Localism
Community Governance: a short discussion
Steve Milton
NOTE: This paper was written in 2009, before 'Big Society' had emerged as a public policy paradigm (or empty signifier - depending upon your point of view.) However, the analysis sets out some interesting academic arguments that bear upon any study of localism in the UK today. Do please post your observations.
Introduction
For over 10 years neighbourhood governance was at the heart of New Labour’s ambitious modernisation agenda encompassing public service improvement, democratic and civic renewal, sustainability, place shaping and redistributive policies aimed at tackling disadvantage and inequality. Over the same period neighbourhood governance emerged as a hotly contested area of theoretical discussion that is interacting with the public policy process to create new governance paradigm that has become known as ‘new localism.’ This paper begins with an overview of public policy developments and proceeds with an examination of emerging theoretical perspectives using as a frame the four rationales of neighbourhood governance identified by Vivian Lowndes and Helen Sullivan (2008). The paper concludes with some of the key messages that have emerged from the evaluation of a decade of public policy initiatives.
Neighbourhood governance in the UK.
New Labour’s 1997 election manifesto pledged to attack ‘the multiple causes of social and economic decline - unemployment, bad housing, crime, poor health and a degraded environment’ in inner cities, outer estates and towns (Labour Party, 1997). This manifesto commitment has driven a complex and evolving set of public policy initiatives which began to appear in 1998 with the £2bn New Deal for Communities programme. In 2001, a more coherent framework emerged with the publication of the Social Exclusion Unit’s (SEU) National Strategy for Neighbourhood Renewal (SEU 2001) supported by Public Service Agreement targets focusing on reducing the gap in outcomes between the most deprived neighbourhoods and the rest of the country in the six key outcome areas of health, education, housing, unemployment, crime and liveability. The government has also funded 35 neighbourhood management pathfinders to test new approaches to joining up public services at the neighbourhood level, based on the premise that ‘residents concerns should be more important in defining what should be done than agencies’ assumptions’ (SEU, 2007). The Neighbourhood Renewal Fund (NRF) provided eligible areas with additional resources to tackle deprivation issues in their poorest neighbourhoods, working in partnership with local government and other local public service agencies through local strategic partnerships introduced by the Local Government Act 2000 (LGA, 2000).
In 2005, the government published a wide ranging discussion paper: ‘Citizen engagement and public services: why neighbourhoods matter’ (ODPM, 2005) heralding a move towards the ‘double devolution’ of powers from central to local government and from local government to neighbourhoods based on the principle of subsidiarity. The discussion paper also started to more closely interweave the concepts of social, economic and democratic renewal into the more cohesive policy agenda that has emerged in the 2008 White Paper – Communities in control: real people, real power’ (DCLG, 2008d). In the introduction to the White Paper, Hazel Blears states: ‘that people should have the maximum influence, control and ownership over the decisions, forces and agencies which shape their lives and environments is the essence of democracy’ (DCLG, 2008d).
The government’s initial experiments with neighbourhood renewal were orchestrated nationally and delivered locally through various governmental structures, all of which sought to engage community groups and community leaders directly in local governance arrangements. However, the 2007 Local Government and Public Involvement in Health Act (DCLG, 2007) saw the government transfer its role and extended powers to all local authorities and their public sector partners through the mechanism of a local area agreement (LAA) linked to priorities set out in a local sustainable communities strategy (SCS) developed by local strategic partnerships (LSP) in collaboration with a wide range of stakeholders, community groups and citizens. This devolution of responsibility followed exhaustive evaluations of the government’s neighbourhood and local policy initiatives that pointed up the importance of local flexibility, community leadership and the need for differentiated approaches (DCLG, 2006, 2008a, 2008b, 2008c, NRU, 2002-2008).
An emerging public policy paradigm: new localism.
The Government’s policy initiatives are underpinned by a range of external factors that Tony Bovaird and Elke Löffler (2003) group into political, economic, social, technological, environmental and legal categories. These factors act with different force at different times to shift dominant paradigms. In our case, we can trace changes back to the economic crises in the UK during the 1980s and 1990s which coincided with public policy focusing on efficiency, competition, consumer choice and public accountability. This ushered in what has since been termed ‘new public management’ or NPM (Hood, 1991) – a public policy paradigm with an emphasis on performance management, decentralisation, market mechanisms, devolved management, citizens as consumers, enabling councils and a reduction in the scale and scope of governmental institutions. Rhodes (2003) examines the impact of NPM, identifying the increasing differentiation of the polity and the ‘hollowing out’ of government by the transfer of powers either upward to EU and global institutions, or ‘downwards to special purpose bodies’ (p17). In such a complex and diverse polity, governance itself becomes differentiated (p 51) and dependent on the metagovernance of networks. Sørensen and Torfing (2007) have extended this analysis through well developed case studies in Denmark to form the basis of a theoretical network governance paradigm. Sørensen, Torfing and Rhodes’ analysis of a new polity differentiated through interlinked governance networks is influential but not unchallenged. Michael Saward (1997) for example, maintains that the differentiation of governance may have created a new terrain in which networks are important, but this does not shift power beyond the control of government.
The government’s most recent drive (DCLG, 2008) to connect citizens to new mechanisms of democratic and civic participation within these differentiated neighbourhood governance networks has been termed ‘new localism’ (Corry and Stoker, 2002, Aspden and Birch, 2005, Stoker, 2006) and can be seen in the context of the work of Robert Putnam (2000, 2004) in the US who observed the rise of more ‘individualistic forms of civic engagement’ that are ‘less focused on collective or public-regarding purpose’ (2004 p. 412). In his influential analysis, he identifies an unequal distribution of social capital ‘accumulated most among those who need it least’ (Stoker, 2006 p 58). The new localism public policy paradigm is also associated with local service delivery and public accountability (Lepine, Smith and Taylor, 2007) and a drive to ‘join up’ public services through collaborative partnerships, joint commissioning and through the local governmental frameworks of LSPs and LAAs.
Neighbourhood governance: a theoretical evaluation
The new localism public policy paradigm and the neighbourhood agenda does not stand unchallenged (for a summary of the main challenges see Griggs and Smith, 2008) and any critical evaluation must examine relevant theoretical perspectives. To structure this analysis, we will adopt the four - civic, social, political and economic - rationales of neighbourhood governance identified by Lowndes and Sullivan (2008) but before that, we need to be clear about what we understand by the term ‘neighbourhood governance,’ because so far we have implied that there is an ontological purity in the term and that is far from the case.
In our understanding of the term ‘neighbourhood governance,’ we must have regard to the problems associated with its origin and current positing within the linguistics of governmental policy. As Derrida (1981) warns, we should avoid accepting assumed understandings and instead recognise the complexity or diachronic nature of meanings by deconstructing them. In this case, Derrida’s warning is helpful because it causes us to examine what we actually mean when we use a term. Lowndes and Sullivan (2008) provide a recent contextualised definition which is useful for the purpose of this paper: “arrangements for collective decision making and/or public service delivery at the sub-authority level.” (p62). Whilst resisting the nihilism inherent in Derrida’s approach, we need to qualify this definition by recognising the compound ambiguities it creates – ‘what are the ‘arrangements?’ who are the ‘collective?’ what do we understand by ‘sub-authority?’ Not only that, but we must also recognise that which it excludes – by focusing on ‘collective decision making’ it challenges traditional notions of democratic representation (Mill, 1948) which are at the heart of the government’s community leadership initiatives (Sullivan, 2007) and this sets up a tension between the two. In the rest of this paper we use Lowndes and Sullivan’s definition because it is derived from the governmental context we wish to examine and as Fish (1989) reminds us realities are ‘intelligible only within their context.’
The civic rationale
Returning then to out theoretical analysis with a useful definition of neighbourhood governance we can examine its ‘civic’ rationale, namely that ‘neighbourhood units of governance provide more opportunity for citizens to participate effectively in decisions’ (Lowndes and Sullivan, 2008 p57). This takes us first to a theoretical understanding of participation itself. Sherry Arnstein writing in the US in 1969 identified a ladder of civic participation (figure 1) that is a valuable as a tool for understanding the complex dynamics of participation in the context of this study. Arnstein uses participation as a‘categorical term for citizen power’ and sees the ladder as a means of redistributing power and addressing the exclusionary nature of civic governance. This is exemplified by the curative, educative and normative processes that often masquerade as participation (rungs 1 and 2) (Arnstein, 1969). Dinham (2005), argues that the government’s approach to participation has become ‘decoupled from the community development discourse from which it derives’ and that the ‘political emphasis on communitarianism is not fully matched by recognition of the community development which is needed to deliver it.’ Dinham concludes that the government’s impatience for predetermined outcomes is ultimately self defeating because it fails to build up the capacity and trust required to effect and sustain those outcomes. We have previously examined Putnam’s (2000, 2004) analysis, and this theme is taken up in the work of Gerry Stoker (2006) who develops the CLEAR model of community participation that seeks to identify factors that encourage engagement. Lowndes and Sullivan (2008), argue that neighbourhood governance initiatives incentivises public engagement ‘because it is at the neighbourhood level that they consume many of the most important public services, and experience the issues most likely to mobilize citizens,’ they see neighbourhoods as spaces within which citizens ‘co-produce’ the products of governance (Pattie, et al. 2004). Participation is more likely to be sustained where activity results in a positive local outcome – the positive-sum game (Stoker, 2006).
Nikolas Rose (1999) asserts that neighbourhoods can become agonistic spaces for conflict, veto, control and the pursuit self interest. Henrik Bang (2005) points out that ‘everyday makers’ (Blears’ ‘real people’) often absent themselves from government networks or they engage in a ‘roll-on, roll-off’ manner and in their place are found ‘expert citizens’ and community activists. The research of Chris Skelcher, et al (2004) reveals support for both Bang and Rose’s views by providing evidence that the influential nodal points in neighbourhood governance networks are often occupied by unelected public officials and so called ‘boundary spanners’ (Murphy and Coleman, 2000). Dinham (2005) observes that the everyday makers involved in neighbourhood governance case studies he examined had mimetically ‘compromised their identities.’ Collectively these dynamics have been described as ‘a game of power’ (Sharpfe, 1997). Rose also observes tensions between the ‘imperatives of common norms and the demands for the recognition of cultural diversity’ and he raises doubts about the ‘community-based relativism’ that underpins the development of present day neighbourhood strategies. Finally, we must consider Marinetto (2003), who cautions against a wholesale acceptance of Rod Rhodes (2003) dominant ‘governance narrative’ claiming instead that the institutions and mechanisms of central government continue to retain supremacy, even within a decentred polity.
The social rationale
Next we examine the social rational for neighbourhood governance. Lowndes and Sullivan suggest that neighbourhoods are the most accessible and best understood ‘contact point’ between citizen and state and that neighbourhood governance provides the best prospect for ‘joining-up’ local action and coordinating local service provision for ‘collaborative advantage’ (Huxham, 1996). However, this ignores some compelling criticisms of locality based decision making, namely that it is intrinsically limiting, vulnerable to powerful local lobbies and the expression of ‘not in my back yard politics’ (Stoker, 2006 p176). We also here encounter problems around the structure of governance. Local authorities have and continue to use a wide range of formal governance structures at neighbourhood level - companies, trusts, partnerships, area committees, neighbourhood forums, tasks groups, user groups, liaison panels – all of which are problematic because essentially neighbourhoods are diverse in terms of size, demographics, geography, histories and capacity and do not relate conveniently to governmental structures such as electoral wards, department or agency boundaries (Young Foundation, 2007). This obvious disconnect between neighbourhoods and the civic institutions that serve them provides an inherent barrier and disincentive for public authorities. This lack of homogeneity between neighbourhoods also introduces paradoxical questions about equitable provision of public services and local choice (Griggs and Smith, 2008).
Another challenge to the social rationale is the lack of social homogeneity within neighbourhoods. Diversity is perhaps less agonistic in larger pluralistic governance structures but at neighbourhood level it is more frequently associated with conflict (Newton, 1982, Dahl and Tufte, 1972). Beebeejaun and Grimshaw, (2007) use neighbourhood governance case studies to show how structural reponses to multiculturalism tend to hinder and, in some cases, exclude minority groups from active participation. As Davies (2007) hypothesizes, ‘in radically unequal societies, the inscription of political power in language and culture means that structures designed to be inclusive and empowering will tend to reproduce the inequalities they seek to overcome’ (p.796). Bourdieu (1990) also questions the validity of consensus observing that domination is ‘linguistically inscribed’ and imprinted by cultural distinctions.
Effective neighbourhood governance is also seen to depend on the effective collaboration and integration of public services to tackle locally identified priorities. However, public services have competing demands that are often difficult to reconcile with community governance, being frequently driven by national performance frameworks towards centrally determined outcomes, strategic policy requirements and concerns to achieve equity and efficiency. Collectively, this acts to limit the scope for local choice and encourages public agencies to use neighbourhood governance structures as a way of managing public expectations or, more cynically, to tap into voluntary capacity that exists within community. As we will see later, the evidence from the Government’s meta-evaluation shows that neighbourhood renewal has delivered improvements, what is not clear is how far these improvements were determined and achieved through the actions of local citizens. The focus on service improvements through neighbourhoods has led to the increased influence of public administrators (Skelcher, Mathur and Smith, 2008) and the emergence of influential non-elected individuals who are skilled at ‘spanning’ organisational, agency and community boundaries and utilizing the sociolinguistics of partnership. The dominance of such ‘expert citizens’ can act to further marginalize the ‘everyday makers’ and the harder to reach groups (Bang, 2004, 2005). .
The political rationale
The political rationale for neighbourhood governance is associated with the utility of local knowledge, responsiveness of elected representatives and the clearer accountability of local decision makers. We have seen in the preceding discussion how accountability can become more opaque in decentred governance networks because public officials and ‘expert citizens’ operate within the democratic shadows and this implies that there has been a change in the role of locally elected representatives. Sullivan, et al (2004) highlights tensions between the roles of officers and members – providing evidence of antagonistic relationships within neighbourhood partnerships. She points to the challenge for elected members in accommodating new models of democratic representation and leadership.
Eva Sørensen’s (2007) study of local governance networks in the Danish municipality of Skanderborg explores how community networks may be influenced or ‘steered’ by meta-governance interventions and this suggests a need to redefine neighbourhood governance as a process of metagovernance. Sørensen’s study identifies the important role that elected members play in the metagovernance of networks and Sullivan, et al’s research provides evidence that councillors see this as very much their natural territory. However, Sørensen concludes that what is required is ‘close cooperation between politicians and public administrators – not a sharp division of labour.’ She sees four essential metagovernance roles for politicians - providing resource and policy frameworks, institutional design, network facilitation and active network participation. However, she is cautious about the latter role, suggesting that politicians need to be wary of creating power asymmetries and hierarchies within networks because this can cause them to fall apart. This is a particular problem in the UK where public perceptions of Party Politicians are generally negative (Councillors Commission, 2007). The participation of politicians in neighbourhood governance arrangements also raises questions about the accepted interpretation of representative democracy handed down from Edmund Burke (1774) and J S Mill (1948). Pressure to act in a ‘delegate’ role is likely to increase the so-called ‘crisis of representation’ (Copus, 2004) with politicians faced more frequently with conflicts between the will of the community and the will of the Party Group.
Rose (1999) describes neighbourhood governance as ‘a sector brought into existence’ to ‘encourage and harness active practices of self management’ which he terms ‘government through community’ (p.176) This he sees as a morality-led politicization of civic life based on a principle of normative self-government (ethico-politics) that determines our obligations to others (p. 188). Foucault (1991) refers to ‘governmentalization’ as the process by which aspects of private life are brought within state control and regulation, introducing a concept that challenges the social rationale of participative, citizen-centered government (Marinetto, 2003). Newman (2005) acknowledges that these new forms of neighbourhood governance may draw citizens into accepting governmental responsibilities within ‘networks that serve to deny the legitimacy of conflict by privileging consensus.’ Jonathan Davies (2007), picks up this theme in his study of neighbourhood renewal partnerships in Dundee and Hull, suggesting that genuine community empowerment is better served through ‘strong independent community organisations capable of acting separately and coercively against governing institutions and elites – an exit action strategy’ (p 779). Paradoxically, the exit action strategy might simultaneously provide opportunities for marginalized cultural groups and also those that operate on the extreme margins of ethico-political norms.
The economic rationale
Lowndes and Sullivan’s economic rationale is based upon the proposition that neighbourhood governance can make more efficient and effective use of available resources. On the face of it this seems a weak rationale. Neighbourhood governance structures are expensive to establish and to sustain and it is hard to conceive of a situation where efficiencies achieved by removing duplication and waste would match the added costs (in Wiltshire the introduction of community governance arrangements will cost in the region of £2.2m per annum). Where the economic rationale is more convincing is in the argument that scarce and dwindling resources will be targeted most effectively through effective neighbourhood arrangements or that perversely, reductions in public expenditure are best managed through local participative processes. Noble and Watkins (2003) are concerned about the emergence of a new local managerialism with empowered local officials managing devolved budgets at neighbourhood level which they claim ‘has eroded the prospect for democratic partnerships.’ On the other hand, the neighbourhood agenda also opens up the prospect of participative commissioning, devolved management of budgets and participatory budgeting.
Evidence from the government’s evaluations of neighbourhood governance
In 2008, the National Audit Office undertook a major review of the CLG’s neighbourhood and community programmes and found considerable improvements in NDC areas, although improvements had been most significant in the early years of the programme (Para 4.11). The gap between the poorest and average neighbourhoods had also closed when measured against floor targets for health, worklessness, crime and liveability but had ‘slipped’ in education and housing (Para 4.5), this despite the allocation of nearly £3bn in targeted funding over the period (Para 4.3). Evidence from the Neighbourhood Pathfinders was more encouraging with the NAO recognising the ‘important contribution to place shaping at a local level through the clear focus on the concerns of local residents.’ However, the report stated that the initiatives had yet to gain ‘support from mainstream local authority funding for their core operations’ (Para 4.12). The report also points to some aspects of social exclusion being beyond the influence of neighbourhood-based schemes, recommending the integration of multi-level and multi-agency approaches across Departments and agencies. It also draws attention to poverty and exclusion outside of the most deprived neighbourhoods which is in danger of being overlooked. The NAO identified a number of challenges associated with neighbourhood governance, questioning: the validity of top down target driven approaches and the impact this has had on quality of life; the capacity of local authorities to sustain the initiatives through the LAA and the additional resource demands of supporting neighbourhood programmes outside of the most deprived areas (Para 4.20).
The meta-evaluation of the various strands of the ‘new localism’ programme has also presented some mixed messages, key among these are concerns regarding the clarity of accountability within new forms of neighbourhood and area based governance. And, while public confidence in local councils has increased from 52% in 2001 to 60% in 2007 this has not been matched by a correlating increase in perceptions of increased influence (DCLG, 2008).
Neighbourhood governance is an emerging and contested area of academic debate, with conflicting evidence around its efficacy. 10 years of government initiatives have achieved some successes but not the wholesale change that was envisaged in the Labour Party manifesto of 1997. This period has coincided with an increased academic focus on community and neighbourhood governance that is revealing some valuable lessons for public policy makers. The Government’s policy initiatives are becoming more sophisticated, integrated and devolutionary, but it remains to be seen whether the new coaltion government's Localism Bill will produce the long anticipated renaissance of England’s inner cities and most deprived neighbourhoods. The Government has put local councils at the heart of ‘new localism,’ if they fail to rise to the challenge it will raise serious questions about the future of local government in the UK.
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