ambiguous and diffuse, in the relationships between the State, the market and the civil society. Although these changes may also be assessed from the point of view of the market and/or the civil society, in this paper we would like to stress shifts in the State itself. For this purpose, we will support our analysis in Roger Dale’s argument that the State, namely the Welfare State that expressed a specific intervention pattern up until the 1970s in western pluralistic democracies, in the last decades has been evidencing erosion mainly as a result of globalisation. Considering the referred understanding, this erosion is becoming clearer by emptying the State intervention in terms of public services provision and financing; from a State that was «doing everything» to a pattern of intervention oriented to «coordinate the coordination», a task meanwhile influenced by other levels besides the national one. Therefore, the mentioned author argues that nowadays one can find a State that is not in its original place, a State suffering from ectopia (Dale, 2005: 56).