Community participation - Joseph Rowntree Foundation

Making the most of community participation: The 1% Solution
representative democracy. Unless we can replenish these participatory energies,
democracy withers. 2
But the other lesson of history is that informal participation can strengthen
democracy without the formal institutions of governance themselves being
particularly participatory. As democratic theorists since Madison have argued, the
hallmark of successful democracy is not the absence of elites but the way they are
embedded in a genuine pluralism, which holds them in check, calls them to account,
limits the influence of a single elite across different centres of power and, most
crucially, prevents the transient power of one elite from crystallising into something
more permanent. 3
The way to do that is to ensure that the right connections are made in the right
places between formal participation by elites in the institutions of governance and
more informal participation by people in the institutions of everyday civic life: book
clubs, gyms, SureStart groups, faith groups and so on. One group we spoke to had
used different colour Monopoly money to allow both parents and staff at a centre to
express their views on what the spending priorities for a service should be. As one of
our interviewees put it:
People already congregate in school, church, at the bus stop … We need
to work harder to find them – don’t assume if they don’t turn up to
meetings they’re not interested.
For, by itself, the existence of a community elite is not evidence that policies to
promote community participation have failed. The existence of a community elite
disconnected from local civic culture is. What is worrying is how much attention is
paid to creating formal structures that, in all likelihood, will only ever be inhabited by
the committed few and how little attention is paid to ensuring that these structures
interact with, and are embedded in, the places and organisations in and through
which people actually live their lives. As we have seen, this cannot be left to chance.
So, rather than ignore the role of elites, we should draw attention to it and ask how it
can be aligned both with existing representative structures, like local authorities, and
with these much more informal forms of participation in mutually invigorating ways.
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