Consultation On The Proposed Community Empowerment - Scottish ...

“There is still often a disconnection between community
organisations on the ground and formal community planning
process. This suggests that community planning partners – in
both the statutory and voluntary sectors - still have work to do
to effectively embed community engagement within their own
activities and programmes.”
(Scottish Community Foundation)
3.11 Community planning partnerships and local authority respondents offered a
different perspective. Many agreed that community engagement should be
embedded within the Community Planning process but felt that engaging
communities on high level strategic policy was challenging. Some suggested
that communities might be better working with individual partner organisations
rather than with the community planning partnership.
“Community engagement within Community Planning has
been developing and is improving but there is still a
considerable distance to travel to achieve effective, informed
and accountable community involvement across all
community planning outcomes.”
(East Lothian Council)
3.12 Others highlighted examples of good practice. For example:
“In Aberdeen there are various levels of community
engagement with opportunities for local geographic
participation and avenues for single issue groups and
communities of interest groups to influence decision making.
In addition the Civic Forum operates as an umbrella
organisation that brings community representative
organisations together and is represented on the Community
Planning Aberdeen Board.”
(Community Planning Aberdeen)
3.13 A number of respondents, particularly third sector/ equality organisations and
their representative bodies expressed concern that Community Planning often
focused on ‘area based’ or ‘geographic’ community engagement, leaving
communities of ‘interest’ at a disadvantage. They suggested that, to be
effective, community engagement and Community Planning needed to be
underpinned by a full recognition and understanding of how a community
identifies itself both in terms of ‘place and ‘interest’.
“Our view is that the picture is varied. There is a tendency for
universal community engagement to only involve the ‘usual
suspects’, as community forums and community councils tend
to encourage a particular type of participant. Arguably, these
bodies are not truly representative of their communities.”
(YouthLink Scotland)
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