Neighbourhoods

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 Blair years requires practitioners to pursue consensus at all costs. In this context, as Karn puts it, ‘community is in essence constituted as unproblematic,’ and participatory practices constitute ‘the community’ as those who participate constructively, cooperatively and reasonably within the process.

'Those who do not adhere to the assumptions of what is best for the community are labelled as ungovernable and subject to demonising mechanisms that exclude them. Groups come to be categorised in terms of governability, which in turn legitimises coercion.'

The third aspect is managerialism, which detaches and sanitises local experience, appropriating it for out-of-reach policy objectives, with assumed consent. 'Community' has been reinvented in corporate liberal regimes, according to Ann Ingamells, as a mechanism of governance:

'it is no threat to neoliberalism if residents in specific localities push for more of a voice and better conditions. Such demands will be managed by (non-elected) professionals (public sector, housing corporations) whose performance is tied to managerial benchmarks and who... will use a variety of means to ‘manage’ such claims, including tight control of information, agendas and meetings, as well as some tightly administered concessions.' (Ingamells 2007, p243)

One might respond that 'twas ever thus; or that there have been many examples in the past decade of inclusive, just and collaborative community involvement initiatives, which I would not want to deny. But what I'm trying to understand is a significant underlying shift in the way power is converted to energy at local level. For the moment, it looks as if power remains where it was but somehow causes energy in neighbourhoods. The entropy is not yet apparent. Or perhaps there is no 'community' equivalent to the second law of thermodynamics.

Where does this leave us? A new government may come in, relishing the new economic realities to justify a debilitating malnourishment of the public sector. The extent to which public agencies can now help people to address collectively the social injustices they might identify is just as constrained, I suggest, by the subtle and nuanced disempowerment through professionalised regeneration and the systematic neutering of conflict and adversity.

In this thin light, Ingamells calls for 'a new repertoire of community development strategies and techniques' and a shared analysis of how it is that we are currently governed. Picking up where she leaves off, I'm wondering how local groups respond to this context, when it is so hard to recapture the language that is used. Here, we are at the same time within and beyond conscientisation: this is about the logic of counter-counter-insurgency.

Brent, J. (2009). Searching for community: representation, power and action on an urban estate. Bristol, Policy Press.

Ingamells, A. (2007). 'Community development and community renewal: tracing the workings of power.' Community development journal 42(2): 237-250.

Karn, J. (2007). Narratives of neglect: community, regeneration and the governance of security. Cullompton, Willan.
 

Creating greater value: participation in Milton Keynes

Back in the summer I worked with Bev Carter reviewing levels of social and civic participation in Milton Keynes. The report has just been published by Citizens:MK - click on the research tab here.

For a small study it's quite a lengthy report, because a lot of stuff came up. We based our work on the belief that social participation and informal involvement with others in everyday life underpins and is critical for civic participation.

Here are some of the main points:

• Cohesion and stability among existing groups has to precede participative integration into broader civic structures. If young people feel despised and unwanted, or Somalis feel unsupported and victimised, those claims have to be addressed before we can raise expectations about integrated participation.
• Perhaps partly because of the town's geography, people seem to be lacking association with a defined, distinctive neighbourhood which offers them something to be proud of, to defend and develop.
• We noted a shift in the areas where young people can or cannot exercise autonomy; and an apparent general decline in their experience of organisation. We think that most young people have no difficulty understanding the nuances of democracy and the value of participation. The problem is more about policy-makers appreciating the importance of social participation in everyday life at local level. It doesn't help that participation principles are not reinforced consistently in the adult world, and loyalty of any kind appears not to be valued.
• Popular participation does not just create connections, it also depends on connections - between citizens, agencies and representatives. A healthy variety of connections is of massive, barely-noticed social significance. Without them we cannot develop a participative politics that resolves social problems by involving all kinds of people collectively in addressing them.

Previously:

Found difficult and left untried?

Invisible mutual support at the margins

You'd hope they'd be angry

Civic health and social impact

Yesterday we had another government public service modernisation strategy, Frontline First, which contains a couple of very interesting ideas likely to attract attention. In 2010 government says it will:

• Build a stronger civic society and give communities more say in shaping public services. We will map civic health in every community through a new Civil Health Index, transfer more public assets to the third sector, and develop new ways of providing capital to civic society organisations - such as through a new social investment wholesale bank and piloting Social Impact Bonds.

The idea of social impact bonds is to reward social investors for work that reduces future social costs.

Social Impact Bonds seek to drive significant non-government investment into addressing the causes of deep-rooted social problems with returns generated from a proportion of the related reduction in spending on acute services. The ambition is to create positive government spending cycles that enable significant tax payer savings through improved social outcomes. (Social Finance report).

There's no detail about the proposal for a Civic Health Index in the UK and an annual Civic Health report. It sounds a bit like an idea I had about 8 years ago for a local community index. Maybe that will follow in time.

Frontline first press release.

Behaviour change and conversations

There are still sceptics about the role of policy in influencing what people do on a day-to-day basis, but I suspect there are far more people who simply don't believe that individuals can be persuaded to modify behaviour pro-socially. Yet policy has surely always sought to change behaviour (like smoking, drinking, driving, oh and thinking of course, there's an example occurs to me). In a post-welfare society under the gathering clouds of climate change, it's kinda priority.

So London's Capital Ambition programme developed a guide to options for public agencies, and LocalGov.uk has a recent article on some of the approaches being taken, 'from nudge theory through behavioural economics to approaches based on values, persuasion and deliberation.' It's written by Gillian Norton and Paul Martin, both Chief Execs of London Boroughs.

If you disregard the inevitable unreflective use of the C word for a moment, it's reassuringly positive:

'The way forward isn’t about trickery or manipulation, and it cannot be achieved by frightening or controlling people. We need serious conversations within and with our communities to win support for changes we all agree are necessary.'

The bit that will get missed out, as usual, is the 'conversations within,' ie everyday local interactions that take place irrespective of what officers are doing. What the article is up against is the fact that it's still hard to get people in positions of power to think in terms of enabling something to happen that doesn't involve them. Hopefully local online networks will bring this about anyway, but a little support from councils wouldn't go amiss.

Sign here if you want more petitions

As our governments grope ever more desperately for formal solutions to problems that require attention to informality, the difficulties they create as they go just serve to complicate things. Encouraging e-petitioning as if it embodies empowerment is one example. Here's Anthony Zacharzewski on the Local democracy blog the other day:

'I don’t have a problem with people saying that they want the council to spend more money – people do that all the time. It’s just very likely that the appeals to spend more money will push for higher and higher spending at a time when there’s less money than ever for doing new things.

'Easier petitioning means councils will need to get (even) better at saying no.'

Every time a council says no in a democratically accountable way it has an administrative cost.

For a robust and open democracy

The other day I gave a presentation and ran a mini-workshop on social justice and community development for the Policy Forum at CILIP (formerly the Library Association). One illustration of community development I referred to was the recent television series about the 'Unsung Town', which describes some of the process of using singing to stimulate connections, collective involvement and a sense of achievement in South Oxhey, an area I know well.

We know that what happenened there is community development because a committee for the choir has been formed and last week appears to have taken an independent political decision: it was offered a £1,000 grant by a county councillor and declined it:

“We’ve worked really hard as a group to be inclusive of everybody and promote an ethnically diverse choir. We don’t feel the BNP shares those values so, as a group, we decided to turn the money down.”

It's an example of the leaky lamplight of community development falling for a moment on big shadowy issues of social justice. For a new and probably inexperienced group it may well have been a challenge and they dealt with it, and will be the stronger.

All round the country today there will have been people in homes, workplaces, colleges, online and elsewhere, discussing the appearance of the leader of the British National Party on BBC television last night.

That discussion will be based around the man's tawdry opinions of other members of the species, and people will be airing thoughts on spikey political issues of racism, homophobia and blunt prejudice, which politics generally discourages them from exploring. So perhaps that's a good thing. Sound points about the representativeness of the audience from Philip Norton here.

The event has reminded us that we have a version of public service broadcasting which is intimately related to open democracy (even if it doesn't always do it very well).

It's been surprising the number of commentators who seem ready to overlook the inconvenience of the formal elected status of BNP representatives (including in South Oxhey). This is only good insofar as it highlights how unsatisfactory the electoral system is to more and more people. I suppose it also illustrates how we still struggle with the tension between the right to freedom of speech - for a party with a given level of representation, in public debate - and the right to be protected from racism and homophobia.

We still get confusions, like the hapless example of Yale University Press, who decided to cut the images when publishing Jytte Klausen's book on those Danish cartoons. But hey, what are centuries of debate and insight into the nature of democracy and freedom of speech to a committee at a university press? (Among the various explorations, see eg here).

Many years ago I wrote an essay on 'Freedom of access to information' (published in this volume: can't find electronic version) in which I made a point about how freedom of speech does not necessarily trump other freedoms or rights, such as the right to be protected from racist material. Or as Klausen herself puts it in an interview for Islam Online,

'Free speech does not give license to say racist things about other people or to incite violence.'

But. What interests me about discussion around last night's Question Time appearance is that so much of it still implies that one right demonstrably always trumps the other. I'm not implying that the example of Yale is directly comparable - I'm not saying that those who sought to stop the broadcast were comparable to the YUP committee. But democracy is surely going to be better when the source of dispute is there for all to see and the views expressed for all to hear, and when we feel empowered by the system to develop and discuss our own views.

For myself, I'm far less comfortable with the idea that the BBC might have denied voice to elected representatives, distasteful as their views may be, than I am with the prospect of lots of people hearing the threadbare BNP views widely broadcast and vigorously challenged, with the likelihood that more people will think more deeply about them. The latter is a much-needed if faint sign of democratic robustness.

Having a structure for civic involvement matters

The Civic Trust was precisely the kind of organisation of which it might have been said, if it didn't exist they'd have to reinvent it. And so they have. The Trust closed in April this year leaving local civic societies in a haze of uncertainty. The Civic Society Initiative has just published the report on their consultation which I mentioned in the summer.

Among the main findings:

• Civic societies want to be less reactive, work more in partnership and be more campaigning in their outlook.
• There is a refreshing openness within civic societies about their shortcomings and their mixed reputation – ageing, negative and out of touch but also locally knowledgeable, actively concerned about the future and wanting to connect more with their community.
• The movement lacks confidence in itself and others can appear to value it more than civic societies themselves.
• Civic societies seek a unifying mission and purpose for the movement. This is likely to be based around issues of place, pride, identity and community.

The analysis reveals a wish to move from being:

• Separate voices to being a collective movement
• Hierarchical to being more networked
• Dependent to being more independent (especially financially)
• Organised top-down to being more federal.

Three main roles have been identified for the national body:

• Providing information, support and advice to civic societies
• Facilitating civic societies to network and cluster together
• Being a national lead and voice for the movement which provides inspiration and direction; lobbies and campaigns on its behalf; and raises its profile and influence.

The organisation is now seeking feedback on the report by Friday 20 November.

More on the representativeness of committees

From an Oz blog, North Coast Voices:

'a certain Neighbourhood Watch committee is tentatively considering allowing a person found guilty of criminal offences to join as a volunteer member.'

There is a case for the chair knowing what the offences were, but it's not hard to see benefits for the individual and the committee. However, the post is cynically dismissive. If you follow the link to Neighbourhood Watch Committee NSW, this is the very first statement you come across:

'Committees should reflect the demographics of individual communities.'

No irony intended.

Of exactitude in democracy

It is said that the traveller George Lewis bought a bundle of papers in Kashgar relating to the work of 11th century Uyghur scholars. Among the records of families and distinguished tradesmen of the settled tribes there is an account of a system of governance devised by the people of the Tarim Basin sometime before the sixth century BCE.

In that region, the practice of democracy had attained such perfection that the membership of the committee for a single province numbered the population of an entire city, and the committee for the region itself numbered an entire province. In the course of time, these extensive arrangements were found somehow wanting, and so the Guild of Democraters devised a system whereby the committee was required to be of the same scale as the population, and coincided with it point for point.

Less sympathetic to the science of democracy, later generations came to judge this system cumbersome, and discarded it unsentimentally. Occasionally in discreet meetings in the houses of scholars along the Silk Road, rumours circulate of the survival of pages from the records of those meetings, but no fragment has subsequently been discovered in the libraries of the world.

(Acknowledgement)

 

Neighbourhood networks workshop

It's clear that neighbourhood online networks will increase in their reach, influence and value. How should people in local government respond?

Yesterday I was working with Hugh Flouch of Harringay Online and Martin Dudley who helped set up and run Bish.net for many years. London Councils had asked us to run a workshop for their Capital Ambition programme to surface the issues and start getting at the kinds of question that will need to be answered if local officers and elected members are to work out how they engage with local online networks.

Hugh and Martin gave very informative presentations about their respective sites. These were preceded by a wide-ranging introduction from Hugh, who has stitched together some absorbing material - including for example, new data showing that referral from social network sites to government sites is increasing - amounting to a compelling case for local authorities to pay close attention to local networks.

Sandwiched between discussion sessions, there was time for a workshop game that I had devised to explore what happens when issues of perceived importance to local people erupt on a fictional online network. Three groups each worked on an example of a real issue taken from the archive of an existing local site - to do with a local disturbance, a park that needs smartening up, or conflicts over school fundraising.

We gave each group a set of 25 character cards representing local residents, councillors and officers. Some of the characters came with short descriptions, others were open to interpretation or development by the participants. On the back of each card was an indication of the individual's level of online involvement: absent, lurker, cautious contributor, occasional assertive, or active contributor.

The task for each group was to develop the story of the issue as it evolved (blew out of proportion, became entangled in other issues, became the cause of open slander or the subject of Machiavellian machinations etc). They were asked to describe what happened in the locality - on-list, off-list and offline - as a consequence of the original post and any subsequent comments. Groups did this using a flip chart sheet, post-its, cards, drawings and their fertile imaginations. I dropped in a news flash about a related mini-crisis to spice things up where necessary.

Exercises like this are always accompanied by a flickering frisson of risk, but this one went very smoothly as all participants had an understanding of how these digital conversations go in the real world, and they grabbed the opportunity to be inventive. I was impressed by the number of clear generalisable points that emerged during the feedback as each group told their story.

For instance, watching an issue erupt or slowly develop, how do council representatives judge whether debate will tail off or reach a critical point at which they have to respond? And is this an appropriate attitude anyway in the new networked democracy? Numerous questions like this were raised and we'll start sifting through the material very soon.

Previously:
Conversational democracy and neighbourhood online networks

Online networks and neighbourhood action

Maybe neighbourhood blogs reflect neighbourhood demographics?

'Digital engagement'

BeLocal workshop game

It's the human ecology stupid

Local 2.0 workshop

What’s missing is communication, not information

Grassroots social justice

Occasionally you happen upon a house like this, where the tiny frontage is used for awareness-raising, communication and the creation of opportunities to get involved - leaflets to take, notices to read, petitions to sign, plants to buy, a box for donations. One person in one space quietly driving their take on democracy and human rights.

Community development and professionalism: time's up

Cometh the hour. There I was yesterday mumbling ineffectually about the need to defend the once-essential anti-professional ethos of community development; and today politely trying to field yet another earnest enquiry about whether my old organisation, Community Development Foundation, still has anything to do with community development. Meanwhile here's Jon Fitzmaurice of Self-help-housing.org on the Guardian's Joe Public today:

Self-help housing enables people to be active citizens, and it fights the culture of "someone should do something about that". It was once more common, but over the last two decades community development and regeneration has fallen into the hands of professionals preoccupied with management and measurement.

Yes, I saw it happening. And yes, I did protest - too weakly, or too forcefully? I don't know, but either way, CD will be reinvented from the bottom-up by people like Jon Fitzmaurice. Let's hope the others just get out of the way.

You'd hope they'd be angry

A while ago I noted some concerns about the proportion of young people who betray a profound sense of detachment and seem never to have inhabited a democratic culture.

This was just a reflection after a few workshops, firmed-up through discussions with teachers and others; it was certainly not the conclusion of systematic research. It felt as if a lot of the young people we talked to have difficulty with conflicting ideas, and they have little experience of organising, being organised, self-organisation, or organisations.

More recently I picked up on some questions about racism among young people. Then this week, two more snippets to add to this particular pile.

In a meeting on Monday evening a teacher spoke about students, particularly Ghanaian girls, practising clear self-segregation along ethnic lines within school, 'sometimes in a quite aggressive manner'. It's an interesting example because language has nothing to do with it: all Ghanaians speak English. We need to understand more about the sense of threat to community identity that causes these contractions.

And yesterday I spoke to a Dutch researcher who has been interviewing more than thirty young people about their sense of citizenship as reflected in their everyday lives. She said that her work (with a lot of data being processed systematically) confirms my reflections on both these themes.

Going to youth clubs and 'being organised' are not cool and levels of participation in other clubs and associations seem to be low. Racial tension in the Netherlands is worrying, often played out by young people struggling for some physical or cultural territory of their own. Sometimes what seem to be clashes of power may really be defiance against lack of it, or the removal of identity.

I suspect there's a link between these themes, I just don't know quite what it is. I fear it's quite profound, having to do with the struggle for acceptable identity and a denial of access to a democratic culture - all at an age where self-respect is very much under construction. Is what we think we're seeing exceptional, among other contemporary cultures or historically? Are we fussing over nothing new?

Thinking about people aged between say 13 and 19, sometimes I want to ask (it seems to me that they want to ask) 'what's the point of being young these days?' This period in their lives is a transition: to what?

One of the teachers I interviewed recently spoke highly of her students but with some concern about the formlessness of the everyday culture they've been left with. She said:

'You'd think they'd be angry. You'd hope they'd be angry.'

Conversational democracy and neighbourhood online networks

Nesta have organised a substantial event in London next Monday called Reboot Britain, which is about how we can

'punch through the gloom and take advantage of the radically networked digital world we now live in to help revive our economy, rebuild our democratic structures and improve public services.'

Paul Evans has organised a stream of sessions on political innovation. I'm speaking at one of these, alongside Nick Booth, William Perrin and Edward Welsh, which is on the broad-enough topic of Locality: Councillors, Journalists, 'active citizens', community websites and local government communications.

I think I'll focus on the ‘active citizenship’ part of the topic, keep the tech at a respectful distance, and ask ‘What's needed to stimulate active citizenship at local level?’

It'll need a rough distinction between informal and social participation on the one hand, and formal civic and political participation on the other. We need the former in order to stimulate the latter. (Well I know some people do political participation without doing social participation: I've even met folk who voted for them, but we won't have time on monday for the nuances).

To my mind, it doesn't work to suppose that people can be prodded and coerced into civic or political participatory roles when their experience of social participation is impoverished. So it would help if we can develop a thriving communication ecology at neighbourhood level, and get some conversational democracy we can depend on.

In the nick of time, with local democracy gagged and tied to the tracks and the train of public spending cuts thundering down the line, along come gallant dynamic al-action neighbourhood online networks. Hurrah. Let's get out of this metaphor and ask a few questions:

Does the economic logic of these nets imply a more appropriate geographic scale for democratic involvement than currently exists? (Consider, for example, how much difficulty some authorities have in trying to establish meaningful area forums).

Does the inbuilt interactivity imply more conversation?

Does online conversation stimulate offline activity?

Should local authorities be enabling the development of these networks? (Dunh?)

'At work wen they asked my opinion'

We asked some young people to think about the earliest or most significant experience of democracy that they could recall. There were some poignant themes reflecting unstructured lives ('deciding whether to live with my mum or my dad') and then this one:

'at work wen they asked my opinion on the display'

Not much is it? One ordinary lad with low self-esteem helping out for next-to-nothing in a shop or somewhere, and someone took the trouble to ask his opinion. I'm glad we asked for his input and he felt able to respond.

I read today, the mutual relationship between two persons is the smallest building block of society. (Thomas Hylland Eriksen)

Place survey: the headlines

Headline results from the 2008 Place Survey, which reflects and contributes to local priorities under local area agreements in England, have been published today.

• 59 per cent of the population felt they belong to their immediate neighbourhood

• 76 per cent felt that people from different backgrounds got on well together in their local area

• 29 per cent felt they could influence decisions in their local area

• 30 per cent feel that in their local area parents take enough responsibility for the behaviour of their children

• 31 per cent felt that there were problems with people in their local area not treating one another with respect and consideration (37.5% in London).

Links to various formats here.

Empowerment: but what about forces working in the other direction?

A couple of days before the captain jumped ship, the department for Communities and Local Government published a systematic review of the evidence on Empowering communities to influence local decision making.

There's a distinguished collection of researchers behind it, who point out that the community empowerment agenda is still in a nascent stage. But I worry that policy is only looking in one direction.

Local practitioners are a crucially important resource in developing this agenda and bringing it towards fruition.

It is important that government clarify the objectives of empowerment and give a sustained commitment to an agenda that may take a while deliver notable successes.

These simple messages imply the need for developing accessible, inclusive and facilitated strategies for empowerment. The community and voluntary sector and specifically community development techniques have an important role to play here.

The research identifies criteria that drive and define empowerment across six specific mechanisms - asset transfer, citizen governance, e-participation, participatory budgeting, petitions, and redress. There are two summaries - a short and a less-short - and it's useful stuff.

What bothers me is that government consistently and unproductively takes a mechanical approach to cultural problems. Much of our official culture is blindly disempowering, often in the misguided name of detached professionalism. Yes, getting these mechanisms right will make a difference, but what about all the embedded forces working in the other direction?

Last week I attended a meeting run by a division of a social services department, with nine or ten professionals around the table and three 'ordinary citizens'. It was a breathtaking demonstration of apparently unintentional disempowerment: the way the entrance of the citizens into the room was preceded by secret session about them; how one of them was told to keep quiet as she was 'not part of the process'; the lack of welcome or explanation of process; the negative body language; the turning away as they left; the 'wait outside please' to be followed by a communicated 'decision', which itself in turn was unclear; the failure to thank them for coming or to recognise their expertise or commitment.

These were neutral residents who were trying to help with certain social problems. How would the structures of disempowerment be cranked up for people who were perceived guilty of some misdemeanour, I wondered.

Such processes coagulate around bureaucracies, and even working across disciplines the participants fail to notice what has happened to the way they treat human beings. It all contributes to a terribly constraining culture of disempowerment all around us. Could we please have a policy initiative designed to crack some of this open?

Maybe now is the time

Here's New Start's Clare Goff on the demise of the community empowerment bill (via Julian Dobson):

'Maybe now is the time for fresh ideas to revive the collective voice and rebuild politics from the grassroots up.'

Absolutely right. Quick thoughts on the democratic turmoil, starting with three angles on those expenses:

Some people (including one who really should know better) have suggested that the issue of MPs' expenses is 'not that important'. These are the ones telling us that we've all fiddled our expenses haven't we?

Well no, we haven't. For a start several million of us have never had expenses to fiddle, and I suggest a high proportion of the rest of us haven't done so. Especially where public money is concerned. So if you have a conscience problem, don't dribble it on the rest of us.

Then we have those telling us that continued exposure of this systematised greed risks 'making it impossible for people to regain their confidence in the democratic system.' The archbeak's piece in the Times is in my view not as bad a piece of thinking as you might suppose from the broadcast headlines - but still, it's a bit feeble to tell us to stop pointing out where the cracks are in democracy just because we might make them worse. The cracks are the problem, not the publicising of them.

There's a third angle which claims that our political system is less corrupt than many others around the world, so stop making such a fuss. Duh.

And those holding any of the above viewpoints are, I suggest, part of the problem.

Three significant themes seem to be missing or understated in the debate so far. First, clarifying the connection with the unregulated greed of financiers which led to the recession; and understanding the extent to which all this greed was given room to grow in the fertile soil of Thatherite individualism, and has been shamelessly tended and nurtured under new Labour.

Secondly, emphasising that many claims made 'within' the crooked legalities of the parliamentary system reflect a decline or absence of acceptable values. Where is the discussion about values in public life, where the code of behaviour which MPs could reasonably be expected to sign up to?

And thirdly, returning to Clare Goff's point, we need to be linking this to the crisis of democracy at local level. The current shambolic state of Westminster is an opportunity for a fresh and vigorous exploration of a new kind of democracy. It will have to be a conversational democracy with a strong local dimension, and inclusive social media have an obvious role to play in helping us shape that. I want this debate to be wide open with low expectations of particular practical conclusions - let's have many thousands of flowers blooming so that creativity can take its chance.

But we must also take careful account of the alarming proportion of young people who betray a profound sense of detachment and have never inhabited a democratic culture. Speaking to one group last week I had the sense that their experience of influencing the decision-making processes that affect them has been so scarce that they might feel threatened by almost any form of empowerment. All their relationships are shallow, they have difficulty with conflicting ideas, and they have little experience of organising, being organised, self-organisation, or organisations. They have been failed.

I can't be the only one to see a connection here. This is about the long-term neglect of everyday democracy, and it's payback time.

(And to be perfectly clear, I am very definitely not categorising all or even most young people in this way. See previously eg 'Kids these days').

Participation: levels and barriers

I was talking to a group of seven or eight older people the other day, who were all active in social and civic roles in an area where most had lived for more than ten years (some more than thirty years).

There was clear consensus among the group that local people were neither more nor less likely to get involved now than they were 20 years ago. 'It's still five per cent,' was one man's way of summing it up.

People spoke about barriers to participation, and got quite worked up about the impact of CRB checks, the amount of documentation you have to read to be an active citizen, and the compensation culture:

There's far more stuff you have to read. Strategies and risk analyses. Society can be so litigious, that keeps people back a bit. People are generally wary of this compensation culture, the blame culture...

It was noted that scout groups, for example, have great difficulty recruiting volunteers, and village fetes are in decline because of the insurance costs.

So there are powerful forces working against participation, and yet these experienced folk felt that levels of involvement had not really changed. What's going on then?

Perhaps previously the barriers to participation were lower but the opportunities and calls for involvement were fewer. Was there more social and cultural participation (local societies, faith group involvement, sports clubs) and less civic participation? Or does it just seem that way now because we're trying to force civic participation and finding levels of social involvement inadequate? Presumably there were also higher levels of union and political party membership, which could more readily be mobilised into political participation.

These questions highlight the need to understand if people progress from social to political participation (which seems the more likely direction, if there is one); and if so, how and why they do so. Wouldn't it be good if there was some well-funded research going on, which might give us insights into such questions? Ooh look, that's handy, Involve have announced just such a project. Presumably they'll be talking to older people.

Consensus, community, and cultural capital

I’ve been gathering some thoughts for a session on empowerment and participation with some MA students at Staffordshire Uni this week, which has sent me back to Jacqui Karn’s excellent book Narratives of neglect. Fearful that I wouldn't do it justice, I failed to blog it at the time; but here are some belated thoughts based around some of my notes, covering two main themes: consensus and community; and cultural capital.

The book is an exploration of the processes of participation and governance in the regeneration of a Manchester estate. No-one I’ve mentioned it to in the participation field seems to have read it, which is a shame, because it's packed with insights.

I come at Karn’s analysis from the viewpoint that, from the time of the initial neighbourhood governance proposals, the government’s empowerment agenda was predicated on unrealistic assumptions that community could be construed to mean consensus.

Problems arise where consensus is not apparent; or, being assumed, appears to be threatened. The idea of ‘moral community’ which characterised the Blair years requires practitioners to pursue consensus at all costs. In this context, as Karn puts it, ‘community is in essence constituted as unproblematic,’ and participatory practices constitute ‘the community’ as those who participate constructively, cooperatively and reasonably within the process.

Those who do not adhere to the assumptions of what is best for the community are labelled as ungovernable and subject to demonising mechanisms that exclude them. Groups come to be categorised in terms of governability, which in turn legitimises coercion.

‘This dual, contractual emphasis on encouraging compliance with a latent community and the control of an ungovernable minority legitimises the use of state agencies’ coercive powers against the “irresponsible.”’

Consensus becomes a question of ensuring (or even guaranteeing) similarity rather than recognising and working with difference. In my view this is an important point for understanding how the engagement agenda might fuse with the cohesion agenda.

The second key theme refreshes some of my own recent thinking about the lack of attention paid to cultural capital. Karn stressed the way power was reflected in the language and knowledge that participants brought to the process she described. She found that

‘The dominance of professional language and knowledge undermined residents’ position both in the partnerships and amongst fellow residents as they so clearly lacked the capital at stake in the process to be able to exert an authoritative voice.’

Karn argues that the professionals in the context she studied tended to conceive of the community as in close contact and united. She adds that they tend ‘to present their knowledge of local problems and solutions as incontestable.’

‘The power dynamics created by this difference in the knowledge claims of participants are particularly important in establishing that the capital at stake in this field is not social capital but cultural.’

Karn, J. (2007). Narratives of neglect: community, regeneration and the governance of security. Cullompton, Willan.

 

 

Why don't we do it in the road? (Updated)

If you talk to Streets Alive's Chris Gittins about organising a street party, and maybe you should, one of the things he'll suggest is that the organisers' meetings be held in the street rather than in people's houses.

'A good place to hold meetings is in the street as it is more welcoming and you can catch people as they go by.'

Just a few neighbours for half an hour or so sitting on a wall working out who's going to do what.

This came up in a conversation today and sparked someone to tell me that where they live, in south London, ward councillors have meetings in the street. If you can do it, a brilliant way of making democracy visible, and minimising the fussy trappings of power.

Someone tell me this happens where they live too.

Postscript

Thanks to Chris Corrigan for this pic of the 'hedgenda' he mentions in his comment. Pic by openspace facilitator Michael Herman.

Coming round

This blog was in a coma for five days - medical report from Typepad still awaited - so for once I will succumb to the temptation just to offer quick links to some good stuff going on.

What works in enabling cross-community interactions? Perspectives on good policy and practice. This is a paper by Andrew Orton for CLG as part of their work on meaningful interaction. It matters because it's about small-scale community activity and informal connections gradually getting some of the policy attention that is needed.

Dancing with Down syndrome - Hildy Gottlieb links to a striking video to remind us to keep pushing back at the Culture of Can’t.

The Eden Project has launched (more quietly than expected; one suspects there is some tense politics in the background) The Big Lunch - street parties everywhere on 19 July.

'The day after the Big Lunch, people will walk down their street and know someone in most windows.'

Paul Evans shows there's even benefit in a human being of the right calibre travelling to Miami, by coming back with knowledge about Mixed ink, which looks like a sweet way of stimulating civic involvement.

Helen Milner and colleagues have set up a blog on digital engagement (which I applaud) with an invitation to write yet another manifesto (which I don't). Manifestos (manifesti?) have a role, but it's usually to do with the process of structuring action around pricniples and surely we've come further than that. Maybe we should (a) dig out the three or four previous manifesto attempts in this country and be familiar with them, together with the recommendations of the shelf-and-a-half or reports that got generated (unh, mea culpa); and (b) assess what impact they had.

Julian Dobson quite rightly calls for more thought about the over-excited bashing of public sector language ('jargon'). The Local Government Association have got all lathered on this; or rather, I suspect, in New Labour style they are following some assumptions of popular media fancy. Reminded me of my wee challenge to the Plain English Mafia.

New research into participation, empowerment and social care

Today I was in Eindhoven relishing a new role as 'publication coach' for several PhD students carrying out research on social work themes. The expectation is that I help the researchers towards some form of publication. In return, the peculiar privilege is that I hear at an early stage about some significant research issues and findings in social care, empowerment and community development.

Like for example, this morning I heard about qualitative research into multi-disciplinary case conferences for vulnerable older people who live at home independently.

You might have five or six professionals clustered in a clinic, talking about an older person, in their necessary absence. The research explores the awkward disempowerment implied - 'on what grounds can you take these decisions on my behalf, and not tell me about them?'

Later I got to hear how participation in youth councils in the Netherlands might be percieved as spurious. According to the researcher, the rhetoric of involving young people in governance emphasises one of five discourses: representation, power, self development, responsibility, or efficiency. For example, a municipality might advance a policy of youth participation on the grounds of representation or simply of improving efficiency. The hypothesis is that tension between these approaches will have negative effects. As I understand it, the youth councils aren't exactly celebrated as empowering arenas as far as political decision-making processes are concerned, and there's a lot of room for understanding.

One of the researchers has been looking at the social networks and cultural capital of immigrant entrepreneurs in the Netherlands. It seems that the power of their social capital is not in question: but low levels cultural capital, by comparison with Dutch entrepreneurs, are likely to be problematic. Most striking here is the extent to which the education system can be seen not as a platform for entrepreneurs, but as a mechanism for filtering them out.

Then I got to find out about how young people in vocational education experience citizenship, in the home, workplace, school, neighbourhood and leisure activities. The early impression is that they experience school as a sharply undemocratic environment, and this has a negative effect on their sense of citizenship for the future. if this is so, as a policy issue it's not trivial.

Finally, a chance to catch up with Laurens de Graaf, from Tilburg University, who I believe to be uniquely positioned with a wealth of research material to explore the similarities and differences between political and social participation. For example - is there really a clear gender distinction between community activists motivated by social involvement and those committed to civic governance roles? Do people migrate between the two? Is there a career path from one to the other? Do they share common values?

So I quite fancy this role of 'publications coach'. It requires good listening skills, ability to appreciate the research topic and methodology, and to place it in the context of other knowledge and social policy, and some familiarity with the literature. If I can encourage Laurens to pursue his questions, and the other researchers likewise to bring their results to publishable form, it will be more than rewarding.
 

BeLocal workshop game

The other day I ran a game at a BeLocal workshop on 'Building and engaging local communities using digital technologies,' organised by Simon Grice.

The intention was to use fiction to create a local context and bring a touch of reality to the fresh excitement of 'freeing up information' for the citizen. 

Time to refer to the recent Power of Information Taskforce Report (beta) report which recommends that UK central government should create the capability for others to re-use and innovate with 'official' datasets. They quote the Prime Minister:

‘Public information does not belong to government, it belongs to the public on whose behalf government is conducted'

- but of course we need to go further. Most people aren't going to be too interested in whether or not information 'belongs' to them, if it doesn't help them or is not pertinent. If we can create information services, personalised or not, that advance the engagement and empowerment of people who experience disadvantage and exclusion, then making them relevant to others is not likely to be too problematic.

And invariably, as Simon noted during the workshop, discussions among information professionals tend to drift away from 'community' to reflect a precoccupation with the systems.

So the objective of the game was to devise an information system, but it had to be based on a neighbourhood context - invented and described by participants; and on the day-to-day lives of individuals - also invented and described by participants.

In the end I over-prescribed some of the conditions but each of the three groups rose to the increasing challenges of complex neighbourhood environments and awkward personal circumstances for their character. The outcomes, when they came to describe their proposed systems, were inventive and sincere: given some of the IT 'solutions' in which local authorities have invested serious money, you might think they had a ready market.

The potential value of the game was summed up for me in the narrative developed by one of the groups about their character - a 51-year old gay formerly married self employed tradesman with no computer skills, who became the driving force for a locally-grown information service that addressed exaggerated and stifling perceptions of the fear of crime.

Lots of new services are going to emerge in the post-Taskforce context and in the slipstream of the Timely Information Initiative, and it may start to feel like a bewildering frantic dash. Reflecting creatively on the environment in which people need and seek information is surely essential for getting this right.

Much of the content of the BeLocal workshop has been captured here by Carl Haggerty.

Social media and local democracy

Paul Evans is forging towards a clearer understanding of how we use social media to contribute to local democracy, not just for citizens but also for councillors. He notes that there's plenty of welcome effort going into freeing-up central and local government datasets for re-use, but 'making data available to clever techies so that they use it in mashups is all very well'.

What about the more qualitative data? The pamphlets that make arguments - the kind of things that politicians really do get overloaded with?

What seems to be needed, he suggests, is for local government to find a way of motivating citizens' groups 'to survey all of the policy information on a given subject and to discuss it in an eavesdroppable way'. What will make a difference is being able to evaluate public policy options. Which may mean

finding local co-ordinators to establish policy discussion groups - using collaborative filtering media to identify information of interest, isolate the useful data, and present it in a way that local councillors can use it.

What this seems to amount to is acknowledging more voices while encouraging them to cluster. Democracy will change with us as we go.

Vote 'stocks' while local villains last

Patrick Wintour reports in yesterday's Guardian that the government is preparing a green paper which may allow local people to vote on what form of punishment is handed out to convicted criminals in their neighbourhood. This would apply to low-level crimes such as disorderly conduct. (Daily Mail coverage here).

It does have the unfortunate feel of government by the miserable standards of contemporary broadcasting. As I understand it, a broadcast programme can have expert judges dismissing a comic-but-flat-footed celebrity in a televised dancing competition to the resounding displeasure of millions, who then overturn the decision by the power of popular vote. Be sure the message did not go unnoticed in Whitehall.

Maybe it's just one of those 'test-the-water' ideas which policy makers dribble from time to time, to see if anyone's paying attention. But it has its justification in Louise Casey's review of community engagement in the justice system, which I mentioned a few weeks ago.

I note also that the green paper will be published (this spring) by the Ministry of Justice, not by the Home Office; and that Communities Secretary Hazel Blears is said to be supportive. So it may well come to pass in some form.

Watch out for the option of online voting to spice it up. A few moments thought about just who would be motivated to review thoroughly the available evidence in any given local case and make a judgement on it, should be enough to shiver the spine a little. The potential for amplifying local social divisions, rather than stimulating cohesion, is not trivial. It could force people to 'take more of an interest in local issues' (and is this the best way to achieve that objective?) or more likely it could lead to more people withdrawing from local affairs in despair.

But let's say a senior civil servant, having worked hard promoting this policy measure, is making their way home one evening in spring. Turning the corner of their home street they are accosted by a local person coming out of a pub.

Believing themselves under attack and lashing out, the official's elbow strikes the other's head (who, your honour, was just asking for a light). Down he goes, striking his head against the kerb. Blood on the pinstripes, sirens in the night, intensive care, incensed relatives and furious friends who, ah, happen to live nearby. The case comes to court: the official is found to have acted with unreasonable violence. Invited to decide on the punishment, how do local people vote? Would you be ready to accept the outcome yourself?

Wintour writes in the Guardian:

The home secretary, Jacqui Smith, said that she favoured local people being given a much clearer choice in deciding what form of community punishment is imposed in their neighbourhood.

['Community punishment'? What does that mean?]

Smith told the Guardian it was wrong that Casey, former head of the Respect unit, was not retained in the Home Office but was moved to the Children's Department soon after Gordon Brown became prime minister. As a result the government lost focus on antisocial behaviour, Smith argues.

Three separate points strike me, to do with the misguided respect agenda, understandings of the role of expertise in governance, and the historical precedent for locally-meted punishment.

(i) The government ought to refocus on civil relations, but it was right to drop the Respect agenda. It was a half-baked set of policies which used disrespect, through an emphasis on shaming, to promote a peculiarly partial approach to civil relations. In particular, it completely failed even to acknowledge that our society is riddled with sanctioned disrespectful behaviour on the part of 'respectable' citizens. More, if more is needed, in chapter 1 of this.

(ii) In three or four presentations last year I used a slide about the three roles in governance, emphasising the need for a balance of influence between elected representative, citizen, and public sector officer. I expressed the concern, which seems to be recognised by people I've spoken to, that most of us emerge from our education system with a feeble understanding of the role of officers (expertise) in local democracy - how important their expertise is in areas too specialised for most of the rest of us to follow.

Broadly speaking, this lack of understanding is reinforced by our popular media. They bash our public services at every opportunity and central government stifles support - for social workers, teachers, probation workers and many others trying to compensate for all sorts of social shortfall.

If this new initiative erodes the ability of the courts to apply their expertise - for instance, in an understanding of research which explains the effects of different punishments in different circumstances - it could be diminishing democracy, not enhancing it. And as one of the commentators on Comment is free puts it:

surely we vote for people who then represent us -

not vote for people who then say "i can't be bothered - YOU do it"

Oh yes and there's that irritating little point (picked up recently by Paul Evans over on Local Democracy) that it's not unheard-of for the public to be wrong.

(iii) Sometime last year I got interested in the system of gebuurten developed in medieval european cities of Belgium and the Netherlands. These were neighbourhood associations and in Ghent each covered an average of 45-50 households. All adult inhabitants were full members of their gebuurte, regardless of their wealth or social status. Heads of households elected a 'dean' who could exact punishment through fines for a wide range of offences related to anti-social behaviour and community norms.

The deans' role was to keep peace and order. They carried out a form of locally-accountable justice, and the system survived in cities like Ghent and Leuven for something like 500 years. I hope to be able to research the geburrten in more detail in future, because I suspect they point to an achieved equilibrium in terms of maintaining local involvement in justice. I'm particularly curious about one possible implication, suggesting that neighbourhood online networks might function most effectively if they include a governance role.

Meanwhile, back to the future: I'm not at all averse to this government exploring as far as it can the limits of local involvement in public services, in fact I applaud that. But I would rather they did so with a better record of having listened when arguments built up against them.

Previously (selected):
Criminalising kids: questions about risk and respect

Respect agenda dissolves in self-parody

Young people, respect and uniforms.

 

Government as 'pilot light'

Over on Podnosh, Nick Booth notes how 'we habitually structure most government on an assumption of permanence' and wants us to work out how, when we need less government, we 'scale it back and put the excess capacity to useful work elsewhere'.

Does it make sense, he asks, to create 'some stronger culture of treating government as something that gets deployed where and when it is needed'?

It strikes me as something that is fully consistent with the network society, where the old hierarchies continue to shrivel. It will depend on more widespread experience of participating in governance than we can boast at present, so it fits with the momentum of empowerment.

And it will require and/or give rise to a revised understanding of the idea of a 'job'. I see all these things, including Nick's basic principle, as desirable.

Make your neighbourhood nicer

There's a superb little booklet published by Refugee Action offering 11 easy steps to helping make newcomers feel welcome at neighbourhood level.

'There are lots of ways to make asylum seekers and refugees feel more at home and more valued in your neighbourhood. Everything from setting your nan straight about the asylum system to getting a bit bolder and braver by letting your MP know that us ordinary Brits really do care about how newcomers are treated.'

As Esme Peach says on the back cover:

If you read just one Make your neighbourhood nicer: how to welcome refugees and asylum seekers in 11 easy steps book this year, read this one.

Empowerment and community development

There's a timely and well-written CDF short paper on community development and empowerment published recently. It pays more attention than I expected to informal relations and cultural change, and concludes:

Empowerment can reach higher into decision-making procedures: setting agendas, raising aspirations and ensuring that the channels for communication and influencing between community members and their representatives, even at the topmost tiers, are accessible and acknowledged as legitimate aspects of the democratic culture. Community development practice aims to embed these structures and understanding into everyday democracy so that everyone knows how they can influence decisions as individual citizens but, more importantly, through collective approaches involving learning, dialogue and negotiation.

Community engagement and consultation in Manningham

I've just published a couple of reports on pieces of work I did for Bradford Libraries earlier this year, to do with the refurbishment of Manningham Family and Community Library under the Community Libraries Programme.

The first was an exercise working with residents to develop their own plan for consultation on the library development. Rather than impose a consultation framework, Bradford Libraries sought to help local people to prepare their own.

The second was an open event designed to raise awareness of the refurbishment project, engage with local people and invite them to submit views. I designed a treasure-hunt inside and outside the library, exploiting the presence of the architect and his drawings. This was supplemented with some basic text messaging consultation.

The first report is called Ask them.

The second is called Manningham Treasures.

Previously on this blog: Community engagement by treasure hunt.

 

Empowerment: some nuances

Following my note yesterday about representation and participation, Regen and Renewal reports some comments on the empowerment white paper made by Vince Taylor, head of strategic economic development at Sunderland City Council. He suggests that the empowerment plan could prove ineffective because 'few people are interested in playing an active role in their communities':

'The white paper focused too much on imposing the Government's view of empowerment on communities, rather than considering how people may want to be engaged.'

Not new, but valid as far as it goes: the Ipsos-MORI report on empowerment based on New Deal for Communities data noted:

‘While there is a clear push from the government towards increasing community empowerment, the extent to which people want this is far less clear cut. The evidence suggests a spectrum of interest, with only a very small minority at one end who want to be actively involved, a larger minority at the other end who have no interest at all, with most in the middle.’

Yes, most people just want to have a say or to know they can influence things if they choose to. But low levels of motivation could at least partly be explained by the fact that most of us have grown up with habitual detached indifference on the part of authorities towards us - indeed systematised discouragement of seeking to influence.

My take on this is that empowerment is not a constant commodity, but reflects its cultural context: it is capable of being increased. It's the cultural context which should be the subject of change - putting it crudely, with the objective that it should not be seen as exceptional to want to have influence on decision-making processes; nor exceptional, for those with decisions to make, to want to involve those affected.

I'd also tender the heresy that community development is not necessarily the sole essential ingedient in the mix. CD promotes empowerment among other things through involvement. Involvement is not the only source of an increased feeling of influence or of the sense of power. However, by promoting collective involvement, CD is likely to multiply that sense of increased influence more powerfully than anything else.

To my shame I never got round to spending time on it before, but it happens that this morning I sought-out and read the CLG definition of community empowerment (page 12 here) which, er, needs a bit of work:

'Community empowerment is the giving of confidence, skills and power to communities to shape and influence what public bodies do for or with them.’

'Giving'? What about the confidence and skills that residents already have but which is overlooked or stifled? I don't like to be too picky, but definitions need a bit more thought than appears to have been spent on this. Why not just say ‘bestowing our largesse on the peasants’ and be done with it?

Yes, it is about power, but increasingly I'm wondering whether 'empowerment' - presented as feeling one is able to influence - is really the best approach to bring about the necessary cultural shift.

Hugh Butcher offered some thoughts of lasting validity on the CLG empowerment discussion forum a year ago:

'the Action plan seems to lack a recognition of the multiple 'faces' of power - it focuses overwhelmingly on a) 'decision making' power and b) 'power-to' (building people's confidence, skills &c).  I would like to have seen more acknowledgement of: c) power to set agendas (the proposals in the Action Plan are 90% about responding to opportunities to 'engage' with those who have already set the agendas) and d) the power to shape the underlying assumptions (the taken-for-granted 'framing' assumptions, beliefs and values) which prompts the identification of particular kinds of agendas (and ignore others) in the first place.'

Representation and participation

Yesterday to an ESRC seminar on democracy and participation, to hear Gerry Stoker, always good value, reminding us that most people aren't after active participation in local governance. We want the right to have a say over the issues that affect us, but most of us just want a quiet time.

'We should be cautious about our expectations about the extent and depth of engagement that people want. We need to design institutions, structure processes and develop support systems to make it easier for people to engage... without at the same time expecting them to give up their lives and become professional politicans.'

What's needed, he says, is for representatives to do a bit more representing, to be more accessible to those they represent and be required to explain their decisions.

Which echoes nicely a note from Peter Hetherington in yesterday's Guardian, referring to a system of citizen-government partnership in Delhi, known as "bhagidari":

a proactive programme where officials regularly have to explain their actions to a range of groups, from charities and residents' welfare organisations to small traders. "No decision is sacrosanct."

Involving local people in delivering local services

A few months ago I was talking to some senior people in local government and asked them what they and their citizens co-produced: not 'what service do you provide?' but what is it that results from the combination of that service and the involvement of local people? Yup, I got the quizzical silence I should have expected.

Well I don't have the right kind of robust optimism, but the people at nef do. Here's Josh-Ryan Collins in yesterday's Guardian finding a silver lining in the polluting combination of the recession and new labour's approach to the public sector as a competitive market.

He offers four examples of how authorities are beginning to support service models of co-production 'that deliver mutliple benefits in the short term, and build future resilience.' Such examples suggest

'how public bodies can create real value for people over time, instead of ruthlessly pursuing the shortsighted goals of bigger-is-better and more-for-less... These models acknowledge the importance of spending public money in ways that deliver social, environmental and economic benefits, assessing performance according to this "triple bottom line"... The challenge now is to turn the exception into the rule, moving beyond discredited market solutions to strengthen communities and economies, to build resilience locally, and to promote sustainable wellbeing.'

Meanwhile, eslewhere in the Guardian, David Clements takes a rather clumsy pot-shot at the government's 'communities' agenda. He's right to be concerned at 'the notion that democracy can be imposed by diktat', but I'd offer a couple of reflections:

(a) the sustainable communities bill was sponsored by a Tory MP, Nick Hurd, which might at least suggest broader recognition that the involvement of local people in the decision-making processes that affect them is long overdue; and

(b) there may be a lot of bad practice in community engagement but that does not invalidate the principle. We need to improve practice urgently before more cynicism spreads.

Previously: The public sector is in crisis.

Celebrating community activists

There's a nicely uncomplicated recent article by Jamie Carpenter in Regen and Renewal about Jean Bartlett, who is an award-winning community activist on the Aylesbury estate in south London.

It's reassuring to have straightforward journalism that doesn't over-emotionalise either the role of an established, committed activist or the challenging conditions in which they are trying to bring about change. Negative media coverage of the estate over the years has not helped, indeed according to Bartlett it has made residents 'ashamed of where they live'. And arguments on whether or not the council's decision to demolish the estate was justified will continue to simmer.

But I've worked on an estate where regeneration - including decanting and reinstatement of residents - has been transformational. I've worked on one, like the Aylesbury, where residents voted against a stock transfer to tenant management and really struggled to adjust to that ballot outcome.

And I've worked in a place where residents might well have welcomed the idea of regeneration with or without demolition and decanting, but saw no chance of any initiative coming near them. Being invisible in public policy reflects a profound level of disempowerment and exclusion.

And in all this we seldom hear much about the attitudes of regeneration officials and developers - often supportive and ennabling, but also often steeped in a subtle patronising condescension which disempowers routinely. And sometimes worse: thanks to William Perrin for a disturbing example from personal experience in this recent comment. See Jacqui Karn's excellent Narratives of neglect for an insightful study of how some of this happens.

It's important we continue to support and report on people like Jean Bartlett and those who work with them, because they have an uncelebrated impact on the quality of life of a lot of people.

Like a light going on

Earlier this year I worked with Linda Constable on a pilot project with four library services in England, using the 'living library' process. Living library, pioneered in Denmark, allows someone to 'borrow' a person for a conversation, to explore their experience or interests and to understand other backgrounds and cultures. The project sought to develop a community development model, taking advantage of the trusted place of libraries in the public realm.

Among the participants was Harry, a World War 2 veteran about 90 years old. He was in his early twenties when he found himself stranded with his brother on the beaches of Dunkirk. One of the people who 'borrowed' Harry for a chat told us how insightful it was to hear him talk about events: 'Like a light going on’.

The project was funded by the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council and involved Bournemouth, Bradford, Kent and Staffordshire library services. The report is now available here.

Previously: The hands in conversation

'What in God's name is a community organizer?'

Here's an article by Peter Dreier & John Atlas in The Nation today, describing how former New York Governor George Pataki referred to Barack Obama at the Republican National Convention:

'He was a community organizer. What in God's name is a community organizer? I don't even know if that's a job.'

Then former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani delivered his own snickering hit job. 'He worked as a community organizer. What? Maybe this is the first problem on the resumé,' mocked Giuliani.

A few minutes later, in her acceptance speech for the GOP vice presidential nomination, Sarah Palin declared, 'I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a community organizer, except that you have actual responsibilities.'

One of the responses of the Obama camp was:

'Let's clarify something for them right now. Community organizing is how ordinary people respond to out-of-touch politicians and their failed policies.'

One doesn't like to see politics so crudely polarised, but still, if the republicans end up in opposition because of such a crass attitude I would find it so reassuring.

'We would like a say in our way of life'

Over on Podnosh Nick Booth points to a short film produced for the Edgbaston Constituency in Birmingham on the impact of post office closures. It was designed to be used as supporting evidence submitted to Postwatch.

It struck me as I watched it that the defence of local post offices needs to be packaged not just as an older people's issue but in other ways also.

One of the participants understandably says that 'pensioners are being pushed on one side for money.' But at the same time, it's an issue to do with the provision of a range of services at the appropriate local level, through outlets that contribute significantly to people's sense of community. Ideally perhaps there should be far more 'whole-neighbourhood' campaigning because all generations will miss these resources if they go.

One of the participants describes the post office as 'part of my heritage'. It's a remark which would be easy to gloss over, but I suggest it's worth reflecting on.

What I think it means is that this person places significant value on the role of the post office in his social life, over a period of time, in that locality. Some people place similar value on a pub or a park or their library. This is not a selfish version of heritage, it is heritage valued as a shared resource. What kind of society declines to recognise such value and support it where possible?

As another contributor says, 'We would like a say in our way of life'. That too is an expression of a value, articulated here by ordinary people and also, as it happens, apparent in government intentions - in the empowerment white paper, for instance.

Government and media have for years been lamenting the decline of local quality of life, so I don't understand how come there is so little political support for the post office network. Just because the commercial model of the post office is wobbly, it doesn't mean that the social argument in favour of providing their services at the most local level is difficult to grasp.

Previously:

• Post offices, informality, and participation.
• Please serve yourself: rural post offices.
• The local post office: a brand in jeopardy.
• Post offices and social value.

Schools overwhelmed by parenting role?

Some years ago a community worker was telling me about the children in her area - 'some of them lead such unstructured lives,' she said, 'it's amazing they turn up for anything.'

Now I fear there is truth in this:

"Schools are being required to take on more and more of the responsibilities that rightly belong to parents; and to provide more of the stability in children's lives which should be provided by families."

The quote is from Philip Parkin, general secretary of the teachers' union Voice, in today's Guardian. The article by Jessica Shepherd notes:

Schools already have to check pupils for weapons, gang membership and extremist views, as well as measure their weight and speech development.

The [UK government] schools secretary, Ed Balls, wants schools to chart children's well-being, teenage pregnancies, drug problems and criminal records from next year as well.

Parkin said he was worried that the more schools did for parents, the less responsibility they would take for their children.

"The transfer of responsibility becomes complete and the expectations upon parents reduce," he said.

This prediction might be far-fetched, I don't know, but it's worrying, and it fits with my growing sense that there is a sharpening contrast between those young people who have supported childhoods and those who don't.

Part of the response might be to ask, is it too late to put forward neighbourhoods as the primary environment where norms of behaviour are shared, tested, learned and accommodated? Is it possible to rescue the idea of neighbours as co-producers of the culture and norms of behaviour around them?

Not, it seems, while so many of the sources of cultural capital (including education but especially 'parenting') are only fitfully or partially available to so many. (I really mean something broader than 'parenting' - positive individualised support from known and trusted adults is what I mean).

Schools also have to deal with our society's inconsistencies around the baggage and paraphenalia of faith groups, as in yesterday's court judgement in favour of a 14-year-old Sikh girl who had been banned from school for wearing the kara (a bangle widely accepted as a symbol of the Sikh 'race and religion') in defiance of regulations. (NB in some interpretations, the case rested on the definition of Sikhism as both race and religion, making the school governors' role a no-win situation and probably leaving quite a few of the supporters of Liberty, which supported the student's case, a bit uncomfortable).

School regulations on jewellery it seems (not to mention daggers of course, another widely accepted Sikh symbol) can be trumped by religion, especially if it can defend itself as race. This makes it hard for teachers and governors to know where society expects them to take a stand. And when we're all confused, there's even less stability in young people's lives.

Not engaging but docking

Over on Podnosh Nick Booth has come up with a thought-provoking metaphor about council and government officials -

Officers are sincerely trying to picture interesting ways to approach the community, connect with it, create an airlock where they and the community can talk and then [get] back into their own orbiters, reseal the doors, flush out the airlocks and return to business.

Well right enough, I've encountered a few flushed-out airlocks in community meetings before now. Guess I just never realised their significance.

I'm with you so far Nick. And yes, I too worry that

the conversation is so often based on the assumption that ‘services’ are separate from the people they serve.

But being separate from is not the same as being irrelevant to. Nick worries that this view is perpetuated 'because services are rarely delivered by the community they are intended to serve.'

Well of course they're not, because services are the provision of something from beyond that which is immediately available. The rhetoric of 'community' (local people, interest group or category of people with a common need) providing services is often questionable in all sorts of ways. 'With local people'? - yes. 'By local people'? - not necessarily.

Maybe my feeble title allusion to Stevie Smith could come in handy. How do you know if someone with difficulties in their life is not waving but drowning? You need to know something about them, have some common bond, and/or be close enough to be able to make a judgement. You may also need to have the resources to take action, which helps explain how services come to be organised on an extra-local basis.

Part of the reason why services become detached has to do with the professionalising ethos, which tends to make it harder and harder for even the best-intentioned official to integrate what they're doing into everyday life at local level.

Still, Nick is definitely onto something, and I think it's the on-off, 9-5 nature of the connection between service provider and resident. (I'm resisting the temptation to explore the AC/DC metaphor here. Go ahead, if you think you're tough enough). The docking image resonates because it suggests an obscure imperialist power, with connotations of imposed dependency - a potentially colonising force landing to see what it can make of things, where the essential inequality of transactions is likely to be deepened, not re-negotiated and evened.

As an afterthought, I wonder about the effects of car-mentality. In my time I've undoubtedly covered more miles on foot and on two wheels than at the wheel of a car, and I'm often struck by the way that being cocooned in a moving metal box transforms people's attitudes towards others. I think we might be surprised at how the boxed separateness of modern mobility has come to influence relations by creating an on-off, inside/outside, connected/disconnected mindset. 'Docking' sums it up neatly.

Where relations between service provider and residents are engaged and functional, what is it that's different? How would we modify Nick's metaphor? It doesn't mean that staff have to live in the neighbourhood or that services have to be delivered by residents.

I think it means that services are developed with the involvement of local people in the decision-making processes, are constantly refined in relation to their responses, and that those responsible for providing them are familiar and welcome to those whose situation requires it.

If you're on a bike or on foot, you don't 'dock' to have a conversation with someone, client or neighbour. You're already where they happen to be.

We still haven't got the hang of democracy

Let me see if I have this right. The elected leaders of 27 European nations, supported by an army of advisers and officials, developed a binding constitutional text called the Lisbon Treaty. To emphasise its undoubted importance, and/or because they were so confident that it would be accepted, they included a condition to the effect that if any of the nations rejected it, it was no longer valid.

So one nation rejects it, and they're thrown into confusion. How bright is that?

Of course, to some extent that precisely represents the problem. Highly-assertive leadership struggles to entertain the possibility of other views - in this case almost to the extent of denial.

The Irish 'no' vote also illustrates some of the things that are problematic about referenda, such as over-simplification of complex issues and decision-making-without-responsibility. So is the referendum thought to constitute a valid reaction against responsibility-without-accountability? You takes your choice.

One comment here calls for a parallel survey:

'the most important question is whether they would consider themselves competent to decide on the treaty's future.'

Modern democracy feels very tender and undeveloped. Many of us still experience democracy as something occasional that intrudes into our lives from time to time, rather than something which permeates everyday life. Did you have a democratic childhood? Did you experience democratic processes at home and at school? Is your workplace democratic, do the agencies in your neighbourhood engage with you to help you influence their practice? Forget about democratic 'traditions', we've only just started.

In my experience, when you engage with people on the issues that affect their lives, they quickly see and respect a role for elected representatives and the expertise of their officers. The more people understand this relationship by coming into contact with it, the less difficulty it causes.

But we still shove young people through an educational upbringing which tells them almost nothing about local government or the principles of governance. How bright is that?

The over-reaction to the perceived crisis of democracy is to over-emphasise countable processes, like voting, when perhaps we need to be putting far more effort into engagement and the understanding of conversational democracy, creating a society which constantly feels democratic and in which people expect to be engaged.

Well-being and empowerment (updated)

This morning I interviewed someone who's been trying to implement a community engagement approach in her role helping to provide a local public service.

Sometimes it's hard to appreciate the gulf between the harried and hassled local practitioner, constantly adjusting to change, and the policy context beyond. Through a project I was involved in, a few months ago she suddenly appreciated that the thrust of government policy was in the same direction. Knowing this, my correspondent felt hugely empowered and given confidence to be more assertive in her organisation, thereby accelerating a change of attitude towards citizens.

Here's something else that will make just that sort of contribution. The Young Foundation's local well-being project, working with IDeA and the LSE, has published a report on practical empowerment initiatives in neighbourhoods, called Neighbourliness + empowerment = wellbeing: is there a formula for happy communities?

It argues that the right kind of work on 'neighbourhood and community empowerment' is likely to increase wellbeing in three key dimensions -

• By providing greater opportunities for residents to influence decisions affecting their neighbourhoods
• By facilitating regular contact between neighbours
• By helping residents gain the confidence to exercise control over local circumstances.

What the report seems to do really well is to distil some wishy-washy key contemporary social issues into focused practical points, and this paper looks like it could really give momentum to the efforts of local practitioners and local politicians who have been grappling with (or perhaps avoiding) All That Stuff about social capital, well-being, neighbourliness, involvement, democracy, responsibilisation and so on.

The report puts forward several case studies of empowerment 'done well' (from Manchester, South Tyneside and Hertfordshire) stressing the significance of the balance of control. Yup, it all comes down to mature understandings of the power issues.

But it's also the case that this is an institutional perspective on the issues - this comes across as an impressively crafted practical guide for local officers on trying to stimulate a greater sense of well-being at local level. I think we still need more work to bring local people's experience of such initiatives, and of initiatives they establish and run themselves, to the surface.

Postscript... Two other thoughts about the report.

It seems to have little to do with neighbourliness, which hardly gets mentioned because the scale of the activities and schemes described is well beyond what is likely to be most people's mental map of neighbourly interactions. Perhaps that's understandable from the practitioners' point of view: so is this another example of the appeal of the N word brought on by the exhaustion of the C word?

Much of what is described is good ol' fashioned community development, and the document marks the continued tension between that field of established practice and the trend to take bits of it and call it something else - which again might be fine, so long as the lessons and principles of community development are appreciated and taken into account.

Carnival, charivari, democracy

I just caught up with an absorbing post by Ian Bertram over on Panchromatica exploring the history and meanings of carnival, and rightly expressing concern that it is becoming assimilated and controlled. See also Ian's previous posts, on charivari and notions of justice and on carnival and festival generally.

Carnival represents the tradition of collective celebration with relatively little structure, heavily-dependant on people's inventiveness and the enjoyment of outdoor spectacle at walking pace.

Ian also links to this paper by Nicola Frost which draws attention to

the tendency for popular festivals and carnivals, in many parts of the world, and in many historical periods, to be characterised by risqué reversals of hierarchy, ludic mimicry, flamboyant and celebratory cultural expression, and a sanctioned overstepping of conventional rules and norms of behaviour.

That last phrase strikes me as important. I can't help feeling that in a de-structured age of wobbly social norms, where consistent overstepping of rules (watch a top-level professional football match, for instance) is thought desirable, rewarded and lauded, it would be helpful to try to understand this.

In past societies where religious and other power structures exerted rigid social control, it's interesting that crowd-rowdiness still burst out in sanctioned forms at decreed moments. How might we re-invent carnival as pertinent for a less-structured age preoccupied with forced spectacle - where the binge-night-out and the knife-fight are described as a 'good time'? Anyone for jousting?

Charivari, meanwhile, seems to be more about summary community justice, like the 'rough music' tradition in England. (This illustration, I seem to recall, featured on an episode of QI).

I should think it could be quite scary and like much vigilantism, not necessarily dependent on sound evidence. I quite liked this description from Dark Stories, at the limit of my understanding of French:

Le charivari, ou « confusion de bruit », est une forme de justice populaire par laquelle les membres d’une communauté expriment leur désapprobation à l’égard des mariages ou de couples mettant en péril les valeurs de leur société.

I suppose we need to try and capture the community-involvement-around-collective-values component without the summary-justice-which-could-be-based-on-well-spread-rumour-or-just-plain-nastiness component. Ah, democracy.

Moments felt globally, experienced locally

Around the world people are watching the Zimbabwean election. At local level in that country, families and friends must be discussing issues in buoyant excitement mixed perhaps with trepidation at the prospect of change, dreading fierce confrontation.

In Florida a few years ago, with surely the best available technology at their disposal, a tragi-comedy played out. In Zimbabwe now, just to illustrate the contrasts, it seems that votes were counted by candlelight in some areas due to a lack of electricity.

If democracy wasn't the pinpoint of global-local meaning, you wouldn't even know what I'm on about.

Citizenship as credo

So former Attorney General Lord Goldsmith has called for children to pledge an oath of allegiance to the queen, as part of a review of citizenship carried out at the request of the Prime Minister.

And he gets a well-earned round of derision. Simon Jenkins, for instance, points out that the man's paternalism

has nothing whatsoever to do with the civic space in which ordinary Britons live, breathe and conduct their politics, which is based on neighbourhood, community, village, town and city.

There's no need to rehearse the critique here - hopefully this folly will drown quickly and silently.

But there's another question to be asked, which is why a lord of the realm (is that the way to refer to them?) was invited by a Labour prime minister to carry out such an exercise? Why not a panel for example, including several citizens and those who work among citizens? It might have saved some embarassment, but the likelihood that it probably didn't occur to anyone close to the PM is as scary as what Goldsmith came up with.

Public libraries and multicultural relationships

Helen Carpenter, who managed the Welcome to Your Library project, has just published a very readable report about her international study tour on the role of public libraries in multicultural relationships.

She considers the relationships in terms of:

• how public libraries connect as institutions with all relevant stakeholders
• how they plan and deliver services that reflect, support and promote diversity
• how they enable inter-cultural dialogue and encourage active citizenship in a rapidly changing environment.

Helen visisted Canada, the USA, Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands and Belgium, and the report offers numerous little snapshots of good practice with professional reflections. More insights on her travel blog.

Community cohesion: stimulating more interaction

The government's response to the Commission on Integration and Cohesion, published today, anounces new actions including guidance for local authorities to consider how funding can better be used to support greater interaction between people from different backgrounds.

The proposed actions are:

* Specialist cohesion teams to be established by central government to provide advice on conflict resolution, mediation, leadership and on the steps that local leaders might take when new people arrive in their area.

* Local authority twinning - between areas of the country experiencing similar issues in order to share ideas and solutions to inspire innovation to respond to these challenges.

* New guidance for local authorities on developing Information Packs for migrants.

* Consultation on cohesion guidance for funders - to encourage local authorities to consider how funding can better be used to support greater interaction, and reducing funding for single groups.

* All local authorities will have access to an impact assessment tool to assess whether the activities they are planning will have a positive impact on cohesion in their neighbourhoods.

Press release.

Local Links - let's hear it for informal networks

Last night saw the launch of the Local Links report, following a joint Common Purpose / JRF project run by Susie Hay. The project worked in four areas of West Yorkshire, stimulating active networks with the aim of uniting people and energising them 'to make networks more productive, worthwhile and sustainable.'

The project injected a lot of energy into local networks over a relatively short period, based on the assumptions that (i) there is often insufficient connection between existing active networks in a locality, and (ii) informal ineraction can make a massive difference to people's perceptions, confidence and contribution.

It's an important project but a difficult one to describe because it examines the benefit of informal networking at local level -

'meeting other people who are active and involved in the area, knowing what they do, talking and working together and forging stronger links.'

All credit to JRF and Common Purpose for making the case for what too many funders would see as 'talk shops,' too wishy-washy to justify resources.

To me, Local Links is an important contribution to the growing pressure to assert informality and the value of conversations in local life. This is not just about saying 'conversations around community action are a good thing' (ho-hum) but saying that culturally we should place more emphasis and value on them as indicators of engagement, participation and a healthy democracy. Thanks Susie.

Report.
Evaluation report by Icarus Collective.
Findings summary.

Older refugees

The Refugee Council and Age Concern England today ran a conference about their work with older refugees, which has included a set of interviews and three regional 'listening days.'

Key points I got from the presentations I heard:

• Older refugees define integration in terms of their labour market experiences and their local social interactions.
• Many refugees feel isolated and this is related to the sense that neighbours are seldom welcoming.
• Service providers tend to assume that older refugees are invariably cared for by their extended families, which is often not the case.
• There are intergenerational aspects to integration - being accepted by people of different ages is important, and having all generations of one's family accepted is important.
• The lack of (unconditional) respect shown to older people in the UK is very offputting to many people from other cultures and can seem a barrier to integration. (There's a nicety here, which I tried to bring out in Respect in the neighbourhood, about distinguishing between respect for others as a default value of human relations, and unconditional respect for an office or status, such as being a teacher or being old. It may be that we have lamentably low levels of both kinds in the UK, but seeking to re-establish the latter may not be the way forward...)

Copies of reports are available via Age Concern on this page.

Ask them what they want

Last night I ran another workshop with local people in Manningham, designing a consultation plan for their new library.

Participants worked on eight themes - such as access, governance, stock, the garden, décor and furniture etc - and in each case looked at who should be consulted, how they should be consulted, what need there was for 'expert' or professional advice to consultation groups, and so on. They used the pink boxes to keep their notes and ideas in place, and it certainly gave a sense of accumulating achievement which you don't quite get from a pile of flipchart sheets. Using small slips of paper probably helps to get contributions from the less forthright or confident; and the boxes will be shared with others groups in the coming weeks to generate more input.

By the end of this third session I was struck by the clarity and immediacy with which people were deciding, for instance, whether or not it was appropriate to consult everybody or just a core group; when (eg with regard to décor or the garden) they thought it appropriate to let a design team come up with options first or after a brief from residents; whether or not to consult on a short list of options or to use open questions; what face-to-face or remote methods were appropriate, and so on.

There were none of those naïve claims that everybody has to have a say, or that professionals shouldn't move a finger without local people's approval. More a mature recognition that there are various ways of soliciting people's views, based on a mix of methods, a stimulated culture of involvement and a flow of information. And that consultation does not remove the responsibility for decision-making, rather it clarifies the requirement for those affected by decisions to be given the time, information and opportunity to contribute views, and that those views be taken into consideration.

It's not difficult: so why is it not commonplace?

'Strong safe and prosperous communities'

It's near christmas, and here's a glimpse of the government's scintillating choice of wrapping paper for the draft guidance on 'creating strong safe and prosperous communities.'

OK calm down, I'll be Santa and give you the link now, the way you'll have a topic of lively conversation to liven up parties the next few weeks. If someone else gives it to you on christmas day, appear thrilled and try not to look as if you've seen it before.

The closing date for responses is 12 February 2008, and yes, it is important stuff for neighbourhoods in England.

It covers for example the new 'duty to involve,' what is meant by 'representatives of local persons,' the role of information provision in consultation and involvement, establishing the 'distinctive vision and ambition' of an area, what is meant mean by a 'sustainable community strategy,' and how everything (especially local area agreements) relates to everything else.