Community participation - Joseph Rowntree Foundation

Network dynamics: explaining the pattern
Exclusivity
Closure
Chapter 2 introduced the concept of closure. It suggested that this potential ‘dark
side’ is sometimes overlooked in more optimistic accounts of social capital, even
though it seems to be an inherent feature of it. It went as far as to suggest that
closure seems to be a key factor in giving value to linking social capital. 12 Given that
its operation may be clandestine or even subconscious, closure is difficult to prove
empirically. But we can infer from the literature and our fieldwork that closure is at
work in producing the small worlds phenomenon in a variety of ways. Some of these
may be deliberate and strategic, whereas others appear to result from tacit,
unintended or subconscious institutional processes.
First:
… public sector partners and other power holders too often select the
community partners with whom they want to work. Inevitably these are
likely to be those whom they find the easiest to work with or the most
easily approachable. 13
In one example we found, a successful community-run health and well-being project
grew out of a local church and flourished into a successful provider of a diverse
range of services, staffed and used by volunteers and residents from the area. When
plans were announced to build a new facility very close by, offering a very similar
suite of services, the project’s management committee expected that they would be
able to engage constructively with the statutory-sector body responsible, so as to
avoid duplication of effort and enable both sides to benefit from each other’s
resources. Instead they faced a wall of indifference to their work. They were
overlooked in the decision-making process, and even found themselves losing a
grant for the provision of one of their services to the new centre. It was not that ‘the’
community was ignored per se. Participation and consultation did take place, but the
voices being amplified belonged to a different set of community organisations,
including one whose dilapidated building was to be demolished and replaced as part
of the plan for the new facility.
Second, even where preferences are not expressed so overtly, institutions still have
tremendous potential to ‘load the dice’ in favour of one kind of community leadership,
and one breed of community participant, rather than another. 14 The ostensibly neutral
demands of ‘good governance’ tend to favour participants with an appetite and a
capacity to handle bureaucratic procedural and financial complexity. 15 In one of our
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