Community participation - Joseph Rowntree Foundation

Community participation
Although this constitutes a significant additional investment, we cannot do
participation on the cheap, and certainly not if we really hope to transform the culture
of participation across the board. Instead we should follow Gordon Brown’s advice
that we must ‘invest to save’ in communities across the board. A growing body of
research is beginning to show that effective spending on involving communities can
ultimately end up saving money. 18
Local councillors’ role should be refashioned around a formal responsibility for
community engagement
The big unanswered question in all of this is the proper role of local councillors and,
in one sense, this lies far beyond the scope of this project. Yet local councillors have
such potential both to facilitate the emergence of a different culture of community
participation and to scupper it that it would be wrong to ignore them completely.
Councillors themselves are clearly very suspicious of community participation, which
they perceive as a direct threat to their role. The era in which local councils were the
only channel for democratic engagement in their area, and local councillors the only
representatives with a claim to democratic legitimacy, is over. Some degree of
pluralism is here to stay. But we are going to need representative roles that are
capable of connecting with and helping to join up those much more distributed
patterns of power at the very local level. Though councillors have lost their monopoly
on democratic legitimacy, a mandate acquired through the ballot box does make
them first among equals in this task. The challenge for councillors is to recognise the
responsibility, which that implies, to acknowledge the validity of other
representatives’ claims and to embrace a new, clearer role as the champion of
community engagement in their area. That role might have a number of elements.
Advocates: the most important shift is away from exercising ‘hard’ power over
direct service delivery towards exercising ‘soft’ power over the activities of a
much wider range of actors in the local governance firmament (police, health,
regeneration) through influence, advocacy and persuasion.
Arbitrators: under the new proposals to give communities trigger powers,
councillors could be vested with powers to act as arbitrators, brokering
settlements between service providers (e.g. the local police commander) and
community representatives, which resolve the issue without drastic action being
taken.
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