Municipal parks and recreation services are often examined from the perspectives of leisure or urban studies, but rarely from the standpoint of social policy. This oversight not only impedes identification of the welfare dimension in parks and recreation services, but also obscures an important connection between the localized organization of these services and the defining influence of higher level policy regimes. This thesis traces that connection with reference to the emergence and ongoing operation of a network of community centres, each one jointly managed by the Vancouver Park Board and a local nonprofit community association. The work is grounded in document analysis, supplemented by recalled data from the writers career involvement with several of these Park Board facilities.The bottom up approach to social policy analysis implied by the above research agenda derives theoretical support from several sources. The work of Karl Polanyi (1944, 1977), and of social policy critics influenced by his decommodification thesis, provides the foundation of a non state-centred social policy. The dual politics model proposed by Saunders (1986), and others who equate urban sociology with the sociology of consumption, draws attention to the decommodifying impact of local governance. However, the concept of semiautonomous fields, adapted from Moore (1979) and Cohen (1987), is found to be a more applicable model to describe the relationship between local policy processes and the central state.This thesis argues that, in the community centre context, social policy cannot be characterized as rational outputs from constituted authority, but is rather the outcome of relations between three semi autonomous fields: (1) a branch of the local state, (2) organized volunteers, and (3) professional staff. The decentered policymaking of these fields, at times constrained and supported by central policy regimes, is shown to have--in a Polanyian sense--substantive economic impacts. The thesis concludes that a similar analytic approach to other areas of welfare service delivery would also reveal productive outputs of social policy.