Neighbourhoods

Discovering local democracy: local people design their own consultation plan

Last night I ran a workshop with residents in Manningham, Bradford, to help them design a public consultation process.

Bradford Libraries have won funding to refurbish and extend Manningham library; and to their great credit, rather than specify how the consultation process would be run, the authority wanted to help local people to design it. A key starting point was for us all to appreciate that what we were doing wasn't about the new library, it was about designing a local democratic process. Once we'd worked through a couple of warm-up exercises to help us clarify this, I was struck by two things: the sense of fresh excitement that people brought to the process, having never before had the chance to participate in a public issue in such a way; and the sense that it's not at all straightforward.

I had asked that recruitment for the group did not result in domination by people who are particularly experienced in community activity, and we had a refreshing bunch of folk with an age range from 19 to 86 years, none of them bruised or made cynical by over-exposure to community and civic politics. And once you start talking to people about their general experience of democracy it can be surprising how strange the notion seems to them, while at the same time seeming to be perfectly natural if only they could get some of it.

Of course we tried to make sure we had a bit of fun, which included using children's bricks to design a 'public building' while simultaneously inventing a character who has to visit and use the place. I'm not sure how come these young women decided they would create a night club (the other group showed less imagination by coming up with, oh dear, a library), but we used the process to tease out some decision-making issues and areas of potential conflict.

The hard work hits next week, when the group starts filling in a matrix of themes and consultation issues. No-one said democracy is easy: perhaps we'll find out at the end of the process whether they think it's worthwhile.

Citizens' day framework

The Citizenship Foundation has published guidance for local authorities and community sector partners on how to set up citizens days.

The booklet offers a range of advice and examples to explore how projects can help bring together people from different backgrounds.

Online game about being a refugee

UNHCR has just launched the English language version of an online game created to increase students' awareness and knowledge about refugee situations, by putting them in the position of a refugee.

In Against all odds, the player is interrogated, hears the sound of guards' footsteps approaching, and senses the urgency in finding safety while racing against the clock.

Press release. Via Welcome to Your Library digest.

Interwoven freedom

One of the most striking features in the long anti-slavery campaign was the role of women and the degree to which this involved local networks and highly organised community action (Adam Hochschild, Bury the chains). Local responses to global issues are nothing new.

Now here's an attractive exhibition put together by English Heritage and the Sparkbrook African and Caribbean Women’s Development Initiative (SCAWDI) in the west Midlands.

Interwoven Freedom enabled a group of women to explore slavery and abolition in Birmingham. They visited archives, exhibitions and historic sites with links to slavery and worked with creative writer Ava Ming and textile artist Karina Thompson. Taking inspiration from Birmingham’s abolitionist women and Black enslaved women who campaigned for the end of slavery – they have interwoven their own personal response with the story of freedom.

Drawing on the tradition of abolitionist women who created and distributed workbags filled with anti-slavery manifestos, the participants have written their own manifestos which mix historical facts with vivid fictional stories and powerful poems. They have made workbags from fair trade cotton and African cloth. Woven into their bags are integrated references from their past and personal histories, images of slave ships, photographs and Jamaican and Ghanaian flags.

Various locations in the west Midlands until 19 May 2008.

Disrespecting childhoods

Plenty in the news this morning about the Community soundings report, which describes high anxiety among 7-11 year olds concerning exams, friendships, and the world they're growing into. It refers to a 'loss of childhood.'

Many expressed concern about climate change, global warming and pollution, the gulf between rich and poor, and terrorism.

"Some were also worried by the gloomy tenor of 'what you hear on the news' or by a generalised fear of strangers, burglars and street violence," the report said.

Are we surprised? As Hugh Cunningham notes in the BBC report, 'unequal societies have the most stressed children.'

And on the theme of pupil tests, a nicely understated remark by the report's author could serve very well as an epitaph for New Labour: "Standards may have been too readily equated with quality."

Guardian. Times.

Cohesion and civic participation

Communities and Local Government last week published some headline findings from the first quarter of the 2007-08 Citizenship Survey, covering April-June 2007.

From which I note:

• As in the last survey (2003), 81% of people agreed that their local area is a place where people from different backgrounds get on well together.
• Among those aged 16-24, the proportion of people who agree that people from different backgrounds get on well together in their area has increased from 73% to 82% since 2003.
• In April-June 2007, 77% of people felt that they 'strongly belonged to their neighbourhood.' Figures were higher among some ethnic groups - Pakistani (85%), Bangladeshi (83%) and Indian (83%).
• In April-June 2007, 37% of people in England agreed that they could influence decisions in their local area. In 2001 the proportion was 44%.

Remember public space?

The thinking I've done recently on third places got me revisiting issues around the confusion of private and public space, usually illustrated by reference to shopping malls.

I first bumped into this issue when I visited a new central library in Dundee ten or fifteen years ago. Unusually for the time, it was located in a small closed mall, surrounded by the usual big-name stores. I was always used to the prospect of homeless people using libraries and I thought at the time this was a particularly thorough way of severing that relationship.

Of course, in some ways malls have attracted some unfair press. I seem to recall Jennifer Light making the point (and if she didn't I'd like to make it anyway, with apologies if need be) that malls play a significant communal role. It's worth stating that 'commercial' does not necessarily contradict 'public'; and that it's often difficult to disentangle class from arguments about 'authenticity' (of architecture or the built environment generally).

Also, it's hardly unusual to observe young people gathering in malls just to hang out - indeed it's one of the few places where they regularly occupy the same space as other age groups at the same time. (Although that says more about the poverty of other public spaces available to them than it does about the malls, I suspect).

So what are the problems with malls? I'm not writing an essay here, just braindumping, but how's this for starters:

(i) homogenised detachment from the local geography/topography

(ii) promotion of use of cars: going shopping is a habit which justifies driving; and consequent effect on local trading economies

(iii) inability to reconcile commercial culture with recreative culture (most of those attempts one sees to give appearance to some form of cultural experience, even Santa's grotto, are embarassingly doomed: the best ones, like the giant chess sets for example, leave as much as possible to the actions of visitors)

(iv) abuse by the private leaseholders in repackaging the area as an exclusionary space: enter the security guard and his or her often ill-defined understanding of rights...

Oh, and on an emotional level, allow me to add: the wretched bloody antiseptic feel of the places.

I got to pondering all this because half an hour ago I came upon this sweet example of confusion over a shopping street (not a mall) posted by Bill Adler on Now public:

"This past Tuesday I went to downtown Silver Spring, had lunch, and then took out my camera and standing on Ellsworth [Drive], I began taking shots of the buildings with the blue sky and clouds as a backdrop. Almost immediately, a security guard approached and told me 'there was no picture taking allowed in Downtown Silver Spring.' 'What do you mean?' I said, 'I am on a city street, in a public place -- taking pictures is a right that I have protected by the first amendment.' The guard told me to report to the management office.

"There, Stacy Horan informed me that Downtown Silver Spring including Ellsworth [Drive] is private property, not a public place, and subject to the rules of the Peterson Companies.  They have a no photography policy to 'protect them from people who might want to use the photographs as part of a story in which they could write bad things about us.'  And she told me that many of the chain stores in Downtown Silver Spring don't what their 'concepts' to be photographed for security reasons."

So is there really a crisis of public space, or is it just an evolution that we don't yet grasp? It seems to me there really is a crisis, but there are subtleties which we need to explore and understand. Bundled into all this is a discussion to be had about the differences between third places and public space - an issue I've touched on recently in relation to public libraries.

A full analysis (at least of the UK context) would require an understanding of the economics and politics of property development in the public realm (is there really a decline of public funding for the public realm: I suspect so), and the relation of public space to (you knew it was coming) democracy...

All in good time: this post has gone on long enough.

Integration and Cohesion: the report

The report of the Commission on Integration and Cohesion is published today, with a strong emphasis on improving cohesion through local action. If you work in or around community development in the UK, you won't be able to escape the significance of this document and I hope you wouldn't want to. If you are outside the UK but interested in cohesion issues, I think this could still be an important document for you.

'Some of the key influences on poor cohesion are low satisfaction with an area as a place to live, high perceptions of levels of anti-social behaviour and a high level of deprivation – all issues which can be addressed locally, or be tackled by local institutions. Our analysis also found that there was no simple link between poor cohesion and any of these factors; or good cohesion and the reverse. Local history, trends or events are also important... Improving cohesion in the long term is about local action: local areas have the expert knowledge about particular local circumstances; and local actions are what will result in integration and cohesion.'

Here's my first, undeniably positive reaction from a quick skim, as I won't have much time to deal with this in the next few days.

The report is structured around four principles:

• shared futures - this is about 'an emphasis on articulating what binds communities together – rather than the differences that might divide them – and is about prioritising a shared future over divided legacies';
• strengthened rights and responsibilities;
• mutual respect and civility, also referred to as 'an ethics of hospitality';
• visible social justice.

The chapter on respect and civility is of particular interest to me and I may post about it separately in due course. I picked out the following:

There is a call for government to take integration and cohesion seriously in relation to youth services provision, but I get the impression that the role of intergenerational work in promoting community cohesion is not given nearly enough momentum in this report.

The Commission proposes a nationally sponsored Community Week (I suppose continued abuse of the C word is inevitable) 'with a focus on celebrating all communities and inter-community engagement'.

The Commission has also acknowledged the dearth of evidence on the most effective ways of stimulating meaningful interaction and building cross-cultural friendships, and it calls for a programme of research, hurrah, 'to explore more closely what works' (in this respect) 'in different neighbourhoods and why.'

There's a healthy emphasis on education and citizenship and the promised and needed support for ESOL classes (English for Speakers of Other Languages) is there, plus an interesting recommendation that authorities should reduce the amount of language translation they do: 'translation should be reduced except where it builds integration and cohesion.' There also seems to be a sensible detachment from media over-excitement about notions of 'Britishness'.

Annex B looks like a very useful categorisation of what seems to work well and less well in five types of area (unhelpfully called 'family groups'). They are: changing, less affluent rural areas; stable less affluent urban areas with manufacturing decline; stable less affluent urban areas without manufacturing decline; changing, less affluent urban areas; and areas with tensions arising from a single issue.

Article by Madeleine Bunting in yesterday's Guardian. More in today's Guardian including comments by Ed Cox on the point that cohesion needs to be considered everywhere, not just in urban areas with a visible ethnic mix: 'cohesion tensions in the future are more likely to be experienced in unexpected places where 'diversity' is new.'

'As local diversity becomes more complex, we think mutual respect and civility should underpin the way we as communities navigate a shared course through different understandings of what is acceptable or normal.'

Third places, libraries and the public realm

I've uploaded a short summary of the presentation I gave last week at the Third Place Forum in Caloundra.

Following comments I received afterwards, I think the key issue is to explore more deeply the differences and interplay between 'community' places or 'community-based' locations, and the public realm. It seemed to me that in Australia the distinction may be more blurred than it is in the UK, which is probably a good thing. But it's surely still true to say that while they overlap there are differences, and that therefore there are questions about how third places in either case are co-produced and styled. Reflecting on this relationship helps us explore the role of public libraries, and vice versa.

Projects don't always work

Proboscis have published a report written by Giles Lane and myself about some work we carried out with a residents' organisation in Southall, west London, in 2006.

In the Conversations and Connections project we set out to explore how some of Proboscis' public authoring tools can be harnessed by a community organisation to stimulate connections between residents and thereby increase levels of participation at local level.

The report describes what we attempted and explores the reasons why the project did not succeed fully. The main reasons were the lack of consistent community development support on the estate, and the weakness of connections between the core group members and the majority of residents. This project illustrates the old principle that sorting the people issues can be harder than sorting technological issues.

The report refers back to the Common knowledge essay which I wrote about community development on the estate.

The project was funded by the Department for Constitutional Affairs, now the Ministry of Justice.

Oi you!

A recent Women's Design Service survey report includes this comment:

Public spaces are improved by design, by encouraging more people to enter them and use them, and providing the facilities for them to do so in a responsible way. This includes reducing traffic, providing easy sustainable access, lighting, shops that people want to use, safe crossings, facilities and leisure, and giving them back to people.

It's not exactly an outburst is it? More like a tired list of odd jobs for the weekend. So why does it take new labour's talking surveillance cameras to elicit such simple sensible advice to government?

Be patient and wait for the next development - school competitions are to be organised so that selected children's voices can be used for these disembodied street reprimands. (There's an official somewhere in Whitehall thinking, 'Yup, that should do it.') No wonder they want everyone in the country to be able to understand english.

I'm hoping I'll get the chance to test these devices out - (can they detect negative thoughts yet, do you think?) -  and if I find their syntax or grammar at fault I hope I have the presence of mind to launch into the most caustic philippic I can muster. No wait, better still, we should have a smart-mob organised mass confrontation, with loud speakers and children's pre-recorded protestations of innocence...

But do they understand mockery?

Cohesion, immigration, and policy

Immigration minister Liam Byrne got headlines yesterday for his proposed new "managed migration" points system, and says that when one junior school in his constituency saw its population of children with English as a second language rise from 5% to 20% within a year, 'the task of boosting standards in some of the poorest communities gets harder.'

And so the practicalities of promoting cohesion, when diversity implies low social capital and instability, bring a keen focus to immigration policy. Byrne points to the speed of population change in some localities and notes:

'Here are a set of changes that have made Britain richer but which have deeply unsettled the country.'

Well good, at least we have some acknowledgement that diversity brings richness. But the notion of diversity in neighbourhoods seems to be readily equated with 'problem'. How can that be? Apparently 'laissez-faire migration' runs the risk of damaging communities. (Not half as much as laissez faire consumerism, I'm thinking).

Being surrounded with a mix of people from different backgrounds creates tensions at local level apparently. (Er, excuse me, not necessarily it doesn't). So we must only admit to our country the people who will make an identifiable economic contribution. (Er, there may be a bit missing from the sequence of this argument). If they say it often enough, to some people it will begin to sound true. To many it probably already does.

It's just possible that there could be other causes of tensions in neighbourhoods. Byrne's approach suggests another clash of government policies, with CLG in various ways (including through the Commission) rightly and consistently stimulating ways in which 'people from different backgrounds can get on well together,' through community cohesion measures, 'liveability' policies, civil renewal, community engagement, local governance and so on. Why would immigration policy makers claim to have the answer without reference to other measures where people are working collectively on these issues? Unless there's an election coming up and some right-wing votes to be lost.

Meanwhile, in what looks like a premeditated subversion of Byrne's theme, from last friday's Guardian comes Robina Qureshi's tale of how 'the arrival of asylum seekers in Glasgow's most deprived areas has given back a sense of community in a way no government initiative has ever done.' How so? Well, as most community workers know, nothing succeeds like adversity:

'Immigration snatch squads, escorted by police, have conducted a series of dawn raids on Scottish asylum families over the past few years. Finally, last October, local people gathered alongside asylum seekers early one morning in Kingsway in peaceful protest at the raids. At around 6.30am an immigration snatch squad turned up to take another family. Over 150 members of the community linked arms and demanded the squad cease immediately. After a 40-minute standoff, the chief of police announced there would be no raid. To this day, the community has been on constant vigil in the hours before dawn.'

And finally, on this theme, a huge round of applause for the Welcome to Your Library project, which 'connects public libraries with refugee communities,' and has won this year's 'Libraries Change Lives' Award. I've been a fan from the start and as a former judge for this award I know how well deserved it is.

Individualism, responsibility, and listening

I've been puzzled at how reluctant commentators have been to finger Thatcherite individualism in seeking to understand contemporary problems of anti-social behaviour. Just now, most of us are sufficiently detached from the present flashes of gun and knife violence glinting on our news-screens, and probably don't know what to make of it. These are local experiences for which broader cultural explanations are sought.

So thanks are due to Josh Freedman Berthoud who in a Guardian article this evening exposes the lasting twisted effects of individualism. He points out that these attacks can be - are sometimes meant to be - indiscriminate and unmotivated:

a chilling indication of the kind of society that many city-dwelling British youths now inhabit - a rampantly individualistic society, in which each boy does everything he can to prove that he has no sense of morals or attachment to the society around him.

We are finally beginning to gain focus on one of the central social policy issues of our age, in which notions of collective association or responsibility can readily be shrugged off, and behaviour that discounts the humanness of others has swollen grotesquely in the vacuum. Give them credit, government and agencies have spotted the connection here - hence the Respect agenda, among other things - but there's another message less well-grasped: a message about how to hear messages.

Certain messages that government sends out - if you do not consume, you have failed as a citizen; you are either with us or against us, so compete or be defeated, and so on - are hard to miss. I'm not sure that messages coming from citizens (or discarded citizens) by contrast, are being processed where government is.

A year or two back I heard a government minister refer to the community sector back in 1997, in the early days of 'the New Labour Project' (his words, worthy of capitals on the grounds of pomposity) as not getting the message and being 'somewhere else'. What a hollow irony. Given the inescapabale compulsion towards responsibilisation of the citizen, the possibility that others' views might be genuinely valid and not just there for the purposes of spurious consultation, may finally be unavoidable. Could it be time to stop telling people, from a position of moral bankruptcy, how to behave, and start listening to how they react to one another's behaviour and attitudes?

How about this at the simplest level, for example: I've often heard older people, in  discussion about kids causing trouble on their estates or in their neighbourhoods, make the point that there's nothing for them to do. It's not unusual to hear older people call for youth clubs and youth work: of course they are frightened by the hoodied clusters on the street corners but they also tend to look for understanding and solutions. So nothing happens for a bit, and then we get ASBOs.

It would be nice to think that we could clinch this notion of a conversational democracy, a style of government that listens and doesn't seek relentlessly just to regulate on its miserable moral basis. The idea continues to gather momentum and is echoed in another Guardian item, in today's published, by Lucy Ward.

Ward notes that when Gordon Brown recently met parents, they favoured 'an independent information and discussion forum separate from government.' She detects a need for 'some way of eavesdropping on a wider range of voices' and finds that what is crucial is not what parents say to the government, but what they say to each other.

Collective behaviour and climate change: why would anybody bother?

Twice recently at events, I've raised the possibility that responses to climate change represent a potential sea-change in collectively-oriented behaviour. More and more people, I suspect, are taking everyday life and lifestyle decisions less on the totally individualistic basis of our Thatcherite inheritance, and more in recognition that there are others around us and to follow, who might be affected by those decisions.

And now I'm just catching up with a recent study by CDX and the Centre for Sustainable Energy
on Mobilising individual behavioural change through community initiatives. The study investigated 'what kinds of local and community initiatives are most effective at influencing changes in behaviour and at what levels, and whether any lessons learned from these are transferable to the issue of climate change.'

The report provokes thinking about important issues. The key message seems to be that what is lacking is 'a realistic sense of agency,' and this is the problem to be solved. Part of the argument is that people are not motivated to take action (jointly or individually) on an issue which is not local, where their action has no immediate impact (or indeed any significant impact), and where the scale of any action taken is dwarfed by the impact of the inaction of others.

And yet, and yet. We know there is evidence of changes of attitude, and local councils have had relatively little difficulty imposing regimes of recycling which have transfomed attitudes. The media too have played a hugely significant role in the subtle shifting of attitudes.

I suspect that because this is an (apparently hurried) report to government, the assessment remains implacably hard-nosed (indeed, in an odd sentence towards the foot of p7 the authors suggest that, in the absence of evidence that community-based environmental initiatives influence behaviour, the challenge for policy-makers and funders is to justify supporting them - the report thereby seems to defy its own existence).

There have been numerous local projects over the years that have engaged people in reducing their negative impact on the environment and changed people's attitudes to the ways in which it is managed.

Surely it's time for better evaluation, not time to abandon evaluation and pass the buck back to policy-makers? I think this is an issue where the notion that there is no such thing as altruism has become a blinding presumption, to the extent that we do not recognise the possibility that people will change their behaviour for any reason other than immediate personal interest.

But some people will do, have done so, are doing so, and, crucially, are now living in a social context which encourages them more than it did in the past to engage with others and persuade others to do so. Perhaps the notion of a renaissance of collective behaviour is not so far-fetched.

Where my naive optimism springs from I'm afraid I cannot say, since earlier this evening I felt physically sick at the televised image from our House of Commons, where elected members had committed this act of inexplicable collective folly. Perhaps it's the lasting influence of Dickens and his famous declaration of political creed:

My faith in the people governing is, on the whole, infinitesimal; my faith in the People governed is, on the whole, illimitable.

A future of participation?

Seems you can't move these days for articles pondering how erstwhile Labour voters feel seduced by the commonsense emanating from Tories, contrasted with the miserable folly of some of our leader's all-too-lasting policies.

And so to an Involve participation seminar this evening, which included a speech from Oliver Letwin on 'a conservative vision of citizenship,' buttressed by Bill Wiggin MP, with some apparently harmless waves of reality from Mary Ann Sieghart allowed to lap gently some way below their lofty outlook.

They were all preceded by Mori's Ben Page who neatly and unceremoniously packed all the real issues into about five minutes, only to find they too were mostly overlooked by the subsequent speakers.

Oliver Letwin offered a vision of citizenship as 'citizens taking responsibility for what goes on around them, not commenting on or responding to what goes on around them' (I think I jotted that down correctly...) His key message was that a Conservative government would press the participation button just as firmly as the current government does, but (mercifully) without the ridiculous over-emphasis on managerialism which has so thoroughly spoiled the best intentions of the past ten years.

Sadly, there was too much to be said and too many people trying to say it - just like real-time participation - for anyone to grab the issues and try to list them. FWIW, with the benefit of a train ride home, here's my personal two euro's-worth for starters:

• consultation without engagement is damaging and always has been. So -
• start community engagement at the most local level and take the lessons up a level at a time, cautiously (Ben Page made some potent points about scale)
• do not use the C word to imply consensus
• try to create a culture of genuine participation in all arenas of social life, including the family, school, and work environments: the habit of participation is precious and a society that neglects it is vulnerable
• understand that at the present rate, politicians will be following, not leading, this debate (possibly trailed only by the established broadcast media)
• try and celebrate the hits for participation that are independent of the availability of resources: there are still too many people baying for funding even though we have an unenviable tradition of wasting it because we don't know how to work collaboratively.

Localism, governance and the public realm

The Museums Libraries and Archives Council has just published a think-piece I wrote for them on localism, governance and the public realm.

Originally the idea was to explore how neighbourhood governance could impact on, and be influenced by, the local cultural sector; but as the broad scope of the local government white paper became apparent, including its coverage of community cohesion and engagement, so did the scope of the essay. I think the new localism presents an oustanding opportunity for local libraries, archives and museums to re-assert the public realm - not as it used to be, but updated to reflect 'engaged democracy' as it is emerging.

The moment is there for the sector to take a lead in developing a vision of the public realm in which people recognise the civic, contribute to it and value it; in which residents organise and participate in local events and associate around such events; where they have places over which they feel a sense of ownership and to which they can go. The case must be made for a public realm in which people feel informed, respected, able to influence the local processes that affect their lives, and supported in celebrating their sense of community.

Refugees and public libraries

I've long been a fan of the Welcome to Your Library project run by Helen Carpenter, and the news digest compiled by Helen with John Vincent. WTYL is a project connecting public libraries with refugees and asylum seekers. By extension, it aims to improve access to and quality of public library services for everyone. The project is working locally in Hillingdon, Leicester, Liverpool, Southwark and Tyne and Wear.

They've just launched the WTYL website which includes an events page, several case studies, and a link to the news digest.

The neighbourhood agenda and community development

Community Development Foundation have published a short policy statement on 'The neighbourhood agenda and community development'.

It includes the observation that 'community life has an existence and a value in its own right and not just as a conduit for engagement purposes.'

Take Part: learning and citizenship

I witter on occasionally about how policy needs to be stimulating rather than just enforcing citizenship, and I think the projects on active learning for active citizenship which the Home Office set up a couple of years ago probably fit the bill. Now they've pulled lessons and a framework together from that programme, and called it Take Part. The aim, it says here,

is to provide programmes of active learning that enable people to gain the skills, knowledge and confidence to become empowered citizens – citizens who are able to make an active contribution to their communities and influence public policies and services.

The manual, according to the press release,

'sets out the guiding principles and values for educating citizens to enable them to influence decision making and shape public services in their communities. It also provides practical advice on learning methods, and lots of examples of Take Part learning in action.'

There's a section in the framework about 'constructed (meaning facilitated) conversations' which starts to bring out the citizenship purpose of community development. It's a shame that there's still some unreflective use of the C word, but there's a lot of careful sifting of theoretical material gone on here and it's well worth absorbing.

There are regional events being held over the next month or so.

Everyday participation

From time to time I bang on about the 'habit of participation' and people nod and then carry on with what they were doing.

Here perhaps is a better term, in work developed by Liverpool Youth Services.

'A culture of participation can only develop if young people are able to experience participation as a part of their everyday life and not simply as a 'one-off' event... Developed in a series of workshops held with young people, Everyday Participation emphasizes the role of youth work as a seedbed in which young people can learn the basic skills and develop the attitudes needed to enable their participation in decision-making at multiple levels. Its working principles are:

• Participation is a dialogue between adults and young people as equal partners in a process where decision-making takes place and results in change.
• A culture of participation is a climate in which young people expect to be heard and involved, where participation is something that happens every day and not a separate event or activity.
• Everyday participation integrates the aims of participation into the daily running of a youth group, making it a guiding principle of every session and every aspect of group life, not the focus of a separate initiative.

This practice emphasises the use of everyday situations in all service settings as democratic moments where young people can make experiences through their negotiation of interests.

It still makes it sound a bit special, having to take place in the running of a youth group, whereas what I'm interested in is overcoming the problem that so many people go through family and school life with very little or no experience of being involved in decision-making processes that affect them. But whether or not the principles feed down into schools and parenting classes, it's still eminently sensible.

Source: Toolkit for youth participation in urban policies, Urbact 2006.

Full practical guide here.

Inequalities at the root

Will principles of social justice and equality (meaning fairness) finally make it through to the top of global and local political agendas?

The news this morning brings at last a focus on the sense of injustice and inequality which facilitates the process of radicalising young muslims. It relates closely to my comment last week:

"Terrorism will only gain footholds and accumulate formidable momentum where people experience high levels of persistent inequality and injustice."

The chemistry of terrorism is not that difficult to understand and one of its essential ingredients is a sense of unfairness. Shahid Malik said: "where you forget about right and wrong, where you think two wrongs equals a right ... those events are diminishing my ability to put forward arguments against extremism."

The UK government stoutly insists there is no connection between acts of terrorism and its own policies - thereby both confirming my view that there is weak political understanding of this principle, and avoiding the question of the extent to which their policies have exacerbated inequalities. For many of us I suspect, the buoyant optimism of 1997-2001, when we had so many incisive and pioneering policy papers and measures, has sunk beneath the greedy centralisation of power and the 'exclusion of exclusion.'

It's becoming graphically clear that this is a global crisis. There's something here about ordinary people in their own neighbourhoods facing the consequences of confrontations between frightening forces that are far beyond their powers to influence, and getting pitifully inadequate and belated responses from authorities. Many people in Belfast must be looking on with a sense of long-haul resignation.

As if to accentuate that this is not just the Palestinian Territories, or Lebanon, or Birmingham or Walthamstow, here is an article in today's Guardian about the street violence in Sao Paulo:

"It is an unrecognised civil war - only they are not political groups involved. It is the poor person versus anybody who has something, and that something need not even be very much."

Celebrating prosocial neighbourhood action

On the 10 Downing Street website tonight:

A couple from Yorkshire met Tony Blair before being honoured for their bravery in taking action against nuisance neighbours.

Joe and Alison Bednall suffered three years of abuse from a neighbouring family that included threats of violence, dumping rubbish and spitting. The couple refused to be intimidated and helped secure anti-social behaviour orders against the family responsible.

Their actions were later recognised at the Respect "Taking a Stand" Awards in London, where other winners were also honoured.

Mr Blair gave the couple a guided tour of Number 10 Downing Street and praised them for their hard work in helping him bring "respect" back to Britain's communities.

"He just said congratulations and well done and carry on doing what you're doing," Mr Bednall said.

After visiting Mr Blair, the couple were named as one of four gold Respect Award winners to receive £6,000 for their community group. They established the group during the struggle with their own nuisance neighbours so residents could work together to improve the area.

Mr Bednall added: "Since the group started going people are more friendly. They want to get things done now. They want to make the area a nicer place to live in."

I think some people will be reading that and asking themselves why they are not quite at ease with it. Surely the action these people took is laudable, and should be celebrated? This is an example of ordinary people resisting intimidation and overcoming the fear of retaliation, to assert their right to respect in the neighbourhood.

But we're not at ease, not because of the action, but because we can't help suspecting the motives behind its celebration. That's politics I'm afraid, but we shouldn't let it diminish the significance of what we are hearing here. Under any previous government, we'd have been quite surprised at such a press release, at national publicity given to such a theme: today, it's almost routine and we're suspicious.

So I'm just pausing a moment and reflecting that I'm pleased for Joe and Alison.

Miliband on empowerment

Given what I wrote the other day about empowerment, these words from David Miliband at a recent Fabian Society event are of interest:

"it is clear to me that the central political debate in the years ahead will be about power, who holds it, how it is spread, how it [is] accountable. We have to show that we have the ideas to reform the state as an ally of aspiration...

"To persuade people about the efficacy of government we have to make them part of the action; the challenge is to spread the sense of power and autonomy citizens feel over their lifestyles and values to other parts of their life, notably their interactions with public services, markets, and the community." [Emphasis added].

Good stuff to hear from a leading politician. But what I've been trying to get at is the point that too many people don't have much sense of power or autonomy over their lifestyles in the first place; so for many, maybe it's not necessarily the right place to start.

The event was the launch of the Fabian Commission report on life chances, Narrowing the gap.

Community leaders, or representation? (updated)

Here I am reading a draft report from a meeting about neighbourhood governance, and the phrase 'community leaders' stops me, the way it always does. I have difficulty with the frequent and unreflective use of this term - not, I hope, just because of some wishy-washy resistance to hierarchical cultures, but more because I'm unconvinced that calling for more 'community leaders' is a solution to anything.

When I've said in the past that I don't know what or who they are, I wasn't being disingenuous. I read recently an article, published surprisingly enough in Urban studies, in which community leaders are described as professionals, equated with the local authority, and referred to, bizarrely, as 'supremos.' A far more nuanced and insightful account was provided by Derrick Purdue back in 2001.*

I think most use of the label refers to activists who play a prominent role, often representing locally a community of interest, sometimes falling victim to accusations of 'usual suspects' or becoming manipulable media products. I'm more concerned right now with the chorus of calls for more of them. (Are we gonna have some kind of genetic programme here, get them all to breed so we have a stock for the future?)

Maybe just whistling for more community leaders won't work, because we'll still have a gulf between them and the rest of us. If our democracy lacks the key ingredients of engagement and participation, I'm not sure it makes sense to crash-course a new cadre of likelies.

Maybe we need to ensure far more widespread understanding of the notion of representation. We need to smooth over the gap between representation and apathy, between involvement and disinterest. We need to establish the habit of participation and an understanding of what it means to be represented by someone, and what it means to represent others.

That's an educational role and it belongs in the citizenship curriculum. Those school exercises in mock elections, termly or annual student representation and so on - those are the kinds of initiative which need more subtle attention. And of course, it doesn't just belong in schools. I'd like to see mixed-age workshops on representation, using creative techniques and lots of local material. That would do a lot more for the future of neighbourhood governance than tired repetitive pleas for more foot-soldiers.

*Hemphill, L, et al. (2006). “Leadership, power and multisector urban regeneration partnerships.” Urban studies 43(1): 59-80.
Purdue, D. (2001). “Neighbourhood governance: leadership. trust and social capital.” Urban studies 38(12): 2211-2224.

Update - Stephen Coleman has kindly drawn my attention to his 2005 ippr pamphlet called Direct representation: towards a conversational democracy, which to my shame I had missed. He argues that we need to move to a richer, more conversational form of representation.

Empowerment and participation: so what?

I spent most of last week running an international seminar for the British Council on empowerment and participation in the network society - an exhausting but exciting experience with numerous little insights. (The pic includes two palestinians, a latvian and an israeli, bashing out some key lessons). A week later I'm left with two strong impressions about the topic.

First, our understanding of how we evaluate and measure empowerment is very primitive. Of course, we can quantify participation in various ways. But what tools do we have to demonstrate changes in, say, the influence that an individual or group has over the decision-making processes that affect them?

It's clear there's much work needed there, but the second impression I'm left with is rather more worrying. It seemed to me that participants who came with clear knowledge and expertise about e-government and the practice of democracy in the network society had a fairly shallow understanding of the experience of disempowerment, and of the centrality of empowerment to establishing meaningful democracy. The original version of the seminar majored on social inclusion, and I wonder if we have lost sight of that a little.

This time we had an inspiring version of the 'engagement game' being developed for the Department for Constitutional Affairs by Drew Mackie and David Wilcox; plus the complete policy background from Ian Johnson of the DCA - not to mention presentations about (for example) mobile phone networks and domestic violence, online and disabled people, ICT and regeneration in a low-income neighbourhood, empowerment and participation with Turkish speaking communities, etc etc, plus a characteristically lucid and entertaining video-conference with Stephen Coleman.

But I'm still left with the concern that significant systems are being constructed all over the place to process consultation and representation, at various geographic scales, where perhaps 'empowerment' is felt to be just another subject, somehow vaguely related to governance and government but not where the real business is.

We know that there's a democratic shortfall which is to do with a sense of powerlessness; and yet we struggle to make the connection, perhaps because we don't spend enough time listening to the experiences of people who experience exclusion. Hopefully the impact of the recent Power Inquiry will be lasting, but I'm not optimistic.

Empowerment and governance

Organising some background material on neighbourhood governance, I realise I had failed to mention on this blog the ODPM's discussion document on 'Empowerment and the deal for devolution.' This was published a month ago as a pamphlet based on a speech by David Miliband, and poses the following questions:

1. What are the current barriers to sharing more power with local people and how can local government, its partners and central government work together to overcome them?

2. What are the key factors that will help to make empowerment attractive and accessible to service users and citizens?

3. How can we rebalance the current performance framework, so that local authorities can better respond to bottom up pressures to improve the quality of public services?

4. What are the implications of more citizen and neighbourhood empowerment for local governance and the role of democratically elected representatives?

5. How cost-effective is empowering users and citizens as a way of driving service improvement?

6. How do we ensure that the interests of disadvantaged people and neighbourhoods are addressed and avoid capture by unrepresentative individuals/groups?

Piece of cake eh? Responses by 31 March 2006 to empowerment(at)odpm.gsi.gov.uk.

Refugee stories

A little late, but not too late, I must mention the most recent Community Links ideas annual, which is a collection of summaries of projects led by refugee and asylum-seeking communities. It's called Small places, close to home, and there are over 30 projects described. It's a surprisingly diverse range of initiatives, the accounts characterised by an upbeat and creative approach, never dwelling on the traumas and persistent difficulties faced by some of the groups.

It costs £ 5.00 for voluntary or community organisations, £15.00 for statutory or commercial organisations, plus postage., and you can order it here.

Meanwhile, JRF have published a review of the evidence of how new immigration is experienced at neighbourhood level.

The role of the ward councillor

One of the things we'll see cranked up in the coming year is the role of local elected members, not before time.

"Government policy in the period up to 2004 neglected the ward councillor role. Significant attention has been focused on neighbourhood management on the one hand and on community engagement on the other. Both these agendas have failed to deal with the ward councillor role."

From The neighbourhood agenda and the role of the elected member by Jane Foot and Ines Newman, published by IDeA, January 2006. (Thanks Martin).

Anti-social behaviour and civil renewal

Some time ago the Civil Renewal Unit set up half a dozen research projects, which have now reported.

For me, by far the most interesting is a local case study of how measures to address anti-social behaviour contribute to civil renewal objectives. The report is written by David Prior, Kathryn Farrow, Basia Spalek and Marian Barnes.

The researchers found a high degree of pessimism among residents about the prospects for achieving positive change.

"This pessimism stemmed both from a lack of confidence in their capacity to accomplish anything constructive that would not quickly be negated by those who engaged in anti-social behaviour, and from a perception of the danger of reprisals, whether physical or verbal, from such people. It was also fed by what they generally regarded as the failure of the public agencies to do anything effective about putting a stop to anti-social behaviour.

"Evidence of such attitudes was apparent at all levels of the study – frequent comment was made about people’s fears in going about their everyday lives, in using parks, shopping centres and other public spaces, and in having to make special arrangements to avoid potential dangers in very mundane activities (for instance, the resident who would phone a neighbour to keep a watch over her as she walked from her garage to her flat). Experiences such as these appeared to be widespread, suggesting a major challenge for national and local agencies in providing the kind of developmental support that will gradually build confidence and reduce fears."

Among the question it raises is, to what extent does the Respect action plan hold the promise to overcome this pessimism? It's clear that that is the intention, and I hope someone is given the chance (if the residents are ok about it) to go back to the study area in a couple of years' time and assess the impact of the new measures.

I note also that one of the recommendations is for more commitment to community development, especially with young people. Perhaps what needs to be stressed at this point is the difference between youth and community work on the one hand (not that there's enough of that going on) and community development work on the other: the latter is emphatically about empowering people to be able to maximise their own participation and contribution in the collective interest.

The report summary is here. Full report is here.

Local Works meetings

I’ve not been keeping up with the practical localism of Local Works, but I notice they have several public meetings coming up after the new year. Check this list if you’re interested in hearing the arguments about sustaining local resources and amenities, and about the need for a Sustainable Communities Bill.

The proposed bill calls for strategies “to promote local services and local economic activity and measures for protecting the environment, social justice and greater political involvement.”

Community, consensus, and neighbourhood governance

I’ve muttered often enough about use of the word ‘community’ as if it implies consensus or something tangible. The Young Foundation with CDF and Bassac organised a seminar on neighbourhood governance the other day and, slightly unfortunately, gave it the title “Where should the community be in neighbourhood governance?”

But I wasn’t expecting the event to raise for me what I now think of as a key question: “Do we need unity of voice – consensus – for neighbourhood governance?” I got into a fascinating discussion with Susan Spencer of Bassac, Naseem Akhtar from the Saheli Women’s Group and one or two others, about trying to change the paradigm of local democracy.

My old buddy at CDF, Gabriel Chanan, had started us off by asking “How self-governing can a neighbourhood be?” I think this tack could have seen us veering into government rather than governance, but anyway some people were uncomfortable with the requirement to have neighbourhood boundaries defined in order to ensure representation and therefore accountability. Gabriel suggested that ‘neighbourhoods’ (ie residents in a given locality) have to be able “to intervene at levels other than their own.” This seems to make sense: if you want to change transport patterns across your patch, for instance, you may have to get into dealing with your county highways department.

But maybe the word ‘intervene’ indicates we’re asking the wrong questions. In our little group discussion we were resisting forms of neighbourhood governance that replicate local government structures. Doing that, we felt, might do no more than bring more command-oriented and silo-constrained management difficulties closer to people’s homes, rather than bring local people’s experience into the governance process. The ODPM’s approach to neighbourhood governance is unambiguously about service delivery, but maybe people are looking for something else: maybe people are looking for new forms of relationship with authorities.

As Susan Spencer tellingly put it, “Often we achieve consensus by people dropping out.” That very feature contributes hugely to the contemporary meaning and meaninglessness of local democracy. I think that many people don’t want decision-making powers. They’d like more knowledge of what’s going on; plus the potential to have, and feel they have, more influence. Neighbourhood governance should be about influencing within and beyond the neighbourhood. One of the questions that arises then is, can we find a new paradigm for relationships with the people who take decisions on our behalf?

This stuff is hugely difficult: there are people like Susan around with decades of community development experience, tussling with the issues and not – by her own admission – knowing the answers. In such a situation, it usually makes a difference to get the questions right.

I also wonder how far the ODPM and the Home Office can push their expectations of voluntary activity. Rose Ardron, from Sheffield NDC, said:

“I do two days a week on this and I get tired. My colleagues who are also volunteers, get tired. People aren’t breaking down the doors to get involved in local forums.”

A colleague was telling me recently about a local activist who does 76 hours of volunteering per week: he’s seriously ill. Of another it was noted recently, that to be an activist in your own street is exhausting. I just don’t get the impression that this factor has featured much in what has been thus far an overwhelmingly top-down debate.

Community and parish planning: national conference

West Berkshire Partnership has organised what looks to be a cracking event on community and parish planning, 8 February 2006 in Newbury. The area has some 46 parish plans at various stages of development and delivery, so there’s plenty to learn from.

Part of the event will showcase this activity by giving delegates a chance to meet local parish planning groups, play with a village model, listen to young people's views and quiz Council Officers. There will be speakers from ODPM and ACRE providing a national context. Leaflet is here.

Fees between £40 and £120. Note the strangely early closing date for bookings – 14 December – so make up your mind quickly.

Neighbourhood governance: game summary

Last week I posted on a run-through of the neighbourhood governance game, devised by Drew Mackie and David Wilcox with a little help from meself. There's a short pdf summary here. More on their games here.

Neighbourhood democracy: a non-partisan social movement

As part of the Transforming neighbourhoods project, Paul Hilder has produced an excellent detailed think-piece on neighbourhood governance, Seeing the wood for the trees.

On one level it just comes across as a combination of assertions, accumulated ideas, and unreferenced experience. But it's carefully framed and it takes us quite a bit closer to being able to build something functional, in terms of democratic structures, out of all the conceptual bayko that's lying around. I draw your attention to the hugely helpful matrix on page 9, a representation of the structures of neighbourhood governance on which it is well worth spending some time. It's a tribute to those involved in the project at the Young Foundation that a great deal of complexity is presented in such a digestible way.

One of several key passages is the section on the role of councillors, a role that is desperately in need of re-invention. It makes me think that what I'd like to see, in addition to the representative function, is a role that enables local people to get to grips themselves with democratic processes - a kind of governance facilitator, perhaps a blend of community development worker and traditional councillor.

And one of the key phrases comes right at the end of the paper: Paul asks, 'how can this non-partisan social movement best gather pace?' One way is to make sure that we balance all the attention to top-down structural tweaking with an attention to the ways in which people experience democracy in their everyday lives - an approach grotesquely absent from most of what has been written around the agenda thus far.

Community engagement and local leadership

The Commission for Rural Communities has published Community engagement and local leadership: the role for parish and town councils, a leaflet on good practice. The recommendations cover the following:

• to foster the capacity of parish and town councils;
• to build effective partnerships with parish and town councils;
• to involve parish and town councils in neighbourhood development;
• to build the confidence and skills of individuals within communities;
• to manage grant funding schemes effectively;
• to guarantee consistency and joined-up policy making;
• to give parish and town councils the power to promote local wellbeing.

Quite interesting to see that last one crop up. Under the Local Government Act 2000, principal authorities have the power to promote or improve the economic, social and environmental well-being of their area, but I believe it's been little used. If the power were extended to parish and town councils, would it be used, and make a difference?

Miliband on the politics of community

David Miliband's speech today to the North West Improvement Network in Manchester again touched on powerlessness in localities. As usual he reassures with a historical grasp of the issues, although we'll maybe have to wait a little longer for the solutions. It's good to see a hint that we might be getting beyond the government's preoccupation with the formal community and voluntary sector, inching towards a recognition of local social capital that includes informal social interactions and relationships. (But the minister was speaking alongside Robert Putnam, so maybe he was just nudging for intellectual elbow-room ;-)

"People say they want to live in a place where you can trust others, and feel a sense of pride and belonging. But these are things that consumers cannot buy and for which MPs cannot legislate. They exist in a space between the state and the individual - a space that we often call civic society, [er, should that be civil society?] or community. It is a space defined by what we share in common - shared values, interests, activities, institutions and spaces. And the politics of community is about how we nurture those things we share." [Or, we might rather say, those things we have in common].

More please. NWIN is a local and regional government network set up in April. Conference blurb is here.

Local governance structures

In discussion about local governance structures, use of the word 'proliferation' has, well, multiplied. There is much to be celebrated about new initiatives that offer local involvement and accountability. But is the sometimes bewildering array of initiatives, partnerships and forums to be found below the local government level going to result in more responsive services, more meaningful involvement in decision-making, a greater sense of democratic validity? JRF have just published a collection of studies of local governance in the four nations, called Mapping governance at the local level, which assesses the range and type of initiatives for various policy sectors such as health, public safety, education, area regeneration, children’s services, local housing strategies, Agenda 21 and others. At the risk of seeming anglo-centric, I've so far only read the report for England (well, it's where I live and work) written by Kirsten Bound and Paul Skidmore of Demos, and it's very enlightening. As a case study, they tried to map local governance arrangements in Bradford, and the variety is daunting. They note that it can seem quite opaque to citizens trying to navigate their way around it.

"With public trust and legitimacy in governing institutions of most kinds at a low ebb at both national and local level ... there is a risk that the complexity of the new local governance landscape simply becomes a source of confusion, misunderstanding and distrust."

Stepping back from the Bradford case study, the authors go on to reflect on the wider policy context:

"What we are seeing at present seems to be something of a gamble about how public legitimacy can be restored. On the one hand, it is possible that new distributed structures will give people a growing range of opportunities to shape service delivery, clarify understanding of the issues and trade-offs involved, and result in decisions backed by a broader base of public support. On the other hand, there is a real danger that the gap between the simple mental models and heuristics that ordinary citizens use in thinking about local governance and the increasing complexity of the situation on the ground becomes ever wider."

I've wittered on before about what I think are some of the requirements: (a) some concerted work on bringing about a participative culture, stimulating citizens' lifelong expectations of participation in the decision-making processes that affect them; and (b), as I put it here, moving on from the present policy preoccupation with formal organisations as if they wholly represent community life.

Segregation and enclaves

Britain is "sleep-walking" its way towards segregation says Trevor Phillips today, citing an ippr report on mapping new immigrant communities and a Royal Geographical Society paper on urban ethnic enclaves.

The ippr report, by Sarah Kyambi looks at the dispersal and key characteristics of immigrant communities in the  UK since 1990. Maps from this report are available on the BBC’s Born abroad pages. The study of ethnic enclaves by Mike Poulsen warns that “The issue for people living within these enclaves is how to achieve more economic and social assimilation in the absence of spatial assimilation.”

Here's another source that doesn’t seem to have got a mention in this flurry: a paper published in Urban studies this June, by Simon Burgess, Deborah Wilson and Ruth Lupton, on ‘Parallel lives: ethnic segregation in schools and neighbourhoods.’ The study was based in England and found an association between high population density and high relative school segregation. “For most ethnic groups, children are more segregated at school than in their neighbourhood.”

Disrespect and the unexamined life

A leader in today's Times calls for the government to get 'tough on disrespect, tough on the causes of disrespect.' Not blazingly original, certainly not to this government, but I note the remark that children "do not learn decency at PlayStations. And Ikea is yet to stock flatpack spirituality. In short, there are far too many unexamined lives in contemporary Britain." This is about the connection between learning to reflect, and learning to respect, which can't be effected without sustained meaningful interaction between human beings in a participative, egalitarian culture. Still some way to go then.

Not the last word on the C word

Curious juxtaposition in adjacent columns of today's Guardian. Under the headline "There is no such thing as community" Peter Preston writes: "The implication behind the word is that Britain is a nation somehow composed of defined, homogeneous and organised groups based on race, religion and neighbourhood interests."

Two or three centimetres away (for those of us using hard copy) Madeleine Bunting reports a Muslim telling her: "There are so many frustrated, angry men who ... convince themselves that this is Islamic. I find it frustrating that our community hasn't tackled this."

I'm a parsimonious user of the C word, and there are plenty of problematic misuses to moan about. But Preston's theme - of course society doesn't comprise necessarily homogeneous groups - misses a point. I think Bunting's source uses the term quite acceptably: if we want to represent a vague sense of commonality, this word, community, is a valid word to use. Such a sense is broadly recognised in human societies. We can grumble about the vagueness of the term but it won't make the feeling itself any more concrete.

What's happening this past few days is that people are groping at the potential for collective responses, as our species probably always has in situations of commonly experienced crisis. We need our politicians and our media to continue helping us understand why we draw in some people and exclude others from our shifting meanings of the word.

Citizenship and public space

Researchers at CLES (the Centre for Local Economic Strategies) have been looking at the role of public space in the development of 'active citizens' and mercifully they didn't have to come up with yet another toolkit. This is "a qualitative snapshot of three public spaces in three communities, and the role and work of eight community participants in developing a public space." They claim to show that community involvement of this kind increases individuals' knowledge of politics and aids understanding of citizenship. The report identifies several personality types which can be used to better understand the reasons why people become involved in their local communities and their routes to active citizenship. These personality types include: the Narcissist; the Altruist; the Reluctant; the Hunter; the Escapist; the Gardener; the Searcher; and the Curious. I'm a reluctant searching escapist, me.

Great expectorations

Let's think about the spitting image, because it helps us get at some meanings of citizenship. The Advertising Standards Authority, in making a judgement about a soft drinks advert in which people are seen spitting, notes that:

"Spitting is widely perceived as anti-social and we could understand why viewers would not want to see children copying this behaviour."

Putting aside the question of whether a nine-o'clock watershed on showing the advert is going to make much difference, and glossing over jokes about being a non-consumer, it's not a bad thing if this issue is getting an airing. I suspect that what most people find offensive is not the visible mess nor the potential negative public health implications, which are surely slight; it's the fact that spitting is usually a raw contemptuous 'animal' gesture. Biologically, we all have to be able to do it, so evolution hasn't been able to screen it out as we learned to speak. If enacted in the presence of others - especially directly before them - it epitomises uncivil behaviour. A couple of half-drunk blokes occupying the pavement outside a pub and spitting can be disgusting particularly if they're in your line of travel, because they're refusing to take account of your presence. So it's about adjusting forms of behaviour in the presence of others - in other words, civil behaviour.

Perhaps we should worry less about the advert than the assumption that children will do so much copying. And does it make a difference that the issue has been raised not by the government directly, but by a different authority (one which has a role of moral guardianship on behalf of government)?

I think about this from time to time because I'm an athlete who suffers from catarrh, and there are times when I need to expectorate but passing through an area with a number of pedestrians I go for the choking option. I think that's enough detail.

My headline is lifted from an article I remember decades ago, about Charles Dickens's American notes in which he wrote with comic distaste about the habit.

Ordinary people are now fashionable

Today saw the launch of a new Demos report on civic participation and the public realm, Start with people. I wish they had. I have enough respect for the authors, John Craig and Paul Skidmore, to be confident that the report will be a sound and thought-provoking read, when I get the chance. I say that because the launch event felt like a strong attempt to put me off bothering. The think tanks have discovered the community sector, as have politicians, and that's not unwelcome. It doesn't mean that these powerful and influential people sitting round discussing how ordinary people set about confronting the processes that reflect the disadvantages around them, in terms and values which are alien and offputting to the rest of us, is not close to offensive. People have been busy at local level - sometimes struggling, sometimes well-supported - getting involved and doing what they can collectively, for a lot longer than think tank wonks and politicians have taken their endeavours seriously, or recognised the significant social value of such endeavours.

Maybe I heard through tired ears, but I did hear culture minister David Lammy, for instance, start off on an unfortunate note by saying that when new labour came to power in 1997, we didn't all understand the project, the voluntary sector was a bit behind, and the community sector was just 'somewhere else.' There really is a need for a rather more sensitive attitude. It's just possible that the community sector wasn't and isn't 'somewhere else;' the politicians and the wonks have been somewhere else. I worry that some of them still are.

I arrived late for the meeting and felt duly contrite, knowing that I may have missed something and needing to allow my understanding of what was going on, to develop over a few minutes. Conceptually and on a rather different timescale, something similar may be needed here.

Neighbourhood governance on a plate

At the Together we Can launch the other day David Miliband was speaking about the 'extension of citizenship,' and those of us with an interest in neighbourhood governance trotted off to a workshop to see what could be done about it. We heard from the ODPM's Mark Hitchen, who was responsible for the Why neighbourhoods matter paper.

And here's Ed Cox of Community Pride, whose facilitation of the session required each group to write key points down on paper plates. I'm fairly sure none of the plates was spun. Plenty of talk about parish councils, delegated budgets, and the variability of the goodwill of local authorities. Meanwhile a few points have crossed my mind.

Part of what bothers me is that many people have a very unsatisfactory experience of democracy in their personal lives; and indeed unstaisfactory appreciation of what it means to participate in the decision-making processes that affect them. I worry a little about the assumptions of enhanced local democracy from the perspective of people for whom democracy has always been a part of day-to-day experience. Similarly, as I have said often enough, it doesn't help if we keep using the term 'community' as if it implies consensus. We may be storing up problems if we imply that people who live in the same locality will naturally agree on what needs to be done, or even that they wish willingly to contribute to the processes of reaching consensus. Thirdly, I'd want to make a point which emerged from the governance game we ran in Bath last week: there is a need to ensure that the representatives are genuinely representative. This is not so much about the electoral formalities of democracy, it's about behaving in representative ways.

In other words, as with the slightly weary e-democracy debate, it's really about enhancing the culture of democracy as much as its processes.

Government and citizen: a new social contract? *updated with link*

In his speech at today's launch of Together we Can David Miliband sought to explain how the social contract is 'out of step' and the social order is in transition. He even used the term 'the collective sphere,' identified as being in need of modernisation because we no longer have a culture of acquiescence sustained by deference and hierarchy. This was a call for re-emphasis on the values of mutuality and shared responsibility, "to build the sense of ownership, belonging and civic pride that is the oxygen of a successful society."

Today's achievement was to make all this sound like a rational way of developing policy without it coming across as an over-spun gloss on existing and new initiatives. Is it a genuine cultural change? Home Office minister Hazel Blears followed up with a speech that emphasised democratic empowerment, arguing that Together we Can "marks the beginning of a new relationship between government and citizens." The press release speaks of the Together we Can action plan as “the first step towards a significant shift in the balance of power between local communities and Central Government.”

Hazel Blears also noted in passing that we're not very good at assessing the cost-benefit of informal social control in terms of savings to services. (Sounds like time for some research funding there then...)

Events like this - more than three hundred people, a fistful of government ministers, expensive video and choreographed production – don’t help get at the detail but they do tell us a bit about commitment, continuity, and whether an initiative is soundly based. There are numerous awkward issues to be surfaced and dealt with, in particular some of the neighbourhood governance questions, and I'll post separately on these.

The Together we Can documents are here and here.

David Miliband's speech is available here.

Neighbourhood governance: closing in on some issues

Yesterday in Bath, David Wilcox and I ran a workshop game on neighbourhood governance at a Quest networking event. David will surely post something about the technique and process in due course on his blog. Meantime here are some issues that emerged in the conversations that we stimulated.

The whole neighbourhood governance agenda makes an assumption that people will connect to their locality. We know that people will come together in the face of adversity, but why do we suppose that they will come together just because government wants them to? This assumption was immediately challenged by one of our groups.

People have lots of different interests, and their allegiance and commitment may be stronger to interest groups than to their locality. This implies that you might not get enough strength of commitment if you assume that we’re solely or mainly bound together by locality. People will cluster around their interests if they find them in their neighbourhood, but is that enough to sustain democratic forums at the most local level? One of our workshop groups, playing the storyline of a fictitious neighbourhood forum, felt the solution was to establish sub-groups around interests; but then they ran up against the challenge of representation because insufficient numbers were turning up to meetings. Well they tried to solve that by saying 'we don't have meetings, we have events'...  Which is fine, but we're talking about a decision-making forum of some kind here...

And then there's the question of community 'leaders' or dominant activists. My hunch is that this will feature less in the neighbourhood governance agenda than is anticipated, but here's how one participant expressed it:

“However democratic you try and make it, you’ll get the big mouths, and others won’t put themselves forward.”

We're looking to develop the game as a way of surfacing issues in this agenda, so if you're interested please get in touch.

Together we can

The Home Office has just launched the website for its Together we can initiative, with a big event in London on 28 June 2005. Together we can is a cross-departmental action plan which formalises a range of government policies and initiatives into a coherent whole. It says here that:

"Together We Can will help to build a new relationship between people and government; a relationship based on mutual trust and shared responsibility."

Speakers at the conference include David Miliband MP, Minister for Communities and Local Government, and Hazel Blears MP, Home Office Minister whose responsibilities include community safety and civil renewal.

You can register here.

Civil renewal and active citizenship

A familar blogger's dilemma is whether to post straight away about a piece of news, or to digest it and offer reflections. This blog is information-oriented and frankly I'm not going to have time to read this in the next few days anyway, so here's the simple notification -

NCVO have just published Civil renewal and active citizenship: a guide to the debate, written by Véronique Jochum, Belinda Pratten and Karl Wilding. There's a pdf here.

From a quick skim, it looks very thoroughly researched and thought-through. There's a government launch and conference coming up, with a few things (at least in my mind) still to be clarified, so hopefully this will help. Since the authors include this attempt (click on the image to enlarge) to get to grips with the formal/informal participation question, it looks very encouraging. Just acknowledging that informal relations in neighbourhoods could be, er, somehow important for civil renewal, seems not to have been spotted anywhere near policy level yet, so this just could be a quiet breakthrough.

Local democratic structures

While in Turkey several people talked to me about the system of village heads (almost always men, except in some urban areas) which I didn't know about. Between them these people cover all parts of the country, playing an official, unpaid administrative intermediary role which includes things like registering voters and endorsing identity cards. They are elected and often have an office or office space. A bit like a parish clerk in some ways but without the council behind them. They tend to be well-known and motivated to carry the interests of their community. There were differing views, among those I talked to, about how susceptible this system was to abuse and corruption; but it clearly has a very strong basis in tradition and continues to function for a society in transition.

Neighbourhood policing: getting a bit of the community action

The Home Office has today launched its online Guide to community engagement in policing. Neighbourhood policing has landed.

A few things to note (in addition to the honourable mention for David Wilcox's work on participation):

(i) The Respect Agenda is formally underway, you can tell because the word is now appearing in the titles of press releases.

(ii) Try not to think about how long it has taken for the police forces to get the message for which they are now given credit. Just think about the social forces that eventually have brought this about.

(iii) Obviously the experience of neighbourhood wardens, much of it genuinely pioneering, has been key to giving some folk the courage finally to 'think neighbourhood' with regard to policing. But strangely enough, the wardens don't get any mention that I could find on the site. You might almost imagine that, being responsible to a different government department, news of their work simply hasn't travelled.

(iv) Everyone wants a bit of the community action.The press release quotes the minister: "Neighbourhood policing is not just a culture change within the police service, but the police service spearheading wider change within communities." So without counting, among those spearheading change at local level we have police, councillors, planners, librarians, and the private sector of course, probably quite a few others I'm too tired to bring to mind. All of which is laudable, up to a point. But you can't help envisaging localities where residents decide to move out because of the nuisance of a flux of professionals screeching into town, pumped up on an overdose of Change. 'What we need round 'ere is a decent community development worker to keep these professionals off our patch...'

There's a caption competition for the pic ('You laugh at my hat, I'll punch yer face in') but nothing scurrilous please.