Community participation - Joseph Rowntree Foundation

Making the most of community participation: The 1% Solution
Inquirers: the use of open inquiry processes, chaired or initiated by councillors,
might be one effective way to mobilise local people to get involved in a process
that celebrates and harnesses the knowledge of local people, generates useful
information for local agencies and provides a different environment for balancing
competing viewpoints. 19
Convenors: councillors should be responsible for mobilising effective community
participation in decision making about their area. A programme of experiments in
participatory budgeting should see a proportion of local authority budgets
delegated to ward level, with councillors overseeing a participatory process for
how it is spent. Councillors might also lead in involving residents in the design
and delivery of Local Area Agreements, 20 initiating a cycle of participatory
planning that began with priorities at the very local level and worked up towards
more overarching, shared themes.
Conclusion
Community participation has the potential to remake our system of governance in a
more democratic image. But we are not there yet and we must not squander the
generational opportunity we have to realise that potential by promising too much too
soon, or by basing policy on unrealistic assumptions about people’s propensity to
join committees in great numbers. Government should be congratulated for opening
up our system of local governance to community involvement and for creating many
more opportunities for people to have a say over how services in their area are run.
But there are diminishing returns to creating any more structures. The key challenge
over the next decade and beyond is about how we make the most of what we’ve got,
through policies and practices that celebrate and liberate the committed few to be
agents for social change, while binding them into a tighter web of informal,
overlapping civic relationships that promote their legitimacy.
The radical American community organiser Saul Alinsky once wrote that ‘In
organising, the major negative in the situation has to be converted into the leading
positive’. 21 The 1% Solution is proposed as a practical, ambitious but achievable way
to take up this challenge. The fact that relatively few people choose to participate in
formal governance does not mean we should discard the ambition of community
participation, but rather that we should recast it. Margaret Mead’s injunction – ‘Never
underestimate the power of a small group of committed people to change the world.
In fact, it is the only thing that ever has’ – is often quoted, but rarely acted on. 22 By
rewiring our networks of community participation at the local level, we have a chance
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