Community participation - Joseph Rowntree Foundation

Community participation
These problems are particularly acute for marginalised groups when there are
pressures to ensure ‘representativeness’. Participants from under-represented
groups like the black and minority ethnic (BME) community or young people often
find themselves in danger of burn-out because they become the BME or the young
people’s representative to whom a whole array of institutions then turn. Chloe falls
into this category, as an articulate young person from a disadvantaged
neighbourhood who has shown herself willing to get involved in governance
activities. The youth worker who works with her is vigilant for any signs that she is
being exploited by institutions or is at risk of burn-out.
Conclusion
This chapter argued that the dominance of a small group of insiders in community
participation lies not in the behaviour of particular individuals or institutions but in the
properties of local governance systems as a whole. It turns out, as Marilyn Taylor
argues, that ‘the much maligned “usual suspects” are often created by the
partnership system itself.’ 22
We identified six ‘network dynamics’ whose cumulative impact serves to explain why
community participation arrangements tend to run into this usual suspects problem.
A clearer understanding of these dynamics helps us to see where the points of
greatest leverage on the problem are. If the emergence of a community elite is highly
likely, given the way local governance systems are currently put together, we can
use this understanding to frame recommendations both for confronting this reality
more honestly in policy and practice, and, in the long term, for taking steps to
remedy it. It is to this task that our concluding chapter turns.
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