Community participation - Joseph Rowntree Foundation

Community participation
case studies, board members for a major new initiative were put through a
recruitment and interview process organised by officers from the local regeneration
partnership. The objective was to ensure that they would have the right combination
of skills needed for the effective stewardship of a multimillion-pound enterprise. But it
is easy to see how this might be interpreted as favouring a particular kind of
community participant. As Taylor puts it:
If [the usual suspects] are not carefully selected by partners, they are
created by the short timescales, the proliferation of partnerships, the
complexity of the rules of partnerships and the knowledge that is
required, which mean that only those who can hit the ground running can
realistically get involved. 16
Third, community groups have their own incentives to promote closure, even if they
would only think of it as doing the right thing for their members. In Benchill, for
instance, a close relationship between one of its organisers and the council
regeneration team made one community project aware of an opportunity to access
some Learning and Skills Council money, which they wouldn’t otherwise have known
about at the right time. ‘It’s very much not what you know but who you know’ was
their verdict on the experience, but they might have added ‘and who you know that
other people don’t’. Another example was residents’ associations, typically
dominated by older people, making little effort to include young people in their
engagement with decision makers, even when the topic under discussion affected
young people very directly (for example, pressing the police or housing association
wardens to clamp down on ‘nuisance’ behaviour).
Self-exclusion
Initially self-exclusion is a difficult idea to wrestle with. Exclusion implies that an
individual or group would like to participate but someone or something prevents them
from doing so. Self-exclusion sounds like a contradiction in terms – why would
someone exclude themselves from something they wanted to be part of?
In practice, however, it is not hard to find a host of reasons why this might be the
case. And unpacking the motivations behind self-exclusion can lead to some
extremely useful insights into the links between governance and social capital.
We found at least three motivations to be in play. First was resignation – people
deciding that governance is not for them. Some groups or individuals display
sufficient civic mindedness and engagement to suggest they have at least the latent
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