Community participation - Joseph Rowntree Foundation

4 Network dynamics: explaining the
pattern
I read somewhere that everybody on this planet is separated by only six
other people. Six degrees of separation between us and everyone else
on this planet.
(Six Degrees of Separation, John Guare) 1
The last chapter confirmed what Chapter 2 inferred: community participation policies
designed to open up decision making carry the potential to wall it off, making it the
preserve of a small group of insiders.
This ‘usual suspects’ phenomenon is a familiar problem. But surprisingly little
attention has been paid in policy circles to understanding it. It has usually been
attributed to the behaviour of particular individuals or institutions – the failure of the
usual suspects to recognise that exercising community leadership does not mean
sitting on every committee; the failure of particular decision makers to look beyond
the usual suspects and reach out to new constituencies; the failure of people in
those constituencies to stand up and be counted. For instance, guidance about
community participation usually suggests that this is simply a question of good
practice and that the problems can be overcome if the institution in question tries
hard enough. 2
This chapter takes a different starting point. It asks whether the explanation for the
emergence of a small group of insiders lies not in the behaviour of particular
individuals or institutions but in the properties of local governance systems as a
whole.
Specifically, if we understand community participation arrangements as interactions
among social networks (as a social capital perspective encourages us to do), are
there features of the way these networks tend to operate that provide a more
plausible explanation for the outcomes they produce than simply pinning
responsibility on one particular actor within the network?
We contend that there are. By marshalling evidence from our fieldwork and returning
where necessary to the academic literature, we identify a number of ‘network
dynamics’ that appear to have an important effect. Individually none can explain why
community participation arrangements tend to run into the usual suspects problem,
but their cumulative impact serves to make it highly likely.
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