The shift towards governance and greater reliance on third parties in the design, implementation and evaluation of policy has created new pressures to ensure that policies are designed and delivered in a consistent and effective manner. In the interest of improving transparency, accountability, effectiveness and efficiency, governments in Canada and in the UK, as in many industrialized countries, have begun to emphasize the need for evidence-based policy-making. As a result, knowledge and research have become key assets in the production of policy. Yet, with their current capacity and knowledge base wanting, governments have increasingly relied on the knowledge and information of external actors and have afforded greater authority to them on this basis. This has created a situation in which evidence-based inputs are given greater weight. This shift has particular implications for voluntary sector organizations whose basis for intervention has lain historically with the interests that they represent. Already, in the Canadian case many national organizations have seen their focus shift to research activities under the impetus of new funding initiatives explicitly encouraging activities grounded in knowledge and policy analysis. Moreover, policy guidelines have been elaborated in order to enhance the sector's capacity to contribute to the development of policy in a depoliticized manner. Using a series of interviews conducted with representatives from national voluntary organizations in Canada, this article explores the implications of such a shift for the voluntary sector in Canada, and asks whether the Canadian case holds some lessons for voluntary sector-state relations in other jurisdictions.

Since the 1990s, governance processes have shifted significantly as most governments in industrialized countries began emphasizing the need for greater participation of third sector organizations in the process of design and delivery of public policy~Agranoff, 2006;Brugué and Gallego, 2003;Kendall, 2009!. While most of the literature has focused on the state and changes in administrative structures~on the resdesign of bureaucratic units see Brugué and Gallego, 2003;Hunold, 2001!, we know comparatively little on how shifts in governance have affected patterns of engagement of community organizations. What is unique about community organizations is that they are both agents in the delivery of services and vehicles for the expression of collective interests. Shifts in governance are compelling organizations to make tradeoffs between these two roles. This paper is particularly concerned with the impacts of this shift in governance on the role and place of community-based organizations as a critical vehicle for the acquisition and expression of citizenship. The emerging pattern in contemporary liberal democracies is a move away from interest group representation and a public sphere organized around demands for extensions of rights, for example, to something much more constrained~Laforest, 2012; Smith, 2005!. In order to examine how these broad dynamics are affecting community organizations on the ground, the paper adopts a case study approach focusing on the field of immigrant settlement. This field provides a fruitful area of investigation because identity issues have tradi-tionally intersected with service delivery in this area. It is also well documented that since the mid-1990s, the settlement sector in Ontario has evolved into a para-state system under new governance arrange-ments~Richmond and Shields, 2004; Sadiq, 2004!. The effects of these new governance dynamics which call for a devolution of settlement services and greater collaboration between governments and community organizations have had their greatest impact at the municipal level. The objective of this article is to examine how community organizations have navigated and adapted their practices to the new governance arrangements, with a particular focus on the city of Ottawa.While Ottawa's immigrant population has grown at a faster pace than the rest of Canada, the local situation in Ottawa has been consistent with national and provincial trends. In 2006, 178,545 immigrants were living in Ottawa, representing almost a quarter of the population~22.2%!. It is estimated that one in five persons~22%! in the city is foreign born and 19 per cent belong to a visible minority group~Statistics Canada Census, 2006!. It is also estimated that by 2017, immigrants will account for 27 per cent of the population, and visible minorities will account for 28 per cent. Statistics Canada, 2010!. What is more, Ottawa has a small but well developed and co-ordinated settlement sector. Being in the nation's capital, the sector has a long history of interacting with various ...

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Résumé Au cours des 10 dernières années, les gouvernements ont réalisé que les nouvelles formes de gouvernance nécessitent une plus grande coopération avec les acteurs de la société civile. L’amélioration de ses relations avec le secteur bénévole et communautaire est maintenant considérée comme un élément clé d’une bonne gestion des affaires publiques. À la fois au Canada et au Québec, les gouvernements ont utilisé un instrument politique innovateur, une entente cadre, afin de renouveler leurs relations avec ce secteur. Même si les moyens sont similaires, il y a des différences importantes en ce qui concerne le degré d’institutionnalisation de l’interaction, l’acceptation du rôle d’action sociale et la reconnaissance de l’autonomie du secteur au Canada et au Québec. Les auteurs démontrent que ces différences reflètent des manières distinctes de positionner le secteur dans le régime de citoyenneté.

This article compares how the role and place of