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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at the Centre for Voluntary Action Studies at the University of Ulster and funded by the Royal Irish Academy, it is argued that the way that voluntary and community organizations developed in Ireland's two jurisdictions after the partition of the island in 1922 illuminates debates on the role of states in structuring the civic space in which voluntary action occurs. It illustrates, in particular, the interaction of state policy drivers with the cultural and ideological forces that shape voluntary action. Analysis lends support to the view that state action, together with cultural trends and social capital resources, is the crucial determinant of how the voluntary sector develops in a jurisdiction.