Tuesday, 09 February 2010

Social policy and empowerment

Yesterday to an event launching new policy work by the centre-right Centre for Social Justice. Their new policy areas are elder care, youth justice, mental health, community cohesion, sport, and social return on investment; and given their realistic chances of influencing forthcoming policy, it's good to see these themes being researched and debated openly.

I'm particularly pleased that some effort is to go into understanding and promoting informal support for older people, and I'll be pottering along to talk to the CSJ in due course. Meanwhile, as someone with a fair bit of experience of think-tank events on the political left, a couple of thoughts that struck me.

First, there was an odd tendency to treat old ideas as new. There's nothing necessarily wrong with refreshing old ideas - it may be better than the current preoccupation with innovation-at-all-costs. One example was the suggestion that it's socially beneficial for young people to participate in sport; but when this view was put across by Iain Duncan Smith as if it were his intellectual property it was greeted by some of those present like a radical revelation.

Similarly the arguments for social return on investment were unveiled as if no-one had ever heard of it before, leaving me pondering with irony the amount of thinking and effort that went into this area (using different terminology) in the late eighties and nineties under a Tory government (I recall in particular their 'Invest to Save' budget, although it was hard to crack into with social arguments: I tried). And it's a bit discourteous not to acknowledge the strong tradition of work at the New Economics Foundation.

Secondly, there was a discomforting sense of moral prescription and crusade - for example in 'saving' young people from a life of crime - without a moment's reflection on the case for empowering those involved. An early question from the floor raised just this point, and went unanswered, as if the language were not quite understood. It seems a realistic ambition for me to see if I can get an appreciation of empowerment and interdependence embedded in the work on care of older people. Wish me luck.

9 Feb 2010 13:46:02 | Governance and participation, Older people, Social policy

The comments to this entry are closed.

NEXT POST
Co-production is coming of age There's a tidy little cluster of examples of neighbourhood-based co-production just posted (anonymously, why?) on the NANM blog, claiming that people do just ‘get it’. So is the idea coming of age? Co-production or co-delivery of public services and benefit gets a mention in most of my presentations and I agree, most people do get it. Most of us don't expect our medics to produce our health for us, we don't expect teachers to have sole responsibility for educating our children, and the police are not the only people who produce safety on our streets. A lot of this thinking goes back to the late 1980s or early 90s, raising questions about how long it takes for the penny to drop in the official-bureaucratic mentality. I'm reminded of a meeting with a county police authority a couple of years ago, in which I made the above points and found myself faced with blank incomprehension, suggesting that few of them had reflected on the social context of their own practice. Co-production needs to be seen as a form of collective behaviour and its ultimate expression is sustainable lifestyles. We can see people's responses to the pressures of climate change ('we must do our bit') as the unlikely source of a post-Thatcherite resurgence in credibility for collective approaches. A little encouragement from our most influential media wouldn't go amiss. Another angle on this is the 'crowding-out' effect, the view that in the second half of the last century the welfare state overwhelmed citizens' readiness to help themselves or one another - hence the line that co-production is 'the biggest revolution in the shape of public services since Beveridge' (NESTA press release on their recent report). There's a strong (but I believe unproven) argument to suggest that in some areas of social support, and with some demographics, accusations of crowding-out may be valid. Which leaves us with the forces of economic recession, reducing expectations and the necessity of localism. It's sometimes tough growing up.
PREVIOUS POST
The future of regeneration and the politics of power Over on Living with rats, Julian Dobson has started and reflected some convened-group thinking about the future of regeneration (here and here). The debate will be featured in New Start magazine in due course. I think the focus on the relation between economic development and environmental sustainability is spot on. And there's a very welcome jab at the refusal of institutional thinking to recognise its own demise: 'There's a difference between [an] organic, assisted process and the directed, programme-driven forms of regeneration we've seen in the last three decades. The role of institutions should become one of nurturing and supporting what already exists and enabling it to grow, not one of constantly imposing grand strategies and plans.' Indeed: the main thing stopping the network society from flourishing as it takes the place of the organisation society is, gosh who'd have thought it, people in organisations. The snapshot of this is councils blocking their staff from using social media. The New Start debate brought out an emphasis on ethics and values, but that seems not to have been linked to the politics of power, as expressed through models of governance at local level. If we speak about a future for regeneration, we need to explain what is so problematic about attitudes to governance under recent and current regeneration regimes. We can't just elide it or imply that it can be smoothed over. This is a recurring theme on this blog and I won't revisit all the arguments, but I want to get at the issues from the point of view of local groups. (I use three main sources: references at the end). The first problem is the appropriation of language. The Third Way (let's dignify it with capital letters) has applied itself to transforming the meaning of 'community' into something we're all supposed to recognise, something unfailingly harmonious and positive which will deliver the state's objectives without ongoing state commitment. It relegates conflict to an issue of public management. Jeremy Brent put it like this: 'Time and again "the community" is referred to as an existing and unified structure, there to be consulted and relied on... Local communities are seen as both identifiable and good, with the certainty of their existence posing no problem, and as places where perpetrators of crime do not live. They have a unified and collective mind that identifies "needs" (a word commonly used in connection with community) that a benevolent authority (of course) can and does meet.' (Brent 2009, p245) Unfortunately it would be hard to deny that the community development field has been complicit in this, or at best docile. The second element concerns the policy determination of 'community as consensus'. Richard Sennett warned us about this decades ago when he wrote of 'destructive gemeinschaft' and pointed to the distaste for disorder. I reviewed Jackie Karn's Narratives of neglect a few months back: 'Problems arise where consensus is not apparent; or, being assumed, appears to be threatened. The idea of ‘moral community’ which characterised the...

Kevin Harris

Search

My Other Accounts

Recent Comments