Community participation - Joseph Rowntree Foundation

Community participation
The 1% Solution
If we accept the premise that elites have an important role to play, what are the
principles that might underpin an agenda for policy and practice, which is
simultaneously more radical and more realistic than that which is presently on offer.
First, it’s not getting everyone to participate in governance that matters. It’s getting
governance to reflect the contribution of a much wider range of types of participation.
From the committed few who join the board of the local partnership to the many
more who get involved informally in organisations that feel closer to home, the trick is
to ensure that everyone’s participation counts towards making the system as a whole
more effective and legitimate, even if it cannot count equally.
Second, rather than try to change people’s participation so it fits existing structures,
we should change the structures so they fit people’s participation. Instead of trying to
corral the young people who attend a youth club or the mums in a playgroup into
getting involved in governance, we should ask how governance can get involved with
them. How can formal structures plug into the everyday social networks people do
choose to inhabit, so that a much wider section of the community understands where
the opportunities for influence are, and is far fewer steps removed from being able to
use them?
Third, we need to pay much closer attention to the incentives for participation, and
these are fundamentally about the devolution of power. Participants in governance
will find it much easier to mobilise others and plug into their networks if the formal
structures they inhabit are places where real power lies. They need to be able to
invite people to join in the creative act of doing something for the community, not
simply in making decisions about what others plan to do.
Fourth, the goal of policy should not be to invent ever more structures of
participation, even though this is much easier to do, but to invest in changing
cultures of participation in the long term.
Fifth, if these principles were adopted, we could begin to realise a system that not
only mobilised 1 per cent of citizens to participate actively in governance but was
also more legitimate, effective and a more promising basis on which to build for the
future than the one we have now. From this our approach derives its name: The 1%
Solution.
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