Neighbourhoods

Building a sense of agency: community engagement in the age of consent

Last week Julian Dobson reported that the government “has been having a series of conversations about how to, in its words, 'mobilise neighbourhoods'”. I don’t know who these conversations are with but it sounds like they might have a bit of catching up to do. Julian reminds us that government seems to want a form of community action that gets people growing and picking apples for motherhood pie but doesn’t upset the cart.

I sense that a new phase of community engagement is emerging and I want to try and clarify what that might mean. First, four little insights from the past week or so.

• I heard how a Chinese restaurant had been inspected by the fire services, whose officers found several dangerous transgressions (not just out-of-date extinguishers) for which they could have been closed down. Rather than do that, the fire officers contacted the chair of the town’s Chinese Association, who intervened to help establish some quick fixes followed by managed upgrading, so that the business was able to keep going.
• I’ve been in conversations to facilitate a process of community engagement in an area of west London that is anticipating extensive regeneration. Our approach will be to help ensure that residents recognise that it is legitimate to have ideas and aspirations for their area; and that local agencies should provide a responsive environment in which such ideas can be tested and opportunities provided.
• I heard some trading standards officers talking about moving from a triggered prosecution approach, when a business transgresses (for example in under-age selling), to an advice and training model, encouraging traders to learn, appreciate and abide by the law. They call it ‘community protection’.
• I ran a workshop with young people who experience exclusion, who were part of a young inspectors’ scheme, whereby they gain confidence, acceptance and employability skills in return for helping local services (like libraries, surgeries, activity centres) through systematic evaluation. The young people’s role was welcomed by the receiving agencies and they could only tell me of one throw-away remark that might on a bad day have been construed as patronising.

Examples like this confirm to me that we are moving into an age in which governance is far more about permissions and consent – in both directions - than about top-down decree. This may be consistent with what has been called ‘permission-based policy-making.’ You can’t do that without genuine engagement. Most politicians haven’t spotted this, because politicians don’t tend to notice change that they haven’t brought about themselves. All four of the above examples were instigated by some of those hugely innovative, under-rated, committed people in modest-ranking roles in local public services.

This change in the relation between local people and service providers is profoundly related to the nature of the network society, which is characterised by the erosion of hierarchies and the emergence of powerful horizontal communication systems. That’s been going on for at least 20 years and is nothing whatever to do with political direction from the centre. The transformation draws on, and depends heavily on, people’s connectedness at local level.

So if government wants to understand the context of ‘mobilising neighbourhoods’ (I think that phrase probably means community action around local issues), it first needs to appreciate how neighbourly recognition and interaction underpin readiness to mobilise in time of need. That’s always been the case. The bit that I think is emerging now is about building a sense of agency at neighbourhood level, which you don’t do with flimsy rhetoric about ‘innovation’ and silly competitions and decimating the public sector.

What this is leading to is a space where people who have previously experienced only disempowerment, come to feel that they have consent to act.

 

 

 

Compound interest

Here's a lesson in grassroots democracy, from Libya. The BBC have a short report from Gabriel Gatehouse on a local democratic initiative emerging from the ruins of Colonel Gaddafi's former compound in Tripoli.

After Gaddafi's cronies fled, apparently some 68 families moved in to the various buildings, some of which are extensive villas, some 'little more than concrete bunkers'. There is public discussion about turning the compound into a large park, but the squatters have organised themselves already, formed a residents' assocation, sent a petition to the national transitional council, and begun the process of negotiating another solution.

 

Local democratic participation and parking

I sometimes wonder whether, in late medieval cities, there were disputes about where people left their carts. Car parking is a major issue in contemporary neighbourhoods, and inconsiderate parking infuriates people. Maybe some kinds of personality just get sparked by the very idea of public space, and always have done.

I’m not known for defending car drivers, but when you have situations where residents cannot get their own cars out of their driveways because others have left their vehicles in the way for long periods of time, you have to ask whether there’s a problem understanding that others have a right of access to public space.

A week ago I designed and ran a consultative process for a public meeting about car parking, in a large village on the outskirts of Sheffield. The material I had to work with included a lot of written remarks in open questions from an online survey, many of which suggested solutions and many of which consisted of repeated annoyance at inconsiderate drivers.

The process I came up with may have helped move things on. One reason is that most participants apparently were expecting a conventional public meeting in which councillors said something from the front, were shouted at by a few worked-up voices from the rows, and nothing much changed as a consequence. There were no rows (in either pronunciation) – the chairs were set around tables, people had the chance to shape their own agenda (and therefore found it hard to complain if the meeting did not discuss what they wanted discussed); they had the opportunity to augment and comment, in groups, on every live proposition as it was passed round, using pre-formatted sheets which included a street map; and they had the chance to vote, at the end, on preferred options to address the parking problem. There was no disruption. It was local participative democracy in action.

What was striking for me was the genuine sense of novelty among the participants, which I’m still absorbing. The sceptical might argue that just because some southerner comes in with an arty-farty creative approach, it doesn’t mean anything will change as a consequence. That remains to be seen. But I sensed from various comments afterwards that some people were grateful for a completely fresh experience of genuinely participative local democracy, which was, well, revelatory to them. That’s change, in itself.

The car resembles the traditional meeting as symbolic of communication confusion: it helps us to share some information (like status, power or detachment); in a car you can say ‘we’ve been through’ somewhere much as the conventional meeting ‘goes through’ an agenda. And cars really mess up interaction, and all the unseen benefits that go with interaction.

 

What is social participation?

‘Social participation comprises three dimensions: neighbouring, trust, and interest in politics.’

This comes from a chapter of early findings from the ESRC’s Understanding society programme (the new household longitudinal study, described as ‘the world’s largest household panel survey’). The sentence is regarded as sufficiently important to be given a large-font margin box all of its own, so they must have meant it.

It’s certainly different. Those who construct these large national surveys have to make a few questions go a long way, which ain’t easy; but it’s quite hard to see how you could get to this 3D reduction from the mix of concepts covered for example in this mindmap which I knocked up a few years ago. And we need the survey makers to get their structures right because they will set in train a whole lot of subsequent research, policy and practice for years to come.

We can compare and contrast the Understanding Society framework with, for instance, the framework offered in the recent Pathways through participation report. Distinguishing social, public and individual participation, the PtP summary report suggests that social participation includes

'being involved in formal voluntary organisations, informal or grassroots community groups, and formal and informal mutual aid and self help.'

The PtP project put a lot of intellectual effort into the topic, and the tag cloud on their site boasts an enticing array of terms; but I don’t see the words ‘neighbouring’ or ‘trust’. There are just two items for ‘politics’.

So here we have two national level initiatives offering quite different frameworks for a concept that affects all of us and has increasing salience in policy. The Pathways approach is more thorough and altogether more convincing, but unfortunately the Understanding Society approach is likely to have influence for some time as the next waves of data build up and get used.

In their effort to explain their framework, the Understanding Society authors trip themselves up quite quickly:

‘Neighbouring captures informal social participation, while general trust and interest in politics capture participation in formal organisations.’

Well no, they don’t, not by a long way. I’m not an academic so I don’t know what the protocol is, but I suspect that if this was an undergraduate essay you’d send them off to start again.

A new age of collective action?

 

According to a reporter on R4’s Today programme this morning, one trade union has seen membership increase by 11,000 in the past three months. So while the coalition government is determinedly polarising British life, by making no effort to constrain the vulgar greed of the wealthy while patronisingly clobbering the least well off, it’s proving quite efficient at stimulating collective action.

So this ‘rebuke to an elite that gives money to banks at the expense of the poor’ might just be an unanticipated manifestation of big society, for those who remember it. And there’s nowt like a bit of class confrontation to help take your mind off the niceties of economic forecasting.

Meanwhile it’s fun to scan through the 102 things not to do if you hate taxes – for example, ‘Do not walk or run on sidewalks… Do not expect to be able to vote on election days.’ (Via Diane Dyson).

Maybe those of us who believe in the importance for civilisation of some things being public, and who resent the systematic erosion of that principle by the Haves, should keep a short version of this list in our pockets as a handout for those moments when we encounter these people – which is always in public space of course.

 

The cleansing of community development

The other day I attended the launch of the Church Urban Fund’s new programme called Near Neighbours. The programme will disburse central government money in small grants through local parishes. There are strong themes of cohesion and working with faith groups:

‘This fund will help local initiatives that build cross-community relationships i.e. people of different faith groups and those of no faith, working together through social action in their community to form closer relationships.’

The scheme is focused in the north of England (Bradford, Burnley and Oldham); Leicester; areas of London, and areas of Birmingham ‘which are diverse and multi-faith.’

There are already impressive stories of collective endeavour in Near Neighbours projects. Judging from conversations about the kind of project that is being funded, it’s apparent that the work that will be supported is community development work or community action. As is the fashion, the language is dominated more by the N words ‘neighbourhoods’ and ‘neighbours’ than by the C word, which is taking a breather after a really hard decade.

There is no attempt to anchor this initiative in the principles and experience of established community development. Indeed, the programme fits the emerging pattern of new community-development-that-is-not-quite-community-development –

• National funding with a local orientation, that conveniently ignores local democratic structures and roots itself in traditional philanthropic soil. People in positions of power don’t want ordinary people to be political, but stuff needs doing in society. So it’s obvious - invent and fund a de-politicised form of CD.
• A high expectation of voluntary involvement that stimulates other local voluntary involvement, which won’t (in Julian Dobson’s words) ‘frighten the horses,’ and which arguably ‘will leave most of society pretty much as it is’.  
• No allegiance to or even recognition paid to a tradition of such work, known as community development, that also acknowledges inequalities and power structures as part of the problem.

So in its humble way, the Near Neighbours programme fits tidily alongside Nesta’s Neighbourhood Challenge and the Big Lottery’s People Powered Change in the contemporary cleansing of community development.

Much good will come from this strange form of air conditioning, but you gotta wonder about what gets shut out. What happens to people who only breathe filtered air? I guess they get ill if they have to go outside.

Get used to plenty of branding but not much about process or values – and yet a form of community development will have taken place. Get used to a diet of neat success stories, and bright shiny case studies, and people in positions of power queuing up to take the credit while blessing the peasants. And yet a form of community development will have taken place.

It needs to be pointed out that any substantial CD programme with a very weak grasp of the principles and values of CD is rather vulnerable to capture, distortion and misrepresentation.

In spite of these reservations, there are several reasons why I think these programmes will be beneficial. For a start, on a superficial level, CD really did need brightening up: how did any set of practitioners who work with human beings come to be so characterised by humourlessness and dour ruggedness? Like the stereotype under which librarians suffer, it may be exaggerated but it’s there and is counter-productive.

More importantly, I don’t think any attempt to suppress the politics in CD is likely to be successful for long. I think of Marx’s well-known remark, referring to the final emergence of revolution: ‘well-burrowed old mole!’ (OK, perhaps it’s best not to dwell too closely on that analogy).

And most interestingly, what these programmes may do best is to shake up the power structures at the micro-level, more effectively than has happened before. If all the blather about ‘innovation’ can be made to mean anything, it should be about this: developing recognisably-effective relationships at local level that are independent of pre-existing power relationships. (Incidentally, if someone from the coalition government tries to tell you that that’s why they bypass local government, take a moment to examine their motives). That’s where the social media comes in, to help make processes and actions transparent: it could serve to transform the power relations between the people who get things done and the people who stop things being done.

 

 

Selective localism

The government’s localism champion, Eric Pickles, appears to have the support of the High Court for his anti-localist decision that the residents of the village of Kings Cliffe should put up with having radioactive waste dumped in the vicinity.

According to a Public Service article published just now,

'The case was seen as an example of how the government may speak of encouraging localism in one breath but in the next force communities to accept decisions that they have opposed through democratic means.'

Some of the background here. Kings Cliffe Wastewatchers site is here.

Sooner or later, those who got over-excited about localism were bound to have to face up to the fact that some decisions affecting localities have to be taken at levels beyond the most local. It didn’t seem to occur to Mr Pickles and his advisors though, so we get the rhetoric of localism when it suits them but not when it doesn’t. I hope it turns out that the government has picked a bad example here.

The neutering of community development?

It’s fair to say that a vacuum was created by the recent abrupt ending of government funding to the likes of Community Development Foundation, Community Development Exchange, and Urban Forum. From slightly to one side (the usual angle) it appears as if the Big Lottery Fund’s People Powered Change programme is swelling within that vacuum.

People Powered Change is the over-arching theme for Big’s investments in England. It encompasses a range of approaches to support and develop community action. The banner signals an intention to stimulate and facilitate local efforts to improve the quality of life in neighbourhoods, using information and various tools to multiply the benefits of community-based initiatives.

Of course, the government’s hands-off approach is unsurprising. But at a PPC event on Monday I was struck by the picture of Jim Diers and Cormac Russell from Nurture Development, at the door of No.10 Downing Street. I have no doubt that their presentation would have been inspiring and thought-provoking. Jim spoke at an event I co-organised with Shared Intelligence last year: we already know how powerfully he conveys the value and impact of community action.

As I wrote in a piece for the Guardian’s voluntary sector network, Cormac and Jim promote asset based community development (ABCD). This was heavily reinforced at the PPC meeting and it seems to fit sweetly with Big’s approach. So the question is not just whether it is enough for PPC to dominate the vacuum left by the weakening of key funded community development agencies (and to be fair I'm sure Big would welcome more agencies with clout alongside them, in that space); we should also take note that the dominant ethos is a particular brand of CD.

So what? Quite rightly, ABCD places great emphasis on the strengths, skills and resources - the assets - that exist at local level. But to do so, it seems to have to imply that established community development works from a deficit model – over-emphasising the negatives like crime, poor housing, poor health and anti-social behaviour, especially forces external to the neighbourhood. There is a strong sense that, for instance, community action should not be complaining about environmental injustice or the local fallout from a trashed economy and depleted public services. Echoes of ‘moaning minnies’?

I would argue, first, that all decent community development is asset based, not deficit based; and secondly, that there are real dangers in appearing to dismiss those who challenge external negative influences, especially at a time when we do not have strong, influential agencies promoting other CD values like equalities and genuine empowerment. I wrote:

'Good community development practice doesn't over-emphasise disadvantage and injustice; but it isn't seduced into ignoring it, and it also has the robust courage to challenge the causes. In lieu of experienced agencies promoting these values, let's hope they get reflected in the People Powered Change programme.'

I welcome the positive implications of these guys crossing the threshold of No.10 and potentially influencing thinking in there, cos that is needed. But for all the symbolism, it’s not so much a massive moment for social policy as a good time to do some thinking about the way genuine CD - let's call it 'total community development' - could be very effectively hushed.

It’s just possible that government would like to see lots of community action where people do not recognise that some of their problems are externally-determined and are the consequence of unequal and unfair policies. This is how that could come about.

 

Power and policy

Toby Blume on 'community rights':

"The greatest concern I have about the introduction of the community rights, is also my biggest fear about the whole Big Society agenda... that government seems to have very little concern about how they are taken up by different groups. Despite Big Society’s strong language on ‘placing power in the hands of those who lack it’, there is little evidence to suggest that government wishes to actually do anything about this. If you accept that power is unequal and some groups are less powerful than others (as ‘those who lack it’ suggests), then surely you must take steps to ensure that specific effort is directed to the less powerful. I cannot believe that anyone with a modicum of intellectual capability can assume that this inequality will be addressed simply by giving everybody (the powerful and the non-powerful) the same opportunity and letting them get on with it. That is patently absurd as ‘any fule kno’ (as Molesworth would say), as the powerful are, by definition, better equipped to take advantage."

 

 

What are councils for?

Why do taxpayers invest in services like education which don't help people to understand why taxpayers should invest in services?

Uncritical and uninformed condemnation of the notion of state services funded through taxation is so embedded in our society and heavily reinforced by our media, it comes as a surprise to find even a public sector broadcaster taking steps to redress the balance.

The beeb went to a street in Preston, withdrew council services for six weeks and reimbursed people with their council tax. The programme involved quite a lot of interference, juggling with the logic of relations between different public services, economies of scale, the need for expertise and adherence to the law, and so forth. The result, The street that cut everything, can be seen here for a few more days.

I will pass over the trampled ethics of powerfully invasive forces, like television and all its accoutrements, provoking disagreements between neighbours.

One of the more easy-going of the televised residents observed,'you don't realise how dark it is, do you, when you turn the lights out'. The turning-off of street lights was an eye-opener, you might say. And it helps to keep the metaphors simple. On the whole, what happened was that people came to realise the point of paying for, and the complexity of, public services, some more readily than others. The woman who says at the outset, with regard to her council tax, 'I just can't see any value for money' completely revises her opinion at the end.

Behind that, there were curiosities, like the single mother insisting 'I'm not used to relying on anybody' without acknowledging that the state support she receives might just count.

With creaky logic, although the council 'doesn't exist', the programme makers require residents to invest in other council services by volunteering their time. So we see two neighbours cleaning city centre public toilets with the poignant observation,

"If you wanna use 'em you should be prepared to clean 'em."

And why not? What is to stop us organising a rota so that council money is saved and we all contribute to the maintenance of such an essential public resource? Pragmatic democracy, anyone? The big society theorists may have been missing a trick. Start with the bogs. Has anyone done the arithmetic I wonder? Depending on population obviously, it might be a duty you'd have to carry out a couple of hours in a year. Not quite the same as jury service I know but the idea's there.

John Crace in the Guardian suggests the programme helps to explain why 'the big society is probably a doomed project':

'However much people might talk up their community credentials, when given the financial choice most are only really happy to pay for the services they believe they benefit from directly and not for those they might one day need or are required by the more vulnerable. So a civilised society depends on a state which removes that choice.'

That seems a little cynical to me. The programme summarised a social experiment, and we saw plenty of evidence of mutual support and the recognition that people have differing needs for support at different times of their lives. On the whole it avoided trivialising the issues, which is more than can be said for some of the big society rhetoric.

For me the irony is always that we invest through our taxes in an education system which leaves so few people equipped to reflect on these issues. Wouldn't it be a good idea if we all as citizens emerged from the education system appreciating the reasons for democratic structures used to take decisions on public services?

 

 

'Likely to do so locally'

The Hansard Society are launching their 2011 report today and the beeb have offered an early peep into research about attitudes to political engagement.

A quarter of us (26 per cent) are either 'apathetic' or 'alienated', with a further 35 per cent either having 'no urge to get involved' or 'not very interested in more involvement'. About 14 per cent of us are 'strongly' engaged and described in this research as interested in doing more, which probably confirms Citizenship survey and other data.

The most interesting group is categorised by Ipsos MORI as 'willing localists' - 'not actively involved but willing and likely to do so locally' (emphasis added).

The category headings sent me back to research carried out by the Henley Centre a few years ago, which suggested that more than two thirds of us are either 'community bystanders' or 'passive participators'.

The Henley Centre researchers, Michelle Harrison and Michelle Singer, categorised 16 per cent of us as 'community conscious' - which may offer an interesting comparison with the 'willing localists' in the new Hansard data.

We need to understand differences in interpretation between general prosocial engagement on the one hand, and involvement that is related to the political process, on the other. This requirement applies most of all to the political theorists who seek a cure-all innovation. Harrison and Singer describe the 'community conscious' as relatively affluent, and note:

'they feel time pressure but are not low on energy. They have a very strong belief in the values of community overall, and in a sense of community where they live. This group is disproportionately female... They organise and volunteer, and are more likely to attend church or a place of worship. They are not, however, “political”: our qualitative research did not suggest that they are any more likely to engage in local politics than their less “community focused” neighbours.'

This resonates strongly with the sense that Hugh Flouch and I got from our Online neighbourhood networks study last year, that local online networks are providing a means by which this category of people can more easily and productively get involved. And the Hansard data also seems to hint at some limits to the extent to which that involvement can be politicised.

The need is to detach the community and the civic from the political. Universal politically-driven coercive messages won't work, but stimulating the local communications ecology in the civic context could be promising. This is because, as I've said often enough, there need to be conversations about all sorts of things going on at local level before we see lasting change in some of these statsitics.

 

Social networks and informal support: the big shift for policy

It’s obvious that informal support and social networks can be critical to the way society looks after its members. When people can use their social networks to get support without going through formal agencies, there are social and economic benefits. Has the time finally come for this logic to be recognised in policy? (Image from Viil Lid).

I happen to think this is quite a big deal. I’m just back from an utterly absorbing study tour in the Netherlands, organised by my friend Jan Steyaert for researchers from the Centre for Social Justice in the UK. We were exploring policy issues around the changing nature of social care in the post-welfare society, and Eindhoven is replete with thought-provoking initiatives and articulate people who have been reflecting on the significant shifts implied for practitioners and citizens. I tagged along to make wonky observations in the background, a role to which I seem to be peculiarly suited.

The basis of lots of urgent fresh thinking is the 2007 Social Support Act (known as the Wmo) which requires a shift in care work and social work towards what is known as ‘welfare new style’. Of course, as in the UK and elsewhere, much of this is driven by the mismatch between increasing care costs and shrinking public funds; but here, unlike with big society, there is immediate and valuing recognition of people's pre-existing connections.

The main points that dominated discussion of Dutch care practice were these:

• Focus on the strengths and resources of the individual, not on their problems
• Map, stimulate and involve the individual’s social network as a key resource
• Emphasise collective rather than individual support solutions
• Use professional care is a ‘last resort’.

I think this is both radical and exemplary. Quite apart from the community development principle of bringing collective solutions into the frame, here we have at last got governmental justification for stimulating social networks, with policy makers pushing care agencies of all kinds to pay due attention to people’s social connections. For example, one disability adviser who visits people with particular needs begins with a conversation based on a simple social network mapping template. Expect to see rapid standardisation of social network mapping in the Dutch public sector.

No-one seemed to know how the idea came so marvellously to be given such primacy, but here it is. And the logic is straightforward. For a long time it has been apparent that formal care is too dominant, has unacknowledged negative effects, and is provided at unaffordable levels. Ergo, we need to recognise and invest in informal support; ergo, we need to emphasise and encourage social networks – especially at local level. Why has this not happened before or elsewhere? Is it because we don’t make measureable claims for the part played by social networks, because we can’t see the results? Is it because no budget gets attached to them, so no-one with influence wants to ‘own’ them? Incidentally, this is not about consigning professional care to insignificance, but about re-establishing an appropriate balance between formal and informal.

In theory the Wmo seems to use the term ‘informal care’ with reference mainly to long term intensive carers. But the term seemed also to be used to imply what we might call informal support, thus covering a broad spectrum from low-commitment, dip-in dip-out five minute neighbouring; through something regular perhaps like weekly shopping with or for a frail elderly person; to high-intensity 24x7 unpaid care for someone with physical disabilities. This breadth of meaning may reflect developments in thinking since the act, and would account for the emphasis on social networks.

One advice worker rationalised the process by saying that as a society,

‘We have to go back to normal and look after each other.’

And so philosophical and anthropological questions about ‘community’ get raised. On what scale and under what circumstances is it 'normal' to provide informal support to others? The nostalgic plea doesn’t work very well, I suggest: some people challenge the mythology of the close-knit community, others point to the downsides and the basis in necessity neighbouring, and so on. Against that, we need some basis on which to establish the levels of trust that can in turn give rise to useable network connections.

An acknowledged problem for the Dutch approach is that many people are reluctant to ask for support, to make claims on their social network, to invest in their social network or exploit it for such purposes. One observation we heard was that in some cases ‘the social network is broken’. Another story concerned an individual who appeared at first to have no appropriate sources of support, then when they went out onto the street with the social worker there was plenty of recognition by others and the individual acknowledged,

‘yes of course I have a network, but I didn’t want the network to know my situation’.

We heard about this on several occasions and in particular in the significant research of Lilian Linders – which I happen to know a little about and which I will describe in a separate post in the near future.

 

 

Informal volunteering continues to decline

I missed this when it came out a month ago but it's worth going back to. We now have Citizenship survey figures for informal volunteering for the first half of the present year (April - September) and the decline ought to be of real concern to policy makers.

Over a year ago I pointed out a five per cent decline within the space of a year. The proportion saying that they volunteer informally at least once per month is now down to 27 per cent; and once per year, 54 per cent. These compare with 37 per cent and 68 per cent respectively in the bumper year of 2005. I devised this chart from data supplied in Table 5 here.

I've suggested before that this trend might just be a bit critical in terms of care for older people. I'm writing this in the plush comfort of the night ferry (yes, free reliable wifi) on my way back from an insightful study visit to the Netherlands. Two intensive days of learning have clarified the argument for me sharply. The Dutch are well in front of us: their Social Support Act (2007) has led to a radical emphasis on informal support and social networks, which I want to cover in my next post.

Moving unconsciously in the same direction

The other day I wrote a little about arrogance and power. This evening we had a masterful display from Hosni Mubarak, an awesome example of the patronising superior stupidity of someone inexcusably detached from ordinary life.

Exceptional though his bizarre, tasteless speech was in that particular quality, its basics are hardly unfamiliar. The tone is not much different to what we are accustomed to from Westminster and many of our town halls: I know best, I have the power, you are young and enthusiastic, jolly well done in that respect, and it's nice to think about change, gosh yes quite right, but not just now.

The style is characterised by patronising half-compliment, damning with faint praise, miserably-minor concessions, ignoring the real issues, selective deafness, and measured encouragement to keep on keeping on for the common cause - but on status quo terms, otherwise there could be recriminations, I think you know what I mean.

More than once I have heard the same tone of unjustifiable, in-the-face-of-reason arrogance from the chair of a community group or residents' association, from a housing officer, once I remember from a senior council officer who thought she could play politics with everyone.

How does this come about? Scientists, help us: where is the disempowering gene, can it be isolated? What is it in humans that drives them to demean others in this pathetic and incendiary way? What is it about arrogant people in power that fails to stop them behaving like History's Total Dickheads?

I want to ask, is it really necessary to be detached from the everyday to have power? If you attain power, do you have to sever ties with the ordinary? Why? What could be more inapproriate?

And let's just note that, as with the London disturbances in December, this is a network society moment. A moment focused by the democratising lens of technologies, with people able to network together in a way which is no longer inferior to the networking power of the Haves. One BBC correspondent said of the people in Tahrir Square,

'This is the twitter generation, they know what's going on.'

Other comments I heard on the BBC's coverage:

'What matters in this is the street, the people on the street... These young people are too smart...'

Of Mubarak's inner circle: 'They don't know what democracy is'.

And from within the crowd, the crowd itself described as 'Moving unconsciously in the same direction'.

 

'Communities! Seize your opportunities!'

I try not to be negative all the time, honestly, but these are strange times. Here's an unfortunate post on the ResPublica blog which exemplifies the peculiar cultural gap in understanding that divides the country. Matt Leach comes straight out and admits that big society is top-down: but version 2.0 is emerging which will be - wait for it -

'the start of a transfer of responsibility for mobilising and leading the project from central government downward to our neighbourhoods and communities.'

Stand well back, here comes big society 2.0 (or 'Big Society' as these people like to frame it: the initial capitals presumably intended to give some cred just in case it struggles to merit it).

It strikes me that version 2.0 will probably accelerate the tendency to retrospective or lateral branding. Expect more desperate or subtle attempts (like this one previously) to capture and badge 'initiatives like Lambeth's Co-operative Council, emerging plans around housing in Rochdale...' as evidence of big soc.

Among the give-away remarks in the article - Big Soc Two Dot Nought, we are told, is going to be

'an open source project defined by the extent to which communities are willing to seize the opportunities available.'

I know it's just one throw-away piece of weak rhetoric but it does exemplify the problem I think. It's not nice to accuse people of arrogance but when they are in a position of influence it may be justified. I'm prepared to believe that much of BS thinking was conceived with good intentions and it's not all consciously politically manipuated. But are we to expect that 'thought leaders' will get any less arrogant in version 2.0?

I've spent enough time over the past 25 years on the edge of London think-tanks, and in quite a few meetings in Westminster, in addition to time spent listening to people in community groups in various places around the country and beyond - people tryng to do stuff themselves against the odds. Those 'odds' don't just include overly-bureaucratic local government. They also include deeply-embedded class-based 'us-and-them' language breathed night and day by people in positions of power. We are the officer class, we govern, it's a tremendous responsibility you know. Your role is to be, well er, energetic, when we finally get the conditions right for you.

The lesson I'm finally having to accept is that arrogance is inevitably found in positions of power and doesn't know itself. Anyone who can write 'the extent to which communities are willing to seize the opportunities available' without self-parody is so manifestly part of the problem, perhaps we just have to be patient until they go away.

 

'In there, or out here'

On one of my favourite themes, gated communities, check out another little gem from babycakesromero...

'You're looking to come into a non-gated community, so unless you can show me proof of residency for out here, I can't let you proceed...'

Big society debate video

Back in October I took part in a debate about big society at the Battle of Ideas (short account here) and a video has now been published. My five min chunk starts here. Plenty of interesting stuff in the discussion.

Other BoI debates here.

Inactive democracy was always a bad idea: street reps and new forms of governance

I spent the whole of yesterday afternoon in a traditional oak panelled, leather-benched council chamber in Shipley, Yorkshire, with a group of practitioners discussing their work with street reps across the district.

Symbolically, the room was dilapidated and its pomp had been subjected to un-ceremonial uses. Conceptually, the meeting served to accentuate the anachronistic surroundings, exposing many of the issues of our accelerating transition from the age of authority. If not perhaps a defining moment, certainly a moment for defining. (The pic is Blackburn Town Hall, not Shipley, which is similar but the seating is red).

The immediate cause was to review some community development work carried out by Groundwork in various neighbourhoods. But for the area neighbourhood management coordinators and street wardens sat round, it was mainly just another meeting working out how to tweak detail, and exploring the raw niceties of probable futures – fewer staff, less resources, recession-hit residents with accumulating problems. Several of those present probably do not know if they will have a job in three months’ time, and yes, emergency exit strategies were mentioned.

But still it felt like a privilege to be there, because I’ve been witnessing the ungainly, messy emergence of the new order.

Discussions about the role of street reps, as I’ve suggested before, are about adjusting the relationship between citizen and state, with an emphasis on co-production; understanding a less formal, more everyday kind of democratic action-in-place; about resisting attempts to formalise and prescribe what people do but supporting them in doing it; acknowledging that targets and performance measurement are at best unhelpful and inappropriate; that networks not organisations are the key but that you can’t make them accountable, and so on. It’s a whole sticky messy tangle of contemporary theoretical policy spaghetti…

These are the kinds of issues that exercise the minds of political theorists and people in think tanks right now - and people who, can you imagine, are not embarrassed to be called ‘thought leaders’ - who are looking at screens or reading reports but not listening to folk like these in rooms like this in towns like this. Thought leaders my arse.

So I listened and was able to appreciate that behaviour change needs local exemplars, plenty of nurturing by local practitioners, and lots of time: just like community development. What these practitioners are trying to do, in some pretty downtrodden localities, is to help networks develop which have credence and weight but do not become cliques, which are open and reflect an informal participative democracy based on local people’s interests. What these practitioners are trying to do is exactly what this government would like and what it needs to understand.

Some of the issues for practitioners are old familiar tensions of course, like whether the politics of intervention are broadly universalising (as typically under Tory councils) or targeted (as under Labour authorities). The question is as sharp as ever when it comes to resources for supporting street reps. Should street wardens be equally involved in more affluent areas? In such places, someone claimed yesterday, if people want something done they just pick up the phone. The Place Survey and Citizenship Survey data can show us, in general terms, where people feel least empowered. So if resources are targeted at the least affluent areas, how does that change perceptions of the role of street reps? In my view, we do it because it’s not healthy for society to have significant imbalances of power.

Against that, it’s worth remembering that when I asked experienced street reps, who had been attending area forum and housing committee meetings and so on, whether they felt they could influence decisions, the answer was a clear ‘no’. People felt they could influence actions, but they could see that the process of decision-making was hidden from them, because of course it doesn’t really happen in the meetings. Especially not when they’re in attendance.

Arguments like these have always run through community development practice, but I want to suggest that discussions about street reps offer a remarkable lens on the new order. And I was full of admiration for the way this mix of staff kept probing for ways to help local people support each other and improve their local quality of life, because schemes have to be made to work in the space between budget and politics, between residents’ energy and capacity, and allocated support.

Inactive democracy was always a bad idea. I wonder if we will look back in 10 years’ time over a transformed conceptual landscape of local social relations and governance, and recognise this awkward work for its nervous, principled clearing of the ground. And what will the council chamber be being used for?

Searching for a culturally unifying notion

Along comes a recession, and maybe the political advantage goes to the first to come up with a compelling and uniting conceptual framework. Except, 'big society' hasn't quite engrossed or convinced enough of us. OK keep thinking.

Here's a new collection of papers (via Will Davies) about associational democracy, asking questions about approaches to governance and economics that can 'increase the flow of information, accountability, trust, inclusion, choice, as well as enable individual empowerment and freedom.' And noting in passing that part of the problem is that

'we have become too constrained by an individualised, abstract and largely economistic set of beliefs and practices. So how can we become more collaborative and human, to improve our wellbeing, increase the effectiveness of what we do and manage the processes and tensions of both desired as well as unavoidable change?'

(More useful stuff about la vie associative and associationalism on the Infed site here).

I wonder whether searching for some all-encompassing culturally unifying ensign is ever again likely to be fruitful. Where it seems to work in its own terms ('God Bless America') its consequences seem, er, questionable at best. Big society won't be the last ever attempt of its kind, because we humans don't give up so easily, but it could be that western civilisation has outgrown that sort of large-scale cohesion. Ah of course, what we need is a culturally integrating notion that accommodates the sense of cultural disintegeration (or diversity, if you prefer). 'Small society' could be a good starting point. Let's see what happens.

 

Informed and willing participation

Last week I mentioned the government's 'barrier busting' initiative designed to free-up local action. Now the National Association for Neighbourhood Management have published their idea for a 'liability waiver form', drafted in the summer, which is

intended to make it easier for people to undertake practical but informal activities which involve some kind of potential hazard and where an owner of land or equipment is concerned about the risk of claims of liability against them.

NANM describe it as

a way to help people get on and do things like mow a grass verge, clear a patch of derelict ground, or… (like the folks in Longlevens in Gloucestershire – see below) help clear the snow and ice.   It is loosely based on what you’d sign to hire a mountain bike or go paintballing and basically says “we’ve chosen to do what we’re doing, there might be a small risk, but we won’t pin the blame anyone if we get hurt”.

If you make use of it or have some comments, tell the good folk at NANM.

 

How the government is encouraging people to get more involved in politics

Some observations on yesterday's news. It's about information, poverty and power.

First, I was struck by the extent to which the government's bullying of the BBC has pushed it to the right. BBC TV coverage of events in Westminster was almost devoid of any attempt to analyse why protestors were angry. The BBC has become afraid to say anything that might upset the authorities. Luckily for them, they had a couple of over-paid celebrities to get excited about. (Incidentally, it obviously wasn't just students, there were other citizens protesting. It suits the establishment to explain the protests as just young people being over-exuberant).

I'm perplexed though at the lack of attention paid to the abandonment of education maintenance allowance (EMA), which is a proven way of supporting young people from low income families who want to stay in education. Secretary of State Vince Cable described EMA as 'enormously wasteful'. Well, it helps poor people with the objective of trying to equalise opportunity, so why would this government want to fund it? The arrogance and complacency seem impregnable. And they're surprised that people are angry.

We don't get many opportunities to be proud to be British (and frankly I don't look for them) but yesterday sort-of counts. While Wikileaks has left most of America apparently supine in acceptance of the arrogant stupidity of its bullying powermongers, in London people have come out and shown the politicians and authorities that their stupidity is unacceptable. I use the word 'unacceptable' because the Haves have been queuing up to use that word with reference to yesterday's street performances. And I use the word 'stupidity' with reference to leaders in the US and UK who have completely failed to grasp the role of new communications media in these confrontations. It's laughable how the establishment feels that the old hierarchies built on hierarchical communication systems (most obviously the bible and the pulpit, but by extension the analog divide generally) can still be depended on to keep people in their places.

Yes, the old question 'why do we have such stupid people in power?' applies as forcefully as ever, but it's gratifying that ethical hacking globally, and the use of google maps to outwit the police in central London, are exposing the powermongers' attempts to deny social justice.

One of the tenets of community development is that nothing succeeds like adversity, and this is shown to apply at the national scale. Sometimes in community development we are disappointed at people's reluctance to get worked up about things; sometimes we are taken by surprise at the vehemence of the response. I count myself among those who have been surprised, and refreshed, at the sudden and fierce discovery of readiness to take political action. It has value which is increasing in proportion to the declining credibility of those in government.

 

How the government is helping young people to learn about community organising

For a long time it puzzled me that my kids and most of their peers grew up a-political. Now I realise I was not being very bright about it. For a start, I needed to turn the reflection around: it was probably as much that politics was 'a-young-people'.

And, as I suddenly realised while reading a marvellous, passionate article by Suzanne Moore in today's Guardian, for a long time they didn't have a cause of their own. For myself and my brothers and some friends, as we bemoaned our youngsters' apparent disinterest, it feels in retrospect like we expected them to take up other causes, which is not necessarily an easy route to early political awareness.

Moore writes of excitement and energy in the current student protests. No surprise that, as she says,

'these kids are able to quickly organise new kinds of creative chaos'.

And as we'd expect, the learning they are going through is invaluable:

'These people have discovered the politics of self-organisation quickly. Some of what was going on was the painfully slow but necessary business of process. How does such a diverse group make rules for itself?'

What interests me even more is the sophistication of their disquiet: it does not seem to be raw anger or outrage - the kind of last-ditch, backs-to-the-wall desperation that characterised the miners' strike for instance.

What seems to be happening is a calculated rejection of the kind of political attitude - imitated across the country by the embarrassing complacency of the Haves - that has no qualms in dumping ordinary people perceived to be incapable of organising their own resistance. In some ways the students' resistance is perverse, in that there is nothing anarchic about it:

'their main contention is wanting access to state institutions.'

We are being governed by two political leaders who exude contempt for anyone not swimming in the mainstream, and seem ignorant of the risks of their lofty disdain. If Moore is right and young people make the clearest demonstration that this politics is morally unacceptable, I for one will find it very inspiring.

And it would be pleasing if in a few years' time we can look back at today's learning about the organisation of resistance as providing the platform for a revitalisation of community politics. That would resonate sweetly with the rhetoric of big society.

 

A crisis of volunteer management?

Yesterday I was at a conference in which representatives from the voluntary sector in south London were seeking understanding about big society. Today I was at something quite different - the launch of a substantial paper on poverty and social exclusion in later life by the Centre for Social Justice.

On both occasions I was struck by a clear common sub-theme in the discussion: people involved in the management and support of volunteers are getting very agitated as their work is getting hacked away and its validity seems not even to be debated.

What seems to be happening is that public sector funding cuts are eroding systematic management of the volunteer force rapidly. This is consistent which what some people see as the big society ethos: process hardly seems to matter any more. Big society isn't bothered how stuff happens, as long as people get out there and do it. Against that, volunteer managers speak from experience when they insist that volunteers need management, support, regulation, training and so on.

I think it's fair to say that a significant proportion of the volunteer force comes from the traditional conservative philanthropic base, not from community action so there's an interesting new political take on this.

But having railed against the over-formalisation of human and social systems for years, even I am starting to feel a little queasy about the wild ride we're all going to have as the free-for-all involvement culture takes over.

Discussing big society without using the words 'big society'

A couple of days ago someone posted this note on the East Dulwich Forum (a very popular local site which covers an area in south London):

sweep your own leaves, clean your own ice and snow: saving the council money balancing the budget

Posted by ataubin November 14, 04:48PM

At the Community Council Meeting on 10 November at St Faith's we were told Southwark has to cut 80 million from its budget. But where? What if we make East Dulwich a trial, a model for community (tiny) action that saves mega bucks? If every one sweeps the leaves and clears the ice and snow from the 8 metres in front of their property the council would save up to 10 million pounds. Yes, you read that correctly: 10 million if everyone did it. Seems a small action to me to save a lot of money. In an entire year it might take one hour? two?. No leaf blowers, no trucks. 10 million saved...

The sequence of responses encapsulates a number of the standard responses to big society, including for example -

The Perverse-Logic rejection:

'there would need to be a shed load of money spent to advertise this so people knew they had to'

(which seems to deny the power of the local online network itself to do this bit for nothing).

The Naive-Detection-of-Fatal-Flaw parry:

'Great idea and no problem doing it but my street has quite a lot of older people living on it. Would they be expected to clear up? If they don't then how will it work with half the street clear and the rest not?'

The I-Couldn't-Possibly-Where-Are-The-Servants? riposte (not for the novice, a difficult niche genre this one but supremely performed here):

'I don't mean to be unhelpful but I own neither broom nor shovel (dustpan and brush aside). Having traversed the mulchy leaves in frippantly high heels, I know this is a task that needs doing, but I'm afraid my tools are not fit for purpose.'

The We're-So-Rubbish-In-This-Country-Other-Places-Do-It-Better standard proclamation:

'In Germany and parts of the US and Canada you have to clear the path in front of your house of snow by law.'

The Informative-Intervention by a ward councillor:

'The Snow code highlights good practice to clear snow from pavements and paths such that you can avoid being successfully sued - which is a commonly given reason for people saying why they haven't cleared the pavement outside their home.'

The Calm-Sensible-Intervention by same:

'Their (sic) will never be enough council employees to clear all pavements outside homes - hundreds of kilometres of pavements.
But if residents clear the pavement outside their home the effects of the snow would be dramatically reduced. This really helps reduce peoples isolation.'

The Defence-Of-Jobs-Above-All-Else deflection:

'I presume more people would be made unemployed by this thus money would have to be spent supporting them and their families?'

The Completely-Miss-The-Point-Damnd-If-I-Will blurting-out (exquisitely executed in this example):

'Considering the amount of council tax we pay I personally wont be sweeping any leaves or clearing ice from the streets or taking part in any other activity that is supposedly covered by my paying of council tax.'

And the Thin-End-Of-The-Wedge kneejerk:

'How far do we go with this? Self-policing? That would save billions!'

Ooops, I nearly overlooked this -

The Timid-Reassertion-Of-The-Basic-Idea:

'But if we all did our bit in sweeping leaves, clearing snow etc that can be regarded as a physical, non financial, contribution to the local area that avoids an increase in local taxes. As an added benefit we might get to know our neighbours, help out th elderly who were unable to sweep / clear and perhaps as an added bonus everyone would take a little more civic pride intheir immediate vicinity.'

 

'Local solutions to local problems'?

Weather's turning cold, time for a precautionary draught of Kev's Traditional Grumpy Old Cynicism.

Among the happy-clappy mantras trotted out so readily in the present policy context is this one: 'local solutions to local problems'. As with 'there is no money' and 'we're all in this together', all a politician has to do is regurgitate this and shake a few hands, and apparently-intelligent beings fold away like reeds before the prow.

I observe that a lot of poverty that can be witnessed today is experienced as a local problem, well it would be wouldn't it, to which people are not able to find a local solution. Cos there's this thing called the economy, and it doesn't simply operate at the local level.

Or you might not like to think about poverty, so let's take transport. Major roads affect traffic flows indirectly causing damage in local areas, which sometimes local people are powerless to do much about. There may be a regional solution, but often not a local one. And so on.

It's not a new observation, even on this blog. Five years ago I posted some thoughts on neighbourhood governance after a meeting at which the point was made that residents in a given locality have to be able to intervene at levels other than their own. And I noted that people were uncomfortable with the requirement to have neighbourhood boundaries defined in order to ensure representation and therefore accountability.

Well well, plus ca change. The recent Local growth white paper includes the idea for 'neighbourhood plans' - around boundaries that the government doesn't want to have the responsibility for deciding. Here at para 3.9 is the stated intention of

giving every neighbourhood the chance to shape its own development through the creation of neighbourhood plans, which will give local communities greater flexibility and the freedom to bring forward more development than set out in the local authority plan.

'The freedom to bring forward more development'? Who are these people comprising 'neighbourhoods' who are so determined to surround themselves with more development? Could there be a connection with this point made by Domenic Donatantonio on the Planning blog? -

in a bid to scythe through red tape, the government has said it will provide incentives to ensure that local communities benefit from development, raising the dangerous spectre of cash payments to buy off frustrated neighbours.

And here's Huw Morris on Planning daily in the second of two provocative articles (the previous one is here):

For planners, the big number from the big society will come with the onset of neighbourhood plans. The final bill for these as yet unproven tools depends on the size and shape of each authority.

However, the cost of producing each neighbourhood plan is likely to be at least £30,000, while some commentators put it at closer to £80,000. Another estimate puts the number of rural and urban neighbourhoods affected by the localism bill at 18,000.

Even on the most conservative estimates, this suggests £540 million will be needed to secure national coverage. At a stroke, planning could be transformed from an income stream into a big spending service.

If such figures are plucked out of the air, this is inevitable. The government has failed to offer any kind of cost-benefit analysis of its proposals. However worthy the principles and visions of a particular policy, such a lacuna in an age of austerity is staggering. It is just the type of oversight that leads to unintended and damaging consequences.

I submit that there's been some naive policy thinking which will lead to tears. It's not helped by thinking of 'communities' as some kind of 'here's-one-I-prepared-earlier' consensus, nor by pretending that local problems are necessarily going to have local solutions.

To me, it makes sense to invest in community development that is geared to helping people work towards consensus in decision-making contexts in the respected and respectful company of professionals; and also to equalise genuine participation, co-design and co-delivery through the area and regional forums that will remain necessary in order for people to have a say in decisions on a wider geographical scale than the neighbourhood.

 

Philanthropy, community action and 'economic activity'

In the debate at yesterday's launch of nef's paper on big society there was a lot of confusion about philanthropy, mutual aid and community action. Each of these at some point seemed to be implied by speakers and comments from the floor in using the short-hand but inadequate term 'charities' (or 'small charities'); and sometimes covered by the term 'volunteers'.

Each of these forms of involvement tries to compensate for the shortfall in formal support or otherwise complement the role of the state, and is assumed to be unpaid. However, they may differ very markedly - in political ideology for example and obviously in the degree to which they aspire to empower or in practice disempower. It's also obvious that they are unevenly distributed in localities across the country. As I've suggested before, in some places it will be relatively easy to mobilise philanthropic volunteering while in others it could prove very hard to sustain even the proudest tradition of mutual aid.

Guardian Society editor Patrick Butler was the only one to come close to unpacking this in his short talk, sending me back to a seminal paper by Gabriel Chanan called Taken for granted, published in 1991.

Taken for granted was important because it revealed the distinction between volunteering based on a philanthropic tradition (ie something which comes from the surplus that 'well-motivated people' donate to others who they see as less fortunate than themselves); and community action which arises from people's own life-support needs, being

occupied in looking after children, elderly people, sometimes people with disabilities, and in doing the whole range of unpaid work which is taken for granted in the running of society - cooking, shopping, cleaning, maintaining social networks, 'emotional housekeeping', protecting local interests and the many other forms of essential activity which we take for granted as the basis for our common existence.

Gabriel went much further, locating the cause of the confusion over the community and voluntary sectors in the economic value placed on unpaid work:

All this tends to confirm the conventional definition of economic activity and to reinforce the image of the 'inactive' half of the population as being passive dependents of the 'active' half.

Sounds sort-of familiar. Twenty years on, here we are contemplating a forced revision of that conventional definition of economic activity against a cacophony of complaints about the economically 'inactive'. It's not a good time to be blurring our understanding of the different agents who can bring about that revision.

Patrick Butler warned yesterday of the possibility that before too long

'many of the charities that the big society will rely on will be dead, dying or missing in action.'

This brings an urgency to the necessary examination of that word 'charities', and perhaps we have to move the big society emphasis away from philanthropy that disempowers, to mutual aid and community action that drives and makes possible the development of skills, confidence, trust, tolerance, co-production, and local economies that include caring.

 

Big soc, good soc?

I took part in a debate, ‘Is the big society the good society?’ yesterday at the Battle of Ideas, alongside Councillor Steve Reed and Jim Panton.

 
Here’s a tidied up summary of what I said.

I see big society as a brand, which wraps together some general motherhood-and-apple-pie progressive ideas about the citizen and state with which few of us would disagree. I don’t imply that it’s empty or necessarily misleading or corrupt. I think it’s a smart piece of idea-management and I’m curious as to how Labour party thinkers are feeling, since they had most of the components – including smaller state, according to one persuasive view yesterday - but failed to put them together into a package.

The key effect of the branding process is to have got people talking about broad cultural change in a positive way. There’s a great deal to be said for that, although the debate has probably not been as extensive beyond Westminster as those within shouting distance might like to believe.

I offered some quick points by way of critique, beginning by referring to the point quoted by Will Davies that we live in a society ‘in which massive gains are privatised and massive losses are socialised’. The financial crisis illustrates why this is so stupid. Big society doesn't even address it.

Much of what is described in big society rhetoric implies consensus within localities by use of the C word. It’s as if the country is parcelled into neatly delimited neighbourhoods, populated by like-minded people who are ready to reach agreement on what needs to be done, and who have the time and energy to get on and do it. It’s not healthy that we have politicians who are so ready to elide the realities of life at local level that they see ‘communities’ as unified structures, there to be consulted and acted upon. It’s patronising to people to expect or require them all to think and act alike. (I’m indebted here to Jeremy Brent).

I like the idea that big society is not about trying to do more with less, it’s about doing more with more – the extra energy resulting from galvanising civic involvement. That’s powerful and it's what community development does.

So will this new civic energy be evenly distributed? No. Some localities will continue to experience a shortfall. Do we have the strategies for dealing with that unevenness? Not as far as I’m aware. Is it even recognised at policy level? Not as far as I’m aware.

Again, within localities, the distribution of civic power and the new influence over resources will be uneven. Because communities are not cohesive units constructed for the convenience of politicians, sense of community in a given place tends to be dominated by some groups to the exclusion of others – adults denying space and audience to young people being the classic example. That phenomenon is likely to be accentuated under big society.

I offered a few thoughts about the proposed army of 5,000 community organisers - the leading of the five thousand as I call it. I suggested a few days ago that the notion of community organising under big society is going to be pretty much value-free. That bothers me a little. The values that underpin community development aren't just chantable mantras: you have to live and breathe them or you will be found out, I promise you.

Big society presents new permissions in citizens’ relations with local government. It seems to give residents explicit permission to bash council officers for not doing what they want them to do; but it also gives officers permission to say, ‘well ok if that’s what you want, go do it yourself’.

My view (expressed previously) is that ‘rolling back the state’ polarises those for whom it will be alright and those for whom it won’t be. Those who experience exclusion start with no options. I think it is false to imply that by making the state smaller you will automatically reveal a big society.

Everyone will have examples of community sector initiatives under threat. I offered an example of a local resource centre I know which has a reputation for the work it does far beyond the town it serves. They receive a grant of £8k from the council, and like a lot of such grant recipients they get bullied in subtle or overt ways by their council. Because they’re smart with SROI, they can show that they generate £86k of services. I’d take that, wouldn’t you? They are now being faced with a 50% or 100% cut in their grant.

So what I want to ask is this: how are people expected to react as they see their own community sector initiatives, developed over years of unrecognised and unrewarded effort, with lessons absorbed, experience shared and efficiencies gained - initiatives which apparently are consistent with big society principles - being wiped out by public sector funding cuts?

I fear we are going to see a stark division between those localities where new civic energy is going to emerge, and those where people are exhausted and energy is depleted. No prizes for guessing the class divide that represents.

 

A historical moment for community development?

So today it has been announced that Community Development Foundation 'will cease to operate as a public body as of 31st March 2011.' It will continue as a charity. There have doubtless been numerous discussions of the news in a context that acknowledges, first, that CDF had become primarily an agency for disbursing government funds, and their market collapsed; and secondly that in focusing on that role the organisation quickly lost its claim in many people's eyes to be an expert CD agency.

I received the news electronically while sat in a Big Lottery meeting about community organising - ironically, in groupwork discussing communication issues in relation to community organising. I was only able to attend a couple of hours of the meeting but some thoughts struck me then about the nature of this historical moment for CD.

The moment is partly defined by being a few days away from a hugely influential government spending review; partly by the rhetoric of Big Society and its call for millions of people to plunge joyfully into enticing, tranquil pools of community action - hopefully not discovering that there are vicious political eddies and currents, and corrosive contamination beneath the surface, god forbid; and partly by the unfinished business of the empowerment of local groups in determining what happens on their patch.

Today Big Lottery brought together some expertise and experience with a view to informing their future funding programmes. I found three related things to bother me.

First, one speaker, explaining her part as an externally-funded, imported 'community champion', said that her role included challenging 'the negative attitudes of doubters and spoilers'. Meaning, I fear, this: if someone externally appointed comes into your neighbourhood and drives a programme of action with high expectations that you will go along with it, and you choose to raise concerns about the process, then your response is unwelcome and you are likely to be labelled as a doubter or spoiler at best and ungovernable at worst. The process will ride over you AND it will still be called community development. (I may have wrongly interpreted this specific case but it's hardly unheard-of). The easy dismissal of counter views can be very disempowering.

Secondly, I'm bothered about the coercion of people in the community development process. The morality of coercion is not trivial and must be acknlowledged. One of the best community workers I ever met admitted yes, we do coerce people. Because life is short, and you make a judgement about what would be in their best interests, and there isn't always time to wait for them and work with them to appreciate the options...

There is a flurry of urgent interest in community organising to compensate for an economy that has failed its public sector; and we risk losing our appreciation of the nuances of how and on what terms people decide to get involved. We risk finding ourselves in a value-free zone of community action which discourages contestation of issues.

And finally - very briefly cos I feel like a broken record on this - persistent repetition of the C word does not mean that a bunch of people who happen to live in the same area necessarily constitute a 'community', nor should the unreflective use of that word be allowed to imply consensus without challenge. Enough on that.

Government is encouraging community development but has stopped funding what was previously its expert CD agency. The meaning of this moment may turn out to be that community development must come of age, by insisting on its values, being honest about the difficult nuances required when encouraging local people to participate, and not denying the realities of conflict and disagreement.

 

Community development and Small State

'Big Society' is an imposed brand and for me gives rise to the same sort of resistance that a commercial advertising campaign would generate. But those who claim that it is nothing more than branding are not quite right. In spite of the coalition's coyness about policy, there have been policy assertions and it's appropriate to examine them. CDF's Mel Bowles has rolled up her sleeves and done just that from a community development perspective, in a measured, questioning recent paper available (if barely discoverable) on the CDX site.

She quite rightly highlights the distinction between politicised and non-politicised community work. Community organisers under Small State will not be expected to support local people in fighting to protect or gain access to existing services:

‘Neighbourhood groups will be expected to develop (additional or alternative) public services and bid to provide them... Community organisers – and others – will be expected to support them to do so. The policy context requires intermediaries... to refocus their attention on developing new community groups that are willing and able to develop and deliver public services…’

She goes on to note that:

‘none of the policy material to emerge thus far addresses the extent to which community organiser support should focus on bringing people from different backgrounds together or on supporting vulnerable citizens and groups to get involved.’

Discussing opportunities for CD, the paper concludes that social action in the context of Small State looks likely to involve 'hybrids of community groups, social entrepreneurs, public services and private contractors overseen by citizens, as well as local governments’.

And among the challenges, the big one:

‘ensuring active citizens are not solely providing services, but are also able to make demands upon authority and power.’

Which reminds me, back in April before the election, I wrote:

'start from the recognition that community action is fundamentally, insecapably political, and get used to it. Attempts to depoliticise it will be self-defeating and may lead to a revival of confrontational radicalism';

and Julian Dobson wrote:

'If we want community activity that won't frighten the horses and will leave most of society pretty much as it is, and will give you social action without having to worry about social justice, this kind of set-up may be a good bet. Those who want more substantial change may well find themselves suffocated in such a network.'

Which in turn invites the familiar point that much of the debate about Small State has taken place in the blogosphere, none of it included in Mel's cited sources. We continue to see two literatures on public policy, the traditional one ignoring the upstart.

 

 

Bigging-up the local

Public sector funding cuts and the Big Society rhetoric, taken together as they must be, seem to be about weakening local government while strengthening citizen involvement and influence in the resulting vacuum.

Is it the expectation that most of the increased involvement and co-production will happen at local authority level rather than at neighbourhood level? I’m not sure we know enough about the differences, but it’s fair to say that a huge amount of informal co-production has always gone on at neighbourhood level, overlooked by and sometimes in spite of government policy.

Once within the local authority area, it’s curious how policy doesn’t seem to have much purchase, the closer it gets to your home. I’m referring to what I tend to call the neighbourhood (in my case just fourteen units): sometimes called the micro-neighbourhood, or in the seminal Shaping neighbourhoods by Hugh Barton and colleagues, the ‘home patch’ (population 20-200).

I have no idea whether that will change in the months and years after the forthcoming Localism Bill, but don’t be surprised if this is where a lot of harsh skirmishes get fought out and where the weak will be abandoned. As public services begin to wither, localities will start to vary enormously according to the amount of self-investment they manage to mobilise. This will be a real challenge for the ways in which we address inequalities.

There are no clues in the CLG ‘structural reform plan’ as to the varied nature of ‘local’. Under the objective ‘Make localism and the Big Society part of everyday life – by increasing accountability’ (para 4.5) the government plan mentions promoting power to ‘community groups’. But unfortunately the subheadings make no further mention of such groups. [Pity the busy officials, we don’t know how many, at their desks, drafting away. Dang, what did I do with those community groups? Dunno, they were there a moment ago. Oh well]. Community groups tend to take their justification from the larger neighbourhood or district, and have impact at the most local level, so it maybe matters that they are kept in the equation.

Traditionally of course, policy works at a scale where its impact is at the wider area level – through transport, policing, planning, health services, environmental services and so on. These services are then expected to reach down into the neighbourhood, and of course some do, to great effect, or they interact with community sector agencies which do so. But often they fail to get near. Will the new localism manage to get closer?

Some of the language can be deceptive. Take ‘safer neighbourhood teams’, part of the extended happy family of policing. While the officers are active in various neighbourhoods they may not come from any of them, and have to work at establishing connections with residents. Or take the misnomer of ‘primary care’. I think it was Marilyn Waring who countered that most primary care is delivered by mothers in the home. I would argue that most primary care is delivered by individuals to themselves or their families. For sure, there is a consistently identifiable level of health care – including community nursing - which comes before the level where we travel 2.5 miles to the nearest clinic.

So the new politics of Small State requires a more nuanced understanding of what constitutes the local. We could start with a better appreciation of the levels and kinds of co-production that take place within the micro-neighbourhood, the better to be able to compensate for the partial disintegration of wider ‘neighbourhood’ services.

As an aside concerning what happens at the most local level, where residents construct much of the narrative of their everyday lives - I’ve just read an interesting paper by John Hipp (Social networks, 32, 2010) on how social distance between residents in the nearest ten units affects perceptions of disorder. His study suggests that

‘it is micro-neighborhoods with two cohesive subgroups containing minimal social distance within them and a large amount of social distance between them [that] have the lowest level of commonly perceived social disorder.’

If nothing else, this highlights the fact that not only are neighbourhoods not as cohesive as policy would like them to be, they probably function better not being too cohesive (residents being better equipped to foster weak ties with the broader neighbourhood). Policy needs to get away from the lazy equation of ‘community’ with local authority area or sub-district: the Localism Bill would seem to be a good time to do some of the necessary thinking.

 

Cuts begin to bite: Big Society nowhere to be seen

Here's how it starts.

Back in May the Chief Secretary to the Treasury David Laws said, according to BBC News, that

'every new spending commitment and pilot project signed off by Labour ministers since the turn of the year would be individually reviewed in a bid to find savings.'

Last week I learned of one painful casualty of this clawing back, a community development project in Watford.

Watford's Council for Voluntary Service had developed the proposal, including  for a community assembly, partly with a view to making the Local Strategic Partnership accountable and representative. The stated objective was:

'to ensure that everyone in Watford has access to a community group to represent their needs and interests, and that these groups have a way of influencing local decisions.'

An enthusiastic community development worker was in place whose role included promoting community engagement and volunteering, and supporting new community groups. Eleven weeks into building the necessary relationships, the claws reached him.

The news somewhat overshadowed a meeting of the Watford community development network yesterday. It happens that the agenda for the meeting included discussion of Big Society, a well-known government initiative promoting principles of localism and co-production, with much-publicised intentions of generating precisely the sort of effects and outcomes that the community assembly was designed and funded to bring.

Polly Toynbee pointed out last week that 'as services shrivel and die it will be easier than usual to summon up indignation.' And the authors of the Big Society idea helpfully directed our attention to Alinsky-style acitivism at the outset. I'm not so confident of any kind of uprising of protest just yet, but give it time.

Big Society: foretelling the end of confrontational governing?

I’m modestly pleased at the recent succession of posts which do not refer to Big Society. But I guess my thinking just went underground for a bit. This is the first of two or three posts in which, belatedly, I’ll start to offer a critique from the community development perspective.

I find it helps seeing Big Society in the context of traditional attitudes towards governance, which are characterised by dichotomous ‘I/You’ confrontational thinking. This kind of thought does not overlap readily with collective or co-operative (or ‘We’) thinking, but in Big Society they seem to have been teamed up together. What will happen?

‘I/You’ thinking is associated with explicit command relationships, given to careful control of information (secrecy) and minimising empowerment. It is associated with a masculine style of management (widely practised by women as well as men, of course) – largely humourless, limiting negotiation, ever-ready to celebrate what it calls ‘strong leadership’. It says, ‘I am in charge and telling you what to do. By all means do your little bit of collective thinking amongst yourselves, but that won’t change the circumstances of who is in charge’. It is characterised by the stifling of growth, certainty of decision-making, and a refusal to admit mistakes or weaknesses.

The public and community sectors are saddled with a lot of people like this, many of them currently relishing the chance to show how ‘strong’ they are at a time when cutbacks are necessary. Hierarchical organisation was invented for these people, they have evolved to exploit it and dominate. Confrontational thinkers are often very clever people given to doing stupid things in very assured ways. They remind me of a remark attributed I believe to Lord Melbourne, who said of somebody, a historian I think it was, ‘I wish I was as sure of anything as he is of everything’. That’s not a very nice thing to say about someone, which is why it’s so appropriate to apply to these people.

‘We’ thinking, by contrast, tries to acknowledge rather than deny the mess and asks, ‘how can we sort this together?’ It doesn’t always do this very well, is easily side-tracked or hijacked and subject to interference, depends on mutual support, openness, inclusion, uncertainty, discovery, shared learning, making mistakes, and growth in a sympathetic ecology. No wonder it’s never successfully run much for very long.

I think what happened when the Big Society idea was concocted was that Conservative thinkers realised that overt ‘I/You’ thinking is running out of steam, historically. Something called the network society is coming over the hill which is gradually bringing an end to hierarchical systems. The emphasis is going to be on governance not government; on co-operation and openness not command and control. What should we do? Let’s occupy some ‘We’ thinkers’ terrain, and control that. Just bring some of this collective mentality into the foreground a little, not too much. The rhetoric of empowerment, that’ll do nicely.

So here we are at an intermediate stage. Our leaders are still people with confrontational mindsets and they continue to encourage similar attitudes and behaviour in management situations. But they look increasingly anachronistic. They have opened the door on collaboration because they had little choice; but they will continue to try to control things through organisations, without (as Mike Chitty writes) encouraging any real self-determination.

Now we need urgently to look beyond organisations for solutions, to informal networks. There’s plenty of evidence to show the effect of network power – Avaaz, for example, co-founded by Res Publica, offers as much inspiration as we need. Perhaps I’m over-optimistic, but I can see a way in which Big Society foretells its instigators’ demise. Let’s get on with it then.

Participation and public service cuts

Yesterday I had the privilege of interviewing two north London ward councillors, Alan Stanton and Zena Brabazon, and we found we had a lot of interests and values in common. As I left Alan kindly gave me a copy of a book he had written on co-operative working (Invitation to self management).

Flicking through the pages on the train last night I came across and was struck by the contemporary relevance of this sentence:

'The rhetoric of participation is one part of the public services where no cuts have been made.'

The book was published in 1989, and refers to work that took place before 1986.

Local sites and civic involvement

Last Friday Hugh Flouch and I organised a Networked Neighbourhoods roundtable discussion on civic involvement and local online in London. We took advantage of the presence in town of US e-democracy pioneer Steven Clift to bring a few interesting people together for some easy-going discussion and share some early findings from our London study.

Unaware that I was about to be knocked back by a short bout of flu (as I type this, coincidentally and characteristically, here's the Next-Door-Neighbour at the back-door asking am I better) there was even less chance that I might come up with any particular insights at the time; but it was at least a moment to try and relate local websites to the community organising and civic involvement expectations of Big Society.

Among the points I hope I managed to put across were these:

• The transformations to co-production of local quality of life and to a more conversational democracy are not trivial, but they are both within the legitimate aspirations of neighbourhood online networks.
• When we look at these sites and the effects they appear to be having, I don’t think we should be looking necessarily for effects that shore up the old ways of doing representative democracy. Nor should we be looking for the strengthening of strong ties and the creation of close-knit communities: local sites support fluid, overlapping networks of weak ties that incorporate sufficient trust to get things done.
• Those ways of getting things done might extend to Alinsky-style community organising, but you wouldn’t conclude from our material that the link is strong. I think it’s fairer to say that we can see a latent demand for informal, controlled-commitment involvement in local issues – people are creating as well as responding to local opportunities, online.
• These sites are places that accommodate the unclubbable alongside the clubbable. We’ve yet to appreciate the benefit of that.
• Essentially, these sites change the acoustics of the public realm: the voices of local people are increasingly audible, not because a few people shout louder but because conversations are generated, accumulate, and are transparent.

The pic of myself and Steve Clift was taken by Hugh and I rather like the reflected cycles round our heads.

There's a short report on the session on the Networked Neighbourhoods site here.

The Big Nudge: can it accommodate awkwardness?

Yesterday I shuffled from a meeting with someone working on Big Society, to an event about how to get citizens involved in public policy. This latter was the launch of findings from the 'Rediscovering the civic' project run by the universities of Southampton and Manchester, known as 'nudge-nudge, think-think' because of the experiments exploring the effect of policies which 'nudge' people into prosocial behaviour, and those which encourage people to think through the issues in the hope of prosocial consequences.

Inevitably, set in the heart of Whitehall with an array of learned speakers, the debate was at a high level of generality while acknowledging the significance of the political moment. Combined with the preceding meeting, it's helped to clarify for me quite where Big Soc fits and what it might mean.

First, the suspicion that the thinking behind Big Society has been based on a shallow appreciation of the realities of the community sector have been confirmed. That can be remedied, perhaps is being remedied (well, they invited me along for a chat!).

Second, we are all starting to see more clearly where it has come from, historically. Take these two quotes, via former Blair advisers, which are going the rounds:

(i) Matthew Taylor referring I believe to a Norwegian journalist who pointed out that Labour's failure was a failure of public mobilisation, having campaigns like child poverty that should have been public campaigns which they turned into technocratic exercises. Can't argue with that. (You can? Go on then).

(ii) Attributed to David Halpern, something like this - 'we're not trying to do more with less. We're trying to do more with more, and that comes from the social fabric'. I've heard this discussion elsewhere, when people say the Big Soc is just what we were trying to do before... Yes, at local level it can certainly look like that. But wouldn't it have helped if new Labour managerialism, and all the arrogance of previous administrations (not that much different), had been supportive instead of so often obstructive and (to pick up a point made by Sue Goss yesterday) infantilising? To put it another way, did previous administrations culturally stifle public involvement? To me these are little insights which can help measure the change to a new context.

Third, insights from Phillip Blond of ResPublica, revealing the centrality of nudge to Big Society. He said that nudge is a modern way of referring to tradition or tacit knowledge, which has become derided and devalued in recent decades.

'Tradition is already a pre-selection of how we should live. Nudge is about group behaviour.'

For Blond, it seems that the Big Society is about restoring the public value of tradition, of accepted shared forms of collective life. Neither De Tocqueville nor Putnam got mentioned, which I suspect is a good thing: whatever is being invented here, it's more than US-style bowling together, because of the political niceties.

Still, association is key in Blond's view:

'There's almost no context in which association is not part of the determinative answer. And yet we do not have the conceptual architecture to make association desirable, to help it happen.'

Don't we? He spoke about making this happen around the issues that people care about 'in their communities', proceeding to an immaculate if not quite intentional definition of community development, without mentioning 'community development'.

But, fourthly, Michael Saward challenged Blond's 'unitarian' interpretation of good citizenship as uncontroversial and universally accepted. That may be unfair, I can't say, but it gets back to a central problem for the Big Society which Saward himself had raised at the outset of yesterday's discussion:

'Will awkward citizens be welcome in the Big Society?'

I've raised this question here in a different way myself: what does BS mean for the local activist who is moved to confront social injustice, not just for the cakestall mafia? When street reps in Shipley talk to me about the tensions between being a 'good citizen' (reporting disorder, keeping an eye out for drug drops, liaising with agencies etc) and campaigning to become empowered and overcome inequalities (activism in the local political arena), it feels like Big Society is not ready to provide the frameworks for that activism, to accommodate awkwardness.

Yesterday's material helps me visualise Big Society as one big nudge towards prosocial action, and I have no problem with that. But if and when Big Society does recognise the need to engage at the level of social justice, it will need to do so in a way that does not feel to local activists like assimilation or an attempt to neutralise whatever frustration, anger, resentment, bitterness they may be feeling.

A new old narrative for community regeneration

Demos have just published a paper by Max Wind-Cowie on community regeneration based on interviews in two high profile Birmingham projects, Balsall Heath and Castle Vale. The report is called Civic streets, although I didn't feel there was much focus on the civic.

There's a reassuring emphasis on local democracy, noting for instance that when local people come together, establish a plan of action and consult widely, 'they have already demonstrated collective efficacy and commitment to improving their neighbourhoods'. Birmingham City's idea for 'micro-mayors' for areas up to 5,000 people gets welcomed, as we'd expect given the Demos tradition. The projects' part in stimulating social capital is celebrated. And it's helpful also to reflect on how come, although they have good relationships with local government, people in these areas

'are not able to assume control of local services even when they are confident of their ability to do so more successfully.'

The author suggests that there is 'a new narrative for community regeneration' -

'one that frees up the space for civil society to rebuild itself and its communities, although providing the tools to help groups and communities to demonstrate their worth and success.'

That sounds like a slightly over-excited claim to justify the planting of the BS flag on all this territory they think they have captured. Before I accept it, I'd just like to consider the use of the word 'rebuild'. Don't keep telling me civil society is bust, I think that compared to some other sectors it might be in reasonably good shape.

He goes on:

'We can help to open up the political and social space for community regeneration if we begin to roll the state back in those areas where it is possible, and desirable, for others to act. We must step back and enable civil society to build neighbourhoods that function well. Just because the state pays for regeneration it does not mean that the state must do regeneration.'

Fair enough, although I think that in ten years' time we may look back at a lot of painful mistakes and re-learning of the reasons why we have such things as, for example, state schools.

Then he rather lets himself down with the final phrase here:

'Community regeneration needs to occur within a framework that is supportive, enabling and engaged with communities themselves.'

Surely only a tory could imagine a form of community regeneration that did not engage with 'communities themselves'... And that highlights a slight problem for those coming late to the idea that people already do this stuff, that it involves political skirmishes and conflict and injustices and messiness, that it's something the state can enable and try to control, and by which occasionally the state can be upset. Note how the report, we are told,

'aims to explore how the ‘Big Society’ has worked in two areas... that are often claimed to be examples of its success.'

Does Big Society really have such a distinguished history? As the author acknowledges elsewhere, people in Balsall Heath and Castle Vale have been working on this stuff for 20 years. Which means they predate the Big Society by, let me see, I make that about 20 years.

I've paid short visits to both projects and truly I doubt whether, at any time since they started, the activists involved would have welcomed hearing their efforts equated with the top-down philanthropic BS approach - an approach that seeks to place co-production in an vacuum beyond contamination while denying issues of disempowerment, exclusion and social injustice that are inescapably part of the context. The suggestion seems closer to an insult than I for one would care to go.

Is this the way things are going? The subtitle of this report insists that these projects reveal 'the Big Society in action'. Sounds like a claim to me. Is anything resembling successful resident involvement, community development, community action or neighbourhood management now perceived as fair game for assimilation by the BS rhetoric? I know that at least one of the above-mentioned projects has struggled to keep itself free from the clammy co-opting claims of politicians now in power. I fear we can expect more of this.

'Susannah isn't in Facebook'

From Nick Booth over on Podnosh:

'Up until now Susannah knew everything that went on in the village. But now she's out of touch.'

This is about municipal governance in the Spanish village of Copons, population about 300. So how much of the success is down to scale?

Starting to bring some reality to BS

Sound and entertaining comments from Alastair Tibbitt, Development Manager for Greener Leith, after attending yesterday's Downing Street launch of Big Society:

"if we're to see a new civic revival then we'll need an investment in old school community development, adult education and a real commitment to making more local government information accessible and understandable. Without this, it will be hard to sustain that army of 'community organisers.'"

'Small state, big society' is obviously the right idea: so do it properly

Hey, I just came across this fascinating document from the early years of new Labour, developing its ideas 'to give citizens, communities and local government the power and information they need to come together, solve the problems they face and build the Britain they want.'

Remember when this was novel?

'We will radically reform the planning system to give neighbourhoods far more ability to determine the shape of the places in which their inhabitants live.'

Or this?

'We will take a range of measures to encourage volunteering and involvement in social action...'

Oh you'd guessed, I was lying, actually it's from the Cabinet Office Building the Big Society document, released today. In publishing terms it's shoddy, in content terms it's underwhelming.

I'm sorry for the run of negative posts recently, but I find this paper weak on one level because it's reasonable to expect Cabinet Office documents to show some sense of authority. They could start by having a statement of origin and a date of publication. This looks like an internal memo intended to motivate the back office staff.

As to content, we already know there are old ideas like community involvement in planning, but there are some new ideas, or rather reaffirmation of ideas presented before the election, like making regular community involvement a key element of civil service staff appraisals. (Can I just ask, who's going to find that a particularly laudable policy measure? Yes ok The Daily Mail. Anyone else?)

And the defenders of the faith will miss the point and condemn anyone and everyone who criticises this document for sour negativity, because we're all supposed to get behind the Big Society and do our bit for the country. This is a movement which has been created by people who are mostly wealthy, educated, empowered and influential, to encourage others who are not, to become active in the collective interest - overlooking minor questions of social justice, and swearing by a high proportion of ideas that were given a run-out over the past ten years of a previous government.

Forgive us our scepticism. 'Small state, Big Society' is obviously the right idea. Pssst: we already knew that. So do it properly, start with the folk who've been doing it for a long time against the odds.

There's more amusement for those of us watching the unseemly jostling for position around new faces in power. Take this comment from the CEO of NCVO, quoted by New Start magazine:

'Many may mock this new term – civil society.'

Eh? The chief exec of the National Council for Voluntary Organisations thinks 'civil society' is a new term. What does that tell you about the state of civil society?

Will neighbourhood management fit into new social policies?

Another day, another government. You know how it is - wake up, a cabinet's been formed, eyewatering public sector cuts in the air, wonder what's up for neighbourhood management? Pottered along to the National Association for Neighbourhood Management conference, along with about sixty other folk. Probably all of us (with the exception of one of the speakers, who shall remain nameless) had years of experience of co-production and were sensitised to its nuances, and led by NANM we co-produced an absorbing event.

We heard two nicely complementary presentations from Gerry Stoker and Steve Broome. Gerry spoke about the Manchester Uni / Southampton Uni research into changing civic behaviour, which has come to be known as the 'Nudge-nudge, think-think' project because of the way it contrasts two ways for policy to influence what we do. Meself, I just think there's a massive policy conspiracy to get me to see things in that framework.

Steve Broome offered the first update I've heard on the RSA's connecting communities project which has been carrying out social network analysis in the New Cross area of south London. They've been rather coy about what's been happening but suddenly here's a whole lot of data which, Steve says, will help us understand 'the total set of connections and possibilities within a community'. Drilling down you can appreciate where the strong and weak points might be, and  you can help people to recognise and exploit their network position. Apparently

'people who value neighbourliness are more likely to be in the core of the network.'

This will be worth examining closely. At least two pieces of work that I'm aware of have suggested that there may not be a strong connection between neighbouring and community activity. The project report is expected in about 6 weeks' time, and Steve said the data will be made available online. Hopefully the kind of work they've done will be inexpensively replicable, and we'll begin to see constructive ways of exploiting the knowledge gained, eg in finding ways to support older people to age in place.

This is the place to offer a note of tribute to two street reps from Shipley, Sue and Arthur Kenworthy, who made the journey down to London to have an input to the two workshops I ran. When a number of practitioners are gathered together in a room, there's nothing like having the experience of local people to draw on. Sue and Arthur are a couple of residents trying to make a little bit of difference in their neighbourhood: they exemplify the barely-recognised efforts of thousands, but yesterday their thoughts and experience were listened to and valued.

So will neighbourhood management fit into new social policies? We  seem to be watching a rapid shift from what I call transactional government - characterised by treating the citizen as compliant consumer of state services who has to struggle for their entitlements - to what Geoff Mulgan has called relational government, characterised by involvement in decisions, co-production and conversational democracy. Am I being over-optimistic?

An argument resonating at yesterday's conference was that we can't afford not to invest in NM. A few weeks back on the NANM blog, Ben Lee put it like this:

'The coming weeks and months will be a crucial time for all of us. On the one hand there is more support and hard evidence than we’ve ever had for the principles of neighbourhood action, localism and empowering citizens through co-delivery. But while some local agencies hold their nerve and take considered decisions about radical devolved service models, others are already taking rushed decisions to reduce or cancel ‘pilot’ programmes - flying in the face of evidence.

We believe local practitioners and community activists need to be taking the best evidence and achievments of neighbourhood working to the heart of the debates about cuts.'

Local activism and a general election

Diane Dyson has an excellent recent post about third places, including this observation:

Early British suffragettes did some of their best community organizing in the town laundries, away from the strong pitching arms of visiting farm boys who lobbed rotten produce at them when the women stood on the back of wagons at village markets calling for the vote.

An exchange of messages with Diane helped me to this recent post about Hannah Mitchell - about whom, to my shame, I knew nothing. It's at moments like this that I feel most keenly the half-hearted incompleteness of my education; but really, for me in late-20thC england, dealing with that lack was trivial compared to the systematised exclusion which people like Hannah Mitchell confronted and overcame.

I invite you to take a few minutes to listen to this reading from her autobiography (scroll down) describing her intervention at a meeting before the general election of 1906. And if your mind happens to be on the fluid nuances of the forthcoming UK general election, this is something to reflect on - not just for the ferocity of the local action against vested interests that was necessary to bring democracy out of the cradle and belatedly learning to walk; but also for the stark political differences and the enviable(?) focus that was possible on causes of social justice.

Well, it would be an insult to those campaigners to envy the context of their struggles, but perhaps politics now does suffer from a lack of distinct causes.

And there's another point to be made, which I am not qualified to explore, about the comparative contribution of women to local anti-slavery activism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the suffragette movement. Maybe someone will tell me this has been done? It's the localness of their action, its morally-forged courage against far broader political forces, and its need to accumulate patiently in order to have effect, that interests me, and from which I feel we should be learning.

A vibrant civil society

Shortly after my last post left this desk, I came across this quote from a political party manifesto:

A vibrant civil society
We believe that enterprises in the mutual and cooperative sector have an important role to play in the provision of local services, from health to education, from leisure to care for the vulnerable. As democratic, not-for-profit organisations, they can help to involve local people in shaping the services they want, unleash creativity and innovation, create jobs and provide new services – especially in neighbourhoods where traditional services have failed local people in the past.

Any guesses? I shall be awarding points, and what do points mean? That's right, points mean sod-all. (Authors of the 2005 Labour Party manifesto are prohibited).

Is Big Society hiding behind civil society?

I understand that tomorrow's Sunday Times will publish a letter signed by 'social entrepreneurs and others from the voluntary and community sector in supporting the role of civil society', by which they mean, the Big Society version of it. After a bit of rumouring during the week, the letter was published yesterday by Social Enterprise (quickly picked up by David Wilcox).

It's pretty disappointing. It deals with some objections to which the authors (I don't mean the signatories necessarily; it's not hard to see where the text originated) feel they can respond, which are well within the comfort zone.

SE says:

The letter states that campaigners have been taken aback by the opposition in the press and elsewhere to the role citizens can play in our country, partly generated by pre-election discussions on such areas as the ‘Big Society’.

How could anyone disagree with the need for a healthy civil society? But some less straightforward questions have been raised here and there, which don't get any kind of recognition or response in the letter. We're invited to vote for motherhood and apple pie.

Having got it slightly wrong first go (eg unashamedly top-down, too closely associated with a political party, too detached from the political reality of community action) the folk behind BS needed to take a step back. There are (or at least there were, up until now) plenty of people ready to help them with their thinking, out of goodwill or perhaps self-interest. But with this letter they may just be compounding their problems. There's no need to defend civil society guys, it's not under attack: it's the Big Society that people wanted to ask about. Come on out.

Publishing this a few days before the election will simply confirm people in their distrust of the close association with the Conservative party. Leaking the letter to test the reaction, gosh there's a new trick, compounds the sense that it's not quite sincere.

And it doesn't take a major effort of recollection to reflect on the very serious and painful struggles that many people in the community sector (not civil society volunteers nor social entrepreneurs in their own terms, but local people with dirt under their fingernails) went through under the last tory administration.

Previously:

Big Society is being watched

Let's hear it for neighbourhood groups: Conservative party launch of the Big Society

What makes a neighbourhood network?

How do local connections between residents get fused into an effective communicative network that comes in time to underpin everything else that happens?

I got into an interesting discussion yesterday at Balsall Heath in Birmingham, where I was lucky enough to be picking up wisdom from people like Paul Slatter and Hannah Worth from Chamberlain Forum, Ben Lee from NANM, Elke Loeffler from Governance International, plus Dick Atkinson and the folk from the famous Balsall Heath Forum.

I'd heard and read plenty about Dick and about what had been achieved at Balsall Heath, and this was my first visit. It's a hugely reasuring place, unpretensiously displaying the commonsense of ordinary people getting stuff done locally.

But I wanted to know, how come? There are active street 'stewards' (with or without the title) in 15 sets of 3-4 streets. I liked Dick's remark that

'With a bit of support and encouragement people do more than they think they can.'

This gives the forum a firm foundation of local people who are continually ferreting away at issues. OK let's be clear: we're talking about unpaid, unelected active local citizens, who 'have emerged out of street life' (Dick's words) in numbers that are sufficient to cover an area with a population of 14,000, loosely linked through neighbourhood management and an elected forum. According to the website

There are 22 residents groups, and 70 Street Stewards. So the whole neighbourhood is covered. Everyone knows someone and the sense of mutual self-help is fostered.

So I'm slightly enviously think about why this hasn't quite happened in Shipley, where I've tried to help out every so often over the years. Having a resident-employed resident, Abdullah, who supports the street stewards and takes some of the pressure off them, must make a difference. He tells us about the advantages of living in the neighbourhood where you work - you get a better response, people don't think you have a hidden agenda: 'they don't see me as a threat'.

And this can be very proactive work. We heard a story of two residents doorknocking because of an eyesore front garden, to discover a man on his own who badly needed, and was given, support.

But none of this, nor the recorded history of Balsall Heath Forum, quite explains how local networks grow and strengthen in some places and not in others. Informality is obviously crucial. But how come the initial connections, presumably between a few willing, motivated, slightly uncertain folk, have ramified and come to underpin a significant amount of what can be done now without the clumsy machinery of the city's formal services?

We didn't come up with an explanation, but I certainly came away with a clearer sense of the fundamental significance of an informal communication network in driving social change at neighbourhood level. For sure, if I'd been shown a unique ingredient I wouldn't have trusted it anyway.

Big Society is being watched

David Wilcox has blogged more on the Big Society Network, which describes itself as 'an organisation being set up by frustrated citizens for frustrated citizens, to help everyone achieve change in their local area.'

Our aim is to not only create the largest co-operative or mutual in Britain, but to create a mutual that is Britain. Every citizen can be a shareholder, contribute, receive help and rewards.

Call me old-fashioned, but I think there's a difference between a network and an organisation, which is kinda significant. Either that's been thought about and is being disregarded, or it hasn't been thought about. If I'm reluctant to trust the network it's because it seems to be an organisation with an agenda, and the agenda doesn't appear to include values and principles that in my view are essential to community development: inclusion and social justice, for instance.

If the response is, 'no, the members set the agenda, so join in and help shape it' then it begs all sorts of questions such as why there are no proposals to strengthen the existing community sector networks (er, we call this 'bottom-up' - it's just a bit if jargon we use, you'll get used to it chaps). At least the Brown government recognised this, albeit in its central-controlling way. Any self-respecting community activist can smell a hidden agenda from well beyond their own territory: they will be suspicious of the Big Society Network perhaps not because it has an expressed agenda just yet but because it's a centralised construct coming from a philanthropic tradition.

A post on ConservativeHome notes the possibility of 'the politicisation of community activists' under the Big Society umbrella, which apparently has also occurred to the Taxpayers Alliance. Is it possible that these people have been immersed for so long in a cakestall-mafia version of the voluntary sector that the prospect of voluntary action having a political dimension is a bit of a shock?

Here's a suggestion: start from the recognition that community action is fundamentally, insecapably political, and get used to it. Attempts to depoliticise it will be self-defeating and may lead to a revival of confrontational radicalism. I welcome the Big Society thinking from the tories because it might just force us to think about the politics of communty action after a couple of decades when that really hasn't been paid much attention.

Julian Dobson has it about right I reckon:

If we want community activity that won't frighten the horses and will leave most of society pretty much as it is, and will give you social action without having to worry about social justice, this kind of set-up may be a good bet. Those who want more substantial change may well find themselves suffocated in such a network.

 

'To spend more time with my sheep'

I spent a couple of hours yesterday in a meeting about co-production where we discussed, among other things, the ways in which many local councillors in England are sidelined by the governance structures (if it's not strategic enough for cabinet, it's not important. But here, read this stack of papers before Monday's meeting...).

We also compared the motivations of councillors and the incentives, or lack of, by comparison with community activists for example. There's always a sense of puzzlement at why people choose to stand as councillors given the persistently unfavourable regard in which they are held and the ways in which the system makes it awkward for them to help residents.

But I see that for some city councillors there are other distractions. Bulgarian City Struggles as Councilors Play Farmville on Facebook.

Via Keith Hampton.

 

Let's hear it for neighbourhood groups: Conservative party launch of the Big Society

In the 1980s if UK politicians talked about community action at all it was defensively, because the notion was subversive, anti-establishment, tainted with radicalism and, typically, intensely confrontational.

Today eleven members of the Conservative party shadow cabinet (yes, eleven, including the party leader David Cameron) presented their ideas for 'the Big Society' which are dominated by plans to stimulate involvement in neighbourhood groups. Given the party's realistic aspirations to be in government within a few weeks, these policies constitute a justification for neighbourhood action at the highest political level.

It was genuinely peculiar to sit and hear the emphasis placed on the role of local residents in social policy. The single phrase most repeated through more than three hours of speechifying (shame about the talking-heads format, they still have a bit to learn in that respect) was 'neighbourhood groups'. They are, we were told, 'the essential building blocks' of the policy.

The three key promises are:

• strengthen and support social enterprises (I'm sure I wasn't the only person surprised at how little emphasis was placed on social enterprises)
• stimulate the creation and development of neighbourhood groups in every area
• encourage mass engagement in neighbourhood groups and social action projects.

Financial incentives are promised 'for people to come together to form neighbourhood groups in the poorest areas', and funding for 5,000 independent community organisers (note: 'will have the skills needed to raise funds to pay for their own salaries').

On page 5 of the document you can read the powers and rights that will be assigned to neighbourhood groups. The list begins:

'Neighbourhoods will be able to bid to take over the running of community amenities, such as parks and libraries that are under threat'.

Threat from where? Understandably, this will be widely read as 'funding for parks and libraries is not gonna be great, but we'll support voluntary action to run them: and if it runs into the sand after a while, that's the community's decision.'

So this, boys and girls, is what localism means - local people being given support to run facilities like schools and parks, or taking over ownership of closed down shops. In his introductory remarks, Oliver Letwin equated the Big Society squarely with social capital, and part of the assumption is that in controlling their own resources local people will also generate much-needed social capital. Empowerment featured frequently in the speeches: local government hardly at all.

Most of the nine points in the neighbourhood powers list imply local consensus, using the N word where so often in the past the C word would have been used. This cheerily-assumed consensus is one of the areas where som elearning might be needed, but for now, the onus is on the community sector to respond to this extraordinary challenge.

If people react saying 'they don't understand the messiness of neighbourhood life - or the inertia, the separation and exclusion...' that won't get us far. Neighbourhood politics can be very intense, but you wouldn't have guessed that from today's speeches. Nor do we know whether grants will be available to unconstituted groups. All that reality-checking is yet to come.

Scepticism about individual choice being packaged as neighbourhood action won't help either, because great stress was placed on membership of neighbourhood groups. Make no mistake, there is, radically, a collective dimension to this policy: it's not just promoting individual civic behaviour (although the sop to the party traditionalists is to call it 'collaborative individualism').

So there I sat, listening to a potential Conservative prime minister say that the role of the state is to agitate for community engagement (speech here). And I remembered the day in 1997 when I heard a representative of the brand-new exciting-new socially-dynamic Labour government say 'we know things can't all be done quickly, we're planning for ten years'. I rushed back to my colleagues at Community Development Foundation with the message - c'mon, c'mon, we've got ten years to prove community development works.

Well, we didn't. Now I reread the phrase in today's document: 'We will encourage mass engagement in neighbourhood groups and social action projects' and it seems to me this is another chance; because the welfare state and a society of institutions are things of the past, and you can't do without support for local involvement.

Press release.
 

Jim Diers on citizen action

Yesterday Jim Diers, author of Neighbor power, spoke at a meeting that I co-organised in London with Ben Lee at Shared Intelligence.

We'd managed to gather a select band of interested and interesting people to hear Jim's inspiring presentation about citizen action and democratic involvement, based on his experience running Seattle’s Department of Neighborhoods.

What Jim has helped local people in Seattle to achieve, and what he's helping others around the world to grasp, is a sustainable and appropriate contribution by local people in the processes and actions that make a difference to their neighbourhoods.

The key points that I take away from the discussion for reflection are these:

• Collective citizen empowerment is not so much an idea whose time has come - it was always an obvious option: rather we should say, time's up for some of the barriers that have been in the way for too long.
• One reason Seattle's Neighborhood Matching Fund worked was because the Department of Neighborhoods imputed a value to residents' voluntary time. This is a topic we've been talking about off and on in the UK for far too long.
• Another reason for the Seattle success was that they chose to encourage and accept bids from unconstituted groups of residents. They found other solutions to the problem of where to bank the grant. Again, this is something we've failed to work-through properly in this country, largely because of the centre's control-obsession.

We also had input yesterday from Hugh Flouch about Harringay Online, which stimulated a lot of discussion about how neighbourhood networks can contribute to collective action and how people can use them to interact with the structures of governance. More when Hugh and I have finished our London study.

Special thanks to Steven Clift for the heads-up on Jim's visit, and thanks to Shared Intelligence for the venue and catering. If you missed this opportunity, watch this space because Jim expects to be back in a year or so, and we're confident we can find a larger room.

**Postscript**  David Wilcox has offered a characteristically imaginative and thorough account.

Street reps, empowerment and statistics

When I ask the street reps I've been working with, do they feel they are able to influence decisions affecting their area, there is a bit of pondering but definitely no evidence put forward. A little probing confirms that they feel they can influence action - getting some rubbish cleared or maybe dealing with a flagrant drug-drop - but not decisions about how services are run or resources targeted.

These are active citizens who feel relatively powerless, partly because of their low visibility and in many cases the need to remain anonymous. For example, none of the group I was working with the other night would go to court and testify against another resident. If we ask 'what would it take to overcome this and raise their profile?' the answer obviates the purpose: it would be a peaceful, ordered neighbourhood where people showed respect for one another, and street reps were (in their terms) unnecessary.

Still, thousands of practice agencies want evidence that government investment is leading to citizens feeling more empowered. That's what the empowerment indicator (NI4) is for, and there's a lot to be said for it. NI4 tells us the proportion of people who feel they can influence decisions affecting their local area. But it's causing a bit of head-scratching.

For example, Inspire-East recently published an absorbing (if cunningly-hidden) report on behaviour in relation to NI4, but confused a few of us right at the start of their exec summary with this:

'measured through the 2008 Place Survey... in the East of England, as nationally, 29% of respondents agree they feel they can influence decisions that affect their local area... the Citizenship Survey shows that in 2008, nationally 39% of people agree they feel they can influence decisions affecting their local area.'

If you go to page 8 of the report, you get a sort-of explanation. They're different kinds of survey. But still, a 10% discrepency doesn't seem trivial. The next survey could ask, do you feel disempowered by statistics?

At the same time, the National Empowerment Partnership has published a document which seems to have very similar intentions to the Inspire-East report, attempting to explain 'what drives feelings of influence?' I've only read the summary, but it's told me some significant things. For instance, that among people who have been civically involved in the past 12 months, some 56% say they cannot influence decisions. This would include the street reps I've been talking to. Being involved, as the report says, 'is no guarantee that people will feel they can influence decisions' - indeed, feeling informed is a stronger driver of sense of influence than is actual involvement in decision-making.

The street reps go to meetings, and tell me they feel listened to, and that it's good to have the chance to give your opinions. But as the NEP report suggests, it could be that through the process of getting involved, people can gain greater insight into what they are not able to influence.

Do unto others: on the appropriation of citizen empowerment

I posted some musings last month about the way empowerment has become an industry: its recognition as an issue in policy is welcome but its neutralising assimilation distasteful.

Meanwhile I've been watching as that well-known authority on local activism, the RSA, plans to follow up on its idea for a 'new community development qualification' by toying with notions of 'citizen power' as if it were a conceptual plaything. I was invited to the launch of this project recently, but I still haven't understood why a local project required a London 'launch' with Triffickly Important People speaking.

The invitation noted:

'With political disengagement on the rise and public services feeling the squeeze, it has never been more important to realise the potential of people to affect change at a local level by shaping the identity and direction of the places and public services they use.'

OK, I'm with you so far, how you gonna do that? 'The potential of people': any particular people?

'This pioneering project led by the RSA in partnership with Peterborough City Council and Arts Council England East, will experiment with different ‘models of social change’ across a range of spheres including civic behaviour, education, local enterprise, rehabilitation and treatment services.'

Ah I see, not led by local people then. But experimenting with their lives and their place, how thoughtful. Well you wouldn't want to risk increasing political disengagement, would you?

The text went on to explain the RSA's belief that 'the goals of individual fulfilment and social progress require an ambitious model of citizenship'... It has to be a model, because the wealthy elite like to play with things and then go off and do something else, leaving ordinary people to, er, well tidy up and make do afterwards I suppose.

David Wilcox has been trying to inject some sense of responsibility and offered a couple of comments here, with a gentle irony that seems either too subtle, or too late, or both:

'I know that there's a strong theoretical commitment to citizen engagement, empowerment etc. But isn't there a slight danger that without some evidence of citzens at the heart of the project this will look like social architecture designed in John Adam Street?'

The rhetoric ('We do want to involve people in all aspects of the project') isn't hard to find but sounds as hollow as always. When I started to wonder about the '.co.uk' url, it struck me that not only is this an audacious attempt by wonkdom to appropriate, govern and direct citizen empowerment from the top-down; it also implies it can be turned into a project of social entrepreneurship.

It may seem trivial to be pricking the RSA's pomposity (although they seem to work hard at it). But I'm more concerned with a growing suspicion that one of the legacies of new Labour will be the erosion of the validity of radicalism by treating it as intellectually fashionable and appropriating its language. If you do unto others and call it empowerment, what will residents call real empowerment when the time comes to get you off their territory?