Community participation - Joseph Rowntree Foundation

Community participation
Principles into practice
The message from our research is that, no matter how hard people try, existing
forms of community participation in governance will only ever mobilise a small group
of people. Rather than fight against this reality, the solution lies in maximising the
value from the existing small group, while also looking at longer-term approaches to
governance that would create a broader bedrock of support for governance activity.
The suggestions here would help to move towards that aim of working incrementally
with the grain of existing patterns in people’s participation, rather than creating
transformation by radically shifting our approach to governance.
Two clear objectives for policy and practice can be discerned: first, to mobilise 1 per
cent participation; second, to embed this participation in the wider rhythms and
routines of community life. What kinds of interventions might help to realise these
objectives? The seven ideas that follow are not recommendations as such; rather,
they are intended as illustrations of what The 1% Solution might mean in practice.
Backing the best 1 per cent
If 1 per cent formal participation is the best we can aim for, we can still do much
more to ensure that it is the best 1 per cent and that they are liberated as far as
possible to actually get things done for their community. As Paul Brickell explains,
this approach makes us somewhat squeamish since:
It suggests that power and decision-making in disadvantaged
neighbourhoods might be vested in individuals and groups who ‘can
deliver’, rather than in representative, elected committees and boards. It
starts with people, rather than representative structures, and so
challenges the dominant notion of what constitutes democratic legitimacy
… Rather than seeing devolution in terms of creating more politicians and
more institutions, it involves a further redistribution of power and decisionmaking
discretion. 11
The lesson of people like Greg is that, so long as there is more than one way to ‘do’
representativeness, our approaches to devolving power to communities need to
accommodate different 1 per cents, authorised in different ways, empowered with
different resources and whose legitimacy is measured on terms dictated by the
community they serve.
54