Community participation - Joseph Rowntree Foundation

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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
Making the most of community participation: The 1% Solution A promising avenue is to recruit a different kind of community elite by backing more social entrepreneurs to act as the vehicles for local change. One way to do this would be to replace some community participation structures with ‘communityinterest companies’, run by a social entrepreneur and with local people given representative rights as ‘shareholders’ in this enterprise rather than as voters or residents. This shift in emphasis should be mirrored in a shift in the type of support offered by the State, with a new focus on the transferral of assets to community control as a way of giving social enterprises the resources they need to get started, to secure loans and to provide the basis for lasting financial independence from Government. 12 Disconnecting and reconnecting the 1 per cent While it may not be possible to counteract the effects of the network dynamics we have identified, there are almost certainly opportunities to ‘disconnect’ and ‘reconnect’ community elites and their stakeholders in new ways. Even if we accept that 1 per cent is the best we can do, we can do more to ensure that a different 1 per cent matters at different times and places, and that it can be recomposed, refreshed, recalled and rotated. In the language of Chapter 4, community participation must foster ‘transactions’ that spread social capital and not just ‘investments’ that concentrate it. As a first step, local authorities should create directories and knowledge banks about community participation in their area. For local people, this would make a terribly confusing governance landscape much easier to understand and navigate, and help them to see how community participation in governance can make a practical difference to their everyday lives. It would tell them who they needed to speak to in relation to different issues, what powers they had, what resources they might be able to access, what help they could be and how they themselves could get involved. For local and national agencies, it would mean that a whole series of more interesting and more important questions could start to gain traction on policy and practice. Who are the 1 per cent? What are they like? How diverse/reflective of the population are they? How are they connected to one another? How have they been recruited? Do they reflect the diversity of the communities from which they are drawn? This knowledge would promote transparency and accountability, and assist better planning and recruitment processes. But mapping these connections and making them visible would also offer a different, more human gaze on governance, which could in turn generate ideas about how it might be improved. 55
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Community participation Who benefit
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Community participation Who benefit
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Contents Acknowledgements Executive
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Executive summary Key concepts This
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Executive summary What the literatu
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Executive summary The bottom line T
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Executive summary 2 Rather than try
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Executive summary representatives a
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Conceptual note Many of the terms a
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1 Putting the public back into publ
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Page 27 and 28: Understanding the links between par
Page 39 and 40: Community participation in two depr
Page 53 and 54: 4 Network dynamics: explaining the
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Page 65 and 66: 5 Making the most of community part
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Page 81 and 82: Notes Executive summary 1 S. Alinsk
Page 83 and 84: Notes Chapter 2 1 Other studies hav
Page 85 and 86: Notes 12 M. Woolcock, ‘The place
Page 87 and 88: Notes 28 C. Barnes and G. Mercer, D
Page 89 and 90: Notes 47 C. Pattie, P. Seyd and P.
Page 91 and 92: Notes Chapter 4 1 J. Guare, Six Deg
Page 93 and 94: Notes 20 M. Woolcock, ‘The place
Page 95: Notes give community organisations
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Community participation - Joseph Rowntree Foundation

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