Neighbourhoods

Big soc, good soc?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

A historical moment for community development?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Community development and Small State

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

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

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

She goes on to note that:

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

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

And among the challenges, the big one:

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

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

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

and Julian Dobson wrote:

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

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

 

 

Bigging-up the local

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Cuts begin to bite: Big Society nowhere to be seen

Here's how it starts.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Big Society: foretelling the end of confrontational governing?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Participation and public service cuts

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

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

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

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

Local sites and civic involvement

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Big Nudge: can it accommodate awkwardness?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Still, association is key in Blond's view:

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

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

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

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

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

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

A new old narrative for community regeneration

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

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

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

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

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

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

He goes on:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'Susannah isn't in Facebook'

From Nick Booth over on Podnosh:

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

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

Starting to bring some reality to BS

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

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

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

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

Remember when this was novel?

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

Or this?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Will neighbourhood management fit into new social policies?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Local activism and a general election

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

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

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

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

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

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

A vibrant civil society

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

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

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

Is Big Society hiding behind civil society?

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

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

SE says:

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

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

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

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

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

Previously:

Big Society is being watched

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

What makes a neighbourhood network?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Big Society is being watched

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

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

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

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

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

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

Julian Dobson has it about right I reckon:

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

 

'To spend more time with my sheep'

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

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

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

Via Keith Hampton.

 

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

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

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

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

The three key promises are:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Press release.
 

Jim Diers on citizen action

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Street reps, empowerment and statistics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Do unto others: on the appropriation of citizen empowerment

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

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

The invitation noted:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Co-delivery sir? Certainly, which kind would you like?

The other day I posted a note about co-delivery, making an aside about policing. Soon afterwards, looking for something else of course, I came across this short 2009 paper by Tony Bovaird and Elke Loeffler, on 'user and community co-production of public services', published by the Third Sector Research Centre.

 
They report survey and focus group research in five European countries, looking at the (co-)production of community safety, the local environment, and public health. The ranking is revealing: crime reporting, and most aspects of crime prevention, clearly rank lowest, even though the top indicator is 'take care to lock doors and windows'.

Bovaird and Loeffler conclude that people are most willing to make a contribution to public services 'when it involves them in relatively little effort and when they do not have to work closely with other citizens or staff or professionals in the government.'

Reassuringly, the researchers do not see this as beyond the influence of policy:

'the behaviour of citizens is more likely to give rise to individual co-production, unless encouragement is given to mechanisms which lead to more collective co-production. The research has suggested the possibility that third sector intermediaries and that internet-enabled technologies are likely to fulfil the requirements which make collective co-production easier and more likely.' (Emphasis added)

That last sentence combines two long-held concerns of mine - the first (third sector intermediaries) being a community development credo and obviously encompassing street reps, for example; the second being precisely the argument that Hugh Flouch and I have been making about neighbourhood online networks. We're hoping that we can confirm it convincingly in our current research.

 

 

 

Hands up, who wants to take responsibility for co-delivery?

I've been reading a recent, welcome but slightly underwhelming paper on co-production from ippr, Capable communities. It includes this statistic: eighty-two per cent of respondents agreed or strongly agreed with the following statement:

'Individuals and communities should do more to help the police cut anti-social behaviour and crime.'

I can't be expected to resist making a comment about the wording of the survey question, because it reflects the language used throughout the report: what can it mean, 'communities should do more to help the police'? This is new Labour reification of 'community,' implying incontestable agency to batches of local people who may have no grounds whatsoever for reaching consensus on local issues. I was quoting the excellent Jeremy Brent on this just a few weeks ago.

It is when you see such uses of the C word to imply policy knowledge put forward by a think-tink that you realise how ineffectual the community development field has been in challenging shallow communitarian rhetoric.

Anyway, I was struck by the question because in presentations for several years I've been referring to policing as an early example of the co-production (or co-delivery) principle - an example which probably dates back to the 1980s in the UK. Someone somewhere pointed out that the police do not have sole responsibility for producing safety on our streets; and that single insight probably gave rise to a significant transformation in the delivery of local policing. The fact that the process required public investment in several new branches in 'the family of policing' - community support officers, neighbourhood wardens and so on - is often conveniently overlooked.

So successfully have the police and media combined in building up this theme that while the police are more heavily funded than ever before, 82% of us agree that we should all be playing more of a role in reducing anti-social behaviour and crime. I'm surprised at the figure, with only 3% disagreeing.

A couple of concluding thoughts -

(i) Until people in policy-land stop implying that there are things called communities which can be called on to voice an opinion and take uncontested collective action that will be acceptable to the state, we're going to see neither genuine empowerment nor meaningful co-delivery.

(ii) The survey asked four questions about attitudes to responsibility for services. As the paper acknowledges, a substantial proportion of people responded 'neither agree nor disagree' or 'don't know' (between 14% and 39%). This suggests that many people may not have thought about any model of delivery of public services other than the one they currently pay for, if that. And yet still we have an education system from which many people emerge with no idea how public services are funded or on what basis they are provided. Policy wonks either can't grasp this, or they're comfortable with it as a form of systematised disempowerment from the processes of democracy.

 

Street reps: an everday story of trust and power

The other day I was running some workshops with street reps in Shipley with my daughter, three years since the first set of workshops I ran with them.

On the surface, the initiative has gone well, with a good sprinkling of residents taking up the role and ready to talk about it. And their contribution seems to have had an impact. For example, the proportion of people in East Shipley who say that rubbish and litter lying around is a problem has decreased from 50% to 36% in three years. Anecdotally, the drugs presence has diminished significantly as people have at last felt supported in raising concerns.

But there is disquiet. This is a predominantly white low income area, part of which comes within the 2% most deprived in the country. One report notes that a lot of people feel that all the ‘big’ regeneration money goes into areas of central Bradford dominated by black and minority ethnic groups, and that ‘white Shipley’ misses out. Well, I don't know the central areas of the city, but there's no evidence of any kind of regeneration money going into the two neighbourhoods of Shipley where I've been working. So it doesn't feel wrong to sympathise if these people feel a sense of marginalisation and abandonment.

What do we expect from the community cohesion indicator? The percentage of residents who believe that people from different backgrounds get on well together declined a disconcerting 10% (from 66% to 56%) between 2007 and 2009. The national average is 76%. So it was not totally unsurprising, if unnerving, to overhear one of the street reps delighting in the prospect that a BNP candidate is likely to get voted in to a local ward. This could be a nasty, dingy corner of local politics.

The second group we spoke to insisted that their role is not political, by which they mean, it's not characterised by party politics. But it's profoundly, inescapably political: these are unpaid volunteers living among people whose neighbourhood they 'represent' - often anonymously because of fears of reprisals - without democratic process or accountability but with the essential task of standing at the interface of citizen-as-subject and state-as-provider.

Every call they make to environment or housing services, every conversation they are having with the police support officer, perhaps every time they step outside and have a word with a neighbour, they're trying to reassert the citizen's influence over what happens, and juggling the fizzing firesticks of responsibility, responsiveness, interference, surveillance, vigilantism, identity, collective interest and so on. They do this from a base of controlled influence and minimal power.

We'll be going back for several more sessions, but (partly because they've not had much press for a long time) I'm already concerned that the street reps movement may not be in blooming good health.

I see it as an important experiment, as much about new forms of engaged democracy as about making services locally responsive; as much about co-delivery as about efficiency. But it's apparent that, as with Neighbourhood Watch before it, the whole initiative can be weakened by lack of trust.

Neighbourhood Watch empowers its representatives, but is based unavoidably on a foundation of distrust. Street reps take their place on a basis of pro-social action, but (sometimes for very good reasons) may have neither the power nor the necessary level of generalised trust to have the influence that justifies the effort.

Maybe too little has been tried. The potential of neighbourhood websites is certainly one area that cries out to be developed alongside support for street reps. We're not done yet.

Empowerment is a good thing, so what am I not happy about?

You can't get away from empowerment. There are conferences and workshops and training going on all over the place. I'm not signed-up to many lists, but my mailbox is peppered with invitations and blurb about empowering citizens / communities / residents, in relation to housing / health / safety / environment / education / motherhood / apple pie.

Fifteen years ago we wouldn't have believed it could happen, ten years ago we might have aspired towards it. Now empowerment is fashionable. I think there's an industry self-generating a lot of activity and I'm suspicious.

This is not to denigrate the work of many who are delivering from experience lots of sound learning points to people who appear to need them; nor specific policy events which in themselves may be wholly valid. But a culture accumulates; and there is a precedent.

Round about 2003, the field of social inclusion and new technology became counter-productively transformed when government started putting up huge chunks of funding without much thought about what was needed in local situations, thus attracting many who were willing to spend it for them without the burden of values or the inconvenience of insights into the nature of exclusion. I've been outspoken about that before, once or twice.

Part of the difficulty is that many London-based suits don't speak to people who have the dirt of estate life under their fingernails, unless for a photoshoot and through an interpreter. They meet together in London events to problematise the issue as 'out there', thus ensuring that they do not see themselves as part of it.

One of the consequences is that any action to be taken becomes the subject of organisational management (control) rather than local networked response.

There's also an increased risk of professionalisation, leading to the situation where some designated people can 'do empowerment' and the rest of us can't, which makes no sense.

Perhaps I'm getting too cranky in my old age, but I can't help suspecting that the processes that I identified the other day, which assimilate, appropriate language, insist on consensus and manage dissent, could in due course absorb the theme of empowerment itself. Now there's a perverse irony. What words would we feel able use for empowerment if its meaning were confiscated?

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.
 

Social policy and empowerment

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

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

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

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

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

Co-production is coming of age

There's a tidy little cluster of examples of neighbourhood-based co-production just posted (anonymously, why?) on the NANM blog, claiming that people do just ‘get it’. So is the idea coming of age?

Co-production or co-delivery of public services and benefit gets a mention in most of my presentations and I agree, most people do get it. Most of us don't expect our medics to produce our health for us, we don't expect teachers to have sole responsibility for educating our children, and the police are not the only people who produce safety on our streets.

A lot of this thinking goes back to the late 1980s or early 90s, raising questions about how long it takes for the penny to drop in the official-bureaucratic mentality. I'm reminded of a meeting with a county police authority a couple of years ago, in which I made the above points and found myself faced with blank incomprehension, suggesting that few of them had reflected on the social context of their own practice.

Co-production needs to be seen as a form of collective behaviour and its ultimate expression is sustainable lifestyles. We can see people's responses to the pressures of climate change ('we must do our bit') as the unlikely source of a post-Thatcherite resurgence in credibility for collective approaches. A little encouragement from our most influential media wouldn't go amiss.

Another angle on this is the 'crowding-out' effect, the view that in the second half of the last century the welfare state overwhelmed citizens' readiness to help themselves or one another - hence the line that co-production is 'the biggest revolution in the shape of public services since Beveridge' (NESTA press release on their recent report).

There's a strong (but I believe unproven) argument to suggest that in some areas of social support, and with some demographics, accusations of crowding-out may be valid. Which leaves us with the forces of economic recession, reducing expectations and the necessity of localism. It's sometimes tough growing up.

Informal volunteering

Here's the trend in informal volunteering in England, which I flagged up last October. Just something to keep an eye on.

Source.

Participation literature review

The Pathways to Participation project has published its literature review, which must leave the project staff with a great 'now-let's-get-on-with-it' feeling.

This is going to be a handy document. The literature of participation is vast and I can't believe anyone really has a good handle on it. We're all going to have our favourite texts which may or may not contribute to the overall picture the project presents. That's not the point: it's more like an exercise in representing a phenomenon from all possible perspectives in order to get a unified understanding of what it is.

So the project perspective is broad, and it feels like there are strong efforts to counter the perception of a bias towards volunteering - plenty of reference to consumer and social movements, for instance. Informal public participation features strongly, and a framework (or rather set of frameworks) emerges to help see participation in terms of life stages, specific activities, the places where it is conducted, and various dimensions such as local-global, passive-active, one-off or ongoing, and so on. Once the project data starts coming in, people who are good at playing with matrices and fancy graphics can have a field day.

'Much of what is relevant in the different bodies of literature examined here does not even frame itself as being about participation – it is about, for example, volunteering or ethical consumerism. In this review we have attempted to map out this vast and complex landscape, to integrate different bodies of literature on participation, and to move towards a ‘round-earth’ view of participation. In doing so, we hope to have mapped the terrain for our Pathways through Participation project, as well as providing what we hope will be a useful review for other readers.'

The key emerging themes will not come as a surprise - that it's about power, relationships, people and context. This is about checking your tools before you move out in to the field. Project work begins in Leeds, Enfield and Suffolk.

Co-delivery in freezing conditions

In this time of big freeze, many people have had to park their cars away from their homes, if they live on ungritted side streets and/or their street is on an incline.

This can lead to the scenario I witnessed in a nearby street on Sunday morning, of at least thirty residents out with their shovels chipping away at the ice to make the road useable. The scene from the foot of the hill was worthy of Breughel. I stopped to note all the conversations that were taking place: no doubt there's plenty of new social capital available to people now.

By contrast, here's another local tale, of a resident who went out to clear her stretch of the road, shovelling and chipping away at the stubborn ice. A neighbour appeared and said, 'are you working for the council now then?'

The traditional passive model of service expectation dies hard, but I suspect its demise will accelerate in the coming big spending freeze.

Community contracts

Community contracts (sometimes called neighbourhood or community agreements or charters) are voluntary agreements between residents, local service providers and elected representatives that aim to improve conditions in a defined area. Here's the first evaluation of the idea based on a pilot programme, with management support from the National Association for Neighbourhood Management, which covered eleven areas. (The evaluation included six cases study areas, two of which were not from the pilot programme).

Among the findings that caught my eye:

• for contracts to be successful, neighbourhood or locality based working needed to be in place
• a history of partnership working contributed to the development of contracts (frankly if a local service provider has not got a history of partnership working by now, you have to question whether they should be in business)
• the absence of accessible and smooth running routes for reporting by residents of service and neighbourhood issues to service providers presented a barrier to the effective operation of contracts (er, if you need a big chunk of public research money to tell you that, I have to question whether you should be in government)
• a core group of active residents was needed to develop and deliver contracts (alright I'll shut up now)
• there was a clear correlation between effective governance and effective contracts.

The report notes that there were plans for extending contracts 'to tackle other service and policy areas, including health and education'. And, not the least important insight:

'the evidence strongly suggests that this is not a policy for less affluent areas only, as it could contribute towards the management of expectations in more affluent areas, add to allocative efficiencies across an authority, by better matching services to citizens’ wishes, and play a role in discussions about distributive efficiencies.'

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.

Changing the acoustics for citizens' voices

The other day I was at CABE for a meeting about community engagement and public space. We seem to have been wobbling on this theme for years without quite getting our balance or momentum, but there are signs that we're all gaining in confidence. Public libraries have been going through a similar process. This is about getting clarity on what constitutes a democratic public realm. Democracy is at last beginning to shift from an emphasis on its mechanics to an appreciation that it depends on the quality of conversations in public. But it's later than you think.

It was an upbeat meeting, including presentations from (among others) Ivan Ball on consultation for Caterham Barracks, William Perrin on Talk About Local, and Alison Drake on the now-famous regeneration work of Castleford Heritage Trust - and that astonishing bridge which, as a public space (as Sarah Gaventa suggests) 'can offer as much as a street, public square, or park.'

Among the themes discussed was the promise that developers will invest in community engagement because it helps them make money. If this is true and becomes acknowledged, it seems to me, it will change the power dynamics: will some community groups come to expect a cut, will they be charging outsiders for their own views about their own locality?

One of the difficulties with discussions like this is that we all make assumptions about the nature of local communities, and have to pass over awkward niceties: like the fact that not all neighbourhoods are neatly defined topographically - and those that aren't are probably easy pickings for unscrupulous developers (if there is such a thing); or the fact that not all neighbourhoods have confident, articulate, respected, energetic local champions like Alison representing their interests.

But what struck me most about the stage of thinking we're at, is that these initiatives imply significant changes to the acoustics for citizens' voices. Organised community action - in meetings around the town as in Castleford or (especially) online as in some of William's examples - is starting to bring about a far more audible articulation of local people's views and experience than we have had before. And don't be fooled by the rhetoric from above, which to use Alison's phrase tends to mean 'big people not listening': much of it is in spite of, not because of, official action.

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.

No, the tech doesn't weaken local social ties

The results of Keith Hampton's latest study, on Social isolation and new technology, have just been released by the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

The study surveyed a nationally representative sample of 2,512 adults in summer 2008. It finds that Americans are not as isolated as has previously been reported. People’s use of mobile phones and the internet is associated with larger and more diverse discussion networks. Internet use in general and use of social networking services in particular are associated with more diverse social networks.

The researchers claim that the number of Americans who are truly isolated is at most only slightly higher than it was 30 years ago. Few people have no one with whom they can discuss important matters, and even fewer have no one who is especially significant in their lives. But they do confirm a more pronounced change, over the past two decades, in the size and diversity of people's core networks.

These paragraphs, I feel, are important:

Compared to the relatively recent past, most Americans now have fewer people with whom they discuss important matters, and the diversity of people with whom they discuss these issues has declined. There is a wealth of scholarship to suggest that the implications of this trend for individuals and for American society are starkly negative. Smaller and less diverse core networks diminish personal well-being by limiting access to social support. There are simply fewer people we can rely on in a time of need – whether it is a shoulder to cry on, to borrow a cup of sugar, or to help during a crisis.

Small and narrow core networks also impede trust and social tolerance; they limit exposure to the diverse opinions, issues, and ideas of others. If we increasingly rely and trust only a small inner circle of likeminded others, it becomes increasingly difficult to recognize, accept or understand opposing points of view. A great deal of research has shown that diversity within our closest relationships – even in the age of the internet – is vital for the flow of information, for informed deliberation, and to maintain the participatory ideals of a democracy.

As we would expect, Hampton and his colleagues clear up some of the thinking about the contribution of technologies to this trend:

What is the source of this change? We don’t know. But, we believe we have ruled out one likely source: new information and communication technologies such as the internet and mobile phone. Our survey finds the opposite trend amongst internet and mobile phone users; they have larger and more diverse core networks.

What about local social networks? The researchers conclude:

Our findings also suggest that there is little to the argument that new information and communication technologies decrease participation in traditional, local social settings associated with having a diverse social network. When we look beyond people’s core network, to their full network of relations, we find that most uses of the internet and mobile phone have a positive relationship to neighborhood networks, voluntary associations, and use of public spaces. There is some evidence that very specific internet activities, such as use of social networking services (e.g, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn), substitutes for some neighborhood involvement – the internet allows people to obtain traditional forms of neighborhood support from a social circle that extends outside of their neighborhood. Yet, internet users continue to give support to their neighbors, and the level of face-to-face contact with neighbors is the same for internet users as it is for non-users.

As we know, many people use the internet to reinforce local connections. The research finds that people who belong to a neighborhood discussion forum are far more involved locally than are others. (Previously: Maybe neighbourhood blogs reflect neighbourhood demographics?)

From the press release:

“There is a tendency by critics to blame technology first when social change occurs,” argued Prof. Keith Hampton, the lead author of the Pew Internet report, Social Isolation and New Technology. “This is the first research that actually explores the connection between technology use and social isolation and we find the opposite. It turns out that those who use the internet and mobile phones have notable social advantages. People use the technology to stay in touch and share information in ways that keep them socially active and connected to their communities.”

Summary. Full report.

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.

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)

 

We didn’t know what it would look like, but this is it

Talk About Local unconference 3 October 2009

I got involved in social uses of technology in 1986 when I joined the Community Computing Network (which at the time was chaired by none other than Bill Thompson). In the late 80s and through the 90s there were numerous forums and meetings and discussions and documents about ‘this stuff’ – the convergence of computers and telecommunications – and what it might mean for unprivileged folk.

We talked about the potential for self-publishing but we weren’t sure of what. We thought this stuff could empower local people but we weren’t sure how. We thought it would promote horizontal communication and mean we were less vulnerable to vertical communication, but we weren’t sure what that would look like. Much of the time I was straggling along behind David Wilcox as we sought some kind of clarity that wasn't spoiled by political reality.

There were nay-sayers. I remember one well-known individual in the community development field protesting that the technology was divisive because ‘no-one is communicating when they’re at a computer’. The inability to see beyond next week was scary. Ludicrous proclamations about the death of the local, or the disastrous consequences for face-to-face interaction, seemed to stifle some people’s ability to reflect.

And things went askew on the way. In particular, too many smart people moved in and created the digital divide industry, determined to make money out of something politically fashionable. Their behaviour was and remains distasteful. The same sort of thing now seems to be happening under the heading of ‘digital engagement’. And there are efforts to introduce things like ‘digital champions’ and ‘digital heroes’, to invent new hierarchies while the rest of us are busy carting off the old ones.

Believe it or not, some of us felt that the global would not invalidate the local. We felt that there is a complementarity, not a disconnection, of offline and online; and wherever you live is a good place to start appreciating that. It turns out we were right. And this was confirmed today at a memorable meeting about hyperlocal sites, organised under the aegis of Talk About Local.

Lots of folk running or supporting local sites from around the country got together in reassuringly unfashionable Stoke on Trent, to discuss whatever they wanted to discuss, about what they are inventing and developing. They talked about relations with councils, how to deal with negative comments on their sites, how to encourage fellow-residents to become citizen-journalists, and so on.

Back in the 80s and 90s, we didn’t know what it would look like, but this is it. It may need some new language, but the values are all there - inclusion, empowerment, local people taking responsibility for their own communication environment. And those values are not worn self-consciously like badges, they’re simply ‘what we do’.

As my mate Martin Dudley of Bish.net put it, the risk with these events is that you get a stream of cyberbabble from the tech addicts, and a load of righteous blather which translates as ‘these poor people, we must help them connect’. He and I have both sat in plenty of meetings which oscillated between these themes. But today we were outside London, and it was a Saturday, which probably partly explains why we were spared.

I suppose that, as with inclusion and engagement, there’s a risk that the suits will swill into this field and contaminate it, but this time something – expertise – is already owned and held by local people. And yes, there’s a question about ‘who’s not here?’ (It was a uniformly white and predominantly middle class gathering). But these are early days.

Huge credit is due to William Perrin and his TAL colleagues for opening this topic up in just the right way at the right time.

*Update: David has uploaded a video of me saying some of this stuff. Among the other clips, observations from Tom Steinberg about the future of local sites as news sites.

Previously:

Against the digital divide industry: of champions and charters

Social inclusion and digital inclusion through community centres

Social exclusion, social capital, and local online centres

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

Vote pop-up urinal!

If you live in the London Borough of Lambeth and you're on the electoral register, you can vote for a community project to be funded from each of three bands - £125,000, £75,000 and £50,000. Including the (presumably separate) computer and shower facilities at the Streatham Darby and Joan club.

There's information about each project and there are also face-to-face information events. Residents can vote online or by text.

As an occasional visitor to Lambeth meself I'd favour the £75,000 'pop-up urinal', although it hardly classes as a community project. Given that the proposed location is Waterloo, it has to stand a chance. However, it's up against a wet play area for children.

Maybe neighbourhood blogs reflect neighbourhood demographics?

A week back the ever-alert Nick Booth linked to this article claiming that 'Neighborhood blogs drive participation in city planning'. (Thanks to Hugh for nudging me onto it).

The city of Seattle has been encouraging residents to fill out a survey to provide their feedback on the growth plan for each of their neighborhoods. How sensible. And it turns out that those neighbourhoods with a high level of responses 'already have a really strong blog presence in the neighborhood'.

“There’s a lot of people already engaged in neighborhood issues through the blogs, and I think that’s what’s driven a lot of people to respond.”

A reasonable assumption - so let's all jump to the conclusion that having a local online presence results in increased civic participation. Lots of us would like to believe it.

But wouldn't it help to step back and think about the degree to which populations predisposed to offline civic participation (this is often closely associated with educational attainment) were getting active in neighbourhood online networks? Could it be that those more likely to be active in civic affairs are more likely to be active in neighbourhood blogs?

To put it another way, isn't it just possible that people in the areas where a higher proportion are less affluent, less connected and less accustomed to having influence, might have neither the time and motivation to establish neighbourhood blogs nor the collective confidence or readiness to engage with civic structures? Just curious.

Empowerment, evaluation and the C word again

When I worked at Community Development Foundation I tried for years and failed miserably to stop my colleagues and others abusing the C word, or using it uncritically at best. Now my old buddy Gabriel Chanan has written for the South West Foundation a characteristically clear guide to empowerment and evaluation in which he recognises that it's not just authorities and professionals at national level who do this:

Community activists and workers, who do understand the internal dynamics of local people’s relationships, are often equally guilty of fudging the use of the word community. They are inclined to designate the small numbers of people and community groups they work with as ‘the community’, because these are the people closest to them, and to ignore the question of how to establish whether the views and experiences of these small clusters of people do or don’t reflect the views and experiences of the numerical majority.

With some notable exceptions, most evaluations and project descriptions in this field start off by describing problems affecting a whole locality and end up by describing the actions of a small group, without ever checking back to see what difference this made to the whole locality, or indeed if the project’s existence was even known to most residents. The active group or project is described as ‘the community’, and its career is then taken as automatically indicative of the state of the whole locality.

This is good stuff not least because more people will take notice of a Gabriel text than of me mumbling on about it. The document explores how the national indicators might get reconciled with local experience,

- using both government indicators and project-based methods together;
- linking the official indicators to small-scale local experience
- extracting lessons from evaluation to improve practice.

Checkout Gabriel's parallel paper on making the business case for community empowerment.

Previously:
The C word has a companion
Not the last word on the C word

Volunteering: a minority perspective

I've been having some online correspondence with a blind woman from a minority ethnic group, about being a volunteer. She makes some sharp points about the receptivity of traditional volunteering agencies, and has agreed for me to pass on these observations.

When my friend lost her sight, she was invited to join the management committee of the local association for the blind.

'It did not take me long to find out that they wanted me on the committee but would not trust me with any interesting work. As I had to give up work I tried hard to get into various voluntary organisations offering my services for free just for the satisfaction of doing something worthwhile. To cut a long story short, I have always had to prove myself, sell my services hard and push myself into some roles none would like. This pushing oneself hard, selling one’s skills and experience for an outcome of insults is not everyone's cup of tea.

'Charities begging for volunteers do not seem to realise that members of BME communities do not necessarily want to work with BME members. I have been told several times that they could not give me any volunteering roles because they did not have any BME demand, until I proved Caucasians were just as happy with my work.

'Agencies using volunteers as well as employers seem to think all similar looking people are the same. So, they club together all Africans, brown skinned people etc, no matter where they are from, thinking they would be happy working together. As one African friend of mine put it, these people calling themselves clever do not realise that someone from Somalia can be as different from someone from Nigeria as an Italian from an Englishman.'