Community participation - Joseph Rowntree Foundation

Community participation
Whether or not the wider community benefits from this depends on another aspect of
these networks – the extent to which they overlap and combine with the more
informal, bonding and bridging social capital that grows out of everyday involvement
in local community groups, associations and activities. As we have seen, this
interaction cannot be left to chance.
If we want to strengthen the relationship between community participation in
governance and social capital, simply encouraging more people to participate seems
a forlorn hope, and creating more structures wrong-headed. The range of forces
helping to perpetuate a community elite will make either approach ineffective.
Establishing some premises
This raises some fundamental questions for policy makers.The first question it raises
is, ‘what are we really trying to do by devolving power to the very local level?’. To
answer that question we need to leave aside the specific objectives of community
participation policies, and actually think about how we understand the social and
civic context of local community life. We need to acknowledge and make explicit the
premises on which community participation policies are based. We propose three.
1 More direct participation by citizens in decision making is the only credible basis
on which democratic renewal will take place. But all citizens do not need to be
equally involved for this participation to be legitimate.
2 Elites of various kinds have always been vitally important in creating social
change.
3 Elites are only undemocratic if they are disconnected from processes by which
they can be influenced and held to account by the communities they purport to
serve.
Since the achievement of universal suffrage and free and fair elections in the UK and
elsewhere in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, democracy has become
synonymous with mass electoral representation. Universal representative rights
remain, to be sure, a necessary condition for democracy and an all-too fragile asset
in many parts of the world. However, the lesson of recent history is that they are not
a sufficient condition. The decline of more active forms of participation in many
different settings – political parties or pressure groups, trade unions or community
organisations, parks committees or faith-based organisations – has weakened
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