Month: May 2026

From democratic resilience to systems resilience – Perspectives from the Inaugural Conference of the European Network of Public Administration 2026

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Dr. Elke Loeffler

The European Network of Public Administration (ENPA) is a newly founded independent learned society led by public administration academics for the theoretical and practical improvement of public administration.

I attended its inaugural conference, held at the top University ASE in Bucharest, in my role as co-founding Board Member and co-chair of the ENPA Research Group on Public Participation and Co-Production. There was also a strong representation of UKAPA – the UK Association for Public Administration. This event showcased a number of innovative formats, including a plenary in interview format on democratic resilience and a highly interactive ‘collaborative discussion’ session on systems resilience, as well as providing a highly-valued Conference Buddy Scheme for Doctoral Researchers.

During the conference it became clear that resilience is now a major emerging theme in public management research and practice. For many local councils this concept has so far been mainly used in relation to emergency response and planning. However, the LGA in the UK considers this to be a ‘whole council effort’, going beyond small emergency teams.

Moreover, the discussions at the ENPA Conference revealed that resilience is not just about sudden, extreme emergencies but about creeping crises such as democratic backsliding and and prolonged failures such as delayed access to public healthcare. While robust governance (Ansell, Torfing and Trondal, 2025, Robust Public Governance in a Turbulent Era) – the ability of a system to maintain its operations despite disruption – is important, resilience is more demanding – it is about the capacity for adaptation in the service system to recover to the same or high outcomes after a disturbance – or as a former UK Prime Minister expressed it “building back better”.

The keynote speakers also discussed the need for public administration scholars to strengthen resilience. Don Moynihan from the University of Michigan highlighted that rule-bound public administration and independent academic research often become targets for populist leaders. He suggested that, in times of democratic backsliding, delivering evidence-based descriptions of current situations and contexts may be more effective than sophisticated, time-consuming causal analysis. While not as analytically powerful, making it clear what is actually happening may make a greater impact on public attitudes, and eventually on public policies, than complex modelling. This argument gave rise to considerable debate in the coffee breaks!

The collaborative session in our Research Group demonstrated that local government resilience is not enough – we also need resilient communities, service users and markets. This brings in the potential role of user and community co-production in strengthening systems resilience. For example, Jan Dumkow from the Helmut Schmidt University Hamburg provided a current action-research project involving co-design of an app for and with people with learning disabilities so that service providers would be able to provide tailored information in the case of emergencies.


The ‘whole systems resilience network’ depends on each element in the network of user-community-provider-market resilience being sound and well-balanced with the other elements (Bovaird and Loeffler 2024). The resilience network constitutes a dynamic system, in which each of the stakeholder groups is always looking to learn and to improve, with the consequence that a weak link in the network reduces the overall capability of the system. However, a systematic literature review which I undertook with Sanneke Kuipers (Leiden University) and Marie-Christine Therrien (Ecole Nationale D’Administration Publique, Montreal), on the role of co-production in strengthening resilience in extreme crisis, revealed that user and community involvement is largely absent in current evaluations of crisis interventions. This is cause for concern and highlights the urgent need for more engaged research with local communities and local councils on how to strengthen all links in the whole systems resilience network. INLOGOV is well situated to work with local councils and communities on this issue, given its expertise on co-production and social prescribing.

Dr. Elke Loeffler is an Associate of INLOGOV and Director of Governance International. She undertakes applied research on local public services and has research interests in community co-production and resilience. Elke is Board Member of the European Network of Public Administration, Vice-Chair for Doctoral Research in UKAPA and Chair of the Public & Nonprofit Management Group at EURAM.

What works in local growth and skills? Learning from recent evaluations

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Jason Lowther

Following the previous blog on homelessness and rough sleeping, this piece turns to another major area of local government activity: local growth and skills programmes. Here too, evaluation activity has expanded rapidly, with a mix of national frameworks, programme‑level syntheses and place‑based studies. Taken together, these evaluations offer a valuable, and still evolving, picture of what is working, what is proving harder, and what local systems actually need to deliver economic outcomes.

Four strands of evidence stand out.

MHCLG local growth evaluation

The MHCLG local growth evaluation programme is significant not just for its findings, but for its approach to evaluation itself. Rather than focusing on single programmes, it introduces a portfolio‑level strategy covering multiple funds aimed at improving sub‑national economic performance.

Recent work, including the process evaluation of the Local Growth Fund and Getting Building Fund, highlight both strengths and tensions in the model. Decentralised decision‑making and the “single pot” approach enabled locally tailored investment and stronger alignment with local strategies. Private sector involvement and local prioritisation were widely valued.  However, delivery was shaped by pressures to deliver “shovel‑ready” projects quickly, particularly in the Getting Building Fund, which sometimes limited strategic coherence and innovation. Governance arrangements, while locally responsive, were often complex, and approaches to monitoring and evaluation were variable. More broadly, the evaluation underlines the difficulty of measuring long‑term economic impact, particularly where interventions are diverse and outcomes unfold over many years.

Multiply deep dives (Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland)

The Multiply deep dives bring a skills and employability perspective, focusing on adult numeracy provision across the devolved nations. Multiply was a £559 million UK‑wide programme designed to improve functional numeracy, with flexible, locally designed delivery models.

The deep dives use qualitative case studies, interviews with delivery partners and analysis of monitoring data, focusing on one area in each nation and drawing on wider place‑level evidence. A central finding is that local flexibility enabled innovation, particularly in embedding numeracy in real‑world contexts such as employment, parenting or financial capability.

At the same time, the evaluations highlight familiar delivery challenges. Short delivery timescales, in some cases just a year, created pressure to scale quickly, often leading to adaptation of existing provision rather than genuinely new approaches. Partnership working across councils, colleges and the voluntary sector was essential but time‑consuming to establish. Engagement with target groups remained difficult, particularly where low confidence rather than low skill was the primary barrier.

Overall, the evidence suggests that contextualised, learner‑centred approaches are promising, but require time, trust and sustained funding to embed.

UK Shared Prosperity Fund (UKSPF) interim evaluation synthesis

The UKSPF interim synthesis report provides perhaps the most comprehensive current view, drawing together 34 place‑based evaluations across the UK. It focuses on process learning rather than impact, reflecting the relatively early stage of delivery.

A clear headline is the importance of local autonomy. Across almost all areas, the ability for Lead Local Authorities to design interventions around local needs was strongly valued, particularly compared to the perceived rigidity of previous EU funds. This flexibility supported alignment with local strategies, more responsive delivery, and better integration across policy areas.

Other success factors included strong local programme management teams, continuity of provision (using UKSPF to sustain previously funded services), and the ability to combine funding streams to create coherent local offers. However, challenges were equally consistent. Tight central government timelines constrained planning and procurement, limited consultation, and created recruitment difficulties. As with other programmes, evaluation and outcome measurement remained underdeveloped.

The synthesis highlights a key tension: local freedom within central constraints. While devolution of decision‑making was real, the operating environment still imposed significant limits on what places could achieve.

UKSPF place‑based evaluations

The place‑based evaluations add depth to this picture by examining how UKSPF worked in specific localities. Using mixed‑methods approaches – including contribution analysis, surveys, interviews and case studies – across 34 areas, they explore how combinations of interventions interact within local systems.

These studies show that outcomes are highly context‑dependent. In some areas, UKSPF supported visible improvements in community facilities, local business support, and employability outcomes. In others, impacts were harder to detect, reflecting both the early stage of delivery and the complexity of local economies. What emerges clearly is that programme success depends less on individual projects than on how they are aligned and sequenced locally.

The evaluations also reinforce the importance of existing capacity and partnerships. Areas with mature governance arrangements, strong voluntary sector links, and prior experience of managing regeneration funding were better able to mobilise quickly and deliver coherent programmes.

What does this mean for local authorities?

Across these evaluations, several consistent lessons emerge.

First, local flexibility works, particularly when supported by capacity and stability. Both UKSPF and Multiply demonstrate the value of devolved decision‑making. However, the benefits are uneven, depending on local capability, existing partnerships, and the time available to plan and deliver.

Second, time is the missing ingredient in local growth policy. Tight delivery timescales appear across all programmes, driving a focus on “shovel‑ready” activity, limiting innovation, and constraining partnership development. Economic change, skills development and behaviour change all take longer than funding cycles typically allow.

Third, integration matters more than individual interventions. The strongest evidence, particularly from the place‑based evaluations, is that impact depends on how interventions fit together. Skills, business support and community investment are interdependent, yet funding streams and evaluation frameworks often treat them separately.

Fourth, measurement remains a weak spot. Across the local growth portfolio, there are persistent challenges in demonstrating impact and value for money. This is partly methodological, but also reflects the reality that many outcomes (productivity, employment, resilience) are long‑term and influenced by wider factors.

Finally, these evaluations underline a familiar but important point: local systems deliver national priorities. Where programmes align with local strategies, build on existing partnerships and allow room for adaptation, they show promise. Where they are constrained by short timescales, fragmented funding or complex governance, delivery becomes more transactional.

The conclusions from the local growth and skills evaluations strongly align with, and are reinforced by last month’s excellent report from the Institute for Government, Designing and delivering employment support.  The IfG goes further in diagnosing why these issues persist and what structural reform is needed. Both emphasise the value of local flexibility, integration and tailoring to place, with the IfG explicitly arguing that strategic authorities are best placed to design joined‑up employment support aligned to local labour markets and services. Likewise, both bodies of evidence highlight fragmentation and poor coordination across programmes as major barriers, with the IfG noting longstanding failures to “shift the dial” despite multiple national schemes, echoing local growth evaluations on disjointed funding and siloed interventions. The IfG report places significant emphasis on the limits of centralised systems and the need for multi‑year funding, capability and accountability frameworks.

In short, the local growth evaluations provide grounded evidence of what works in practice, while the IfG report offers a more explicit systems diagnosis: that without sustained devolution, integration and long‑term investment, the conditions needed for those “what works” approaches to succeed will remain constrained.

The Local Elections

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Preface

For years, Chris Game’s pre-election column in the Birmingham Post has followed a familiar, almost reassuring rhythm – beginning with Birmingham, moving across the wider West Midlands, and ending with a measured national overview. But this year breaks decisively with that tradition. The forthcoming local elections are anything but routine: they are unusually volatile, strikingly unpredictable, and potentially transformative in ways rarely seen in modern British politics. What might once have been a steady survey now demands a wider lens, as voters across the UK head to the polls in contests that could reshape not only local councils, but the broader political landscape itself. This post was first published in The Birmingham Post on 30th April 2026 and is available here: https://pressreader.com/article/281835765304023

Chris Game

The Post’s annual local elections column: it used to be, if not easy, at least formulaic, especially in a ‘Birmingham year’ – in the past three years in four, but now just one: which happens to be this year.  I’d start with ‘the Biggie’ – the City Council itself; then the other metropolitan West Mids councils with elections, focusing mainly on any that might possibly see a change in political control.

On then to any interesting-looking adjacent counties or districts, before concluding with a couple of national ‘round-up’ paragraphs. Informative, I’d hope; exciting, possibly less so. 

In total contrast, this year’s Thursday May 7th locals, both individually and collectively, are quite simply the most fascinating, intriguing, and, above all, potentially most consequential since, some reckon, the 1970s. There’s no remote chance of doing them justice in this single column, so my main aim is to stimulate your interest and thereby encourage you to catch the results as they’re published at various times during the ensuing couple of days.

You could stay up, but the only West Mids results you’re likely to catch are Redditch (est.1.45 a.m.) and Dudley (3.30 a.m.). The rest are mainly later Friday afternoon: Solihull 3.00 p.m., Sandwell and Walsall 5.00, Walsall and Birmingham, last maybe but absolutely NOT least, 6.00 – recounts permitting!

This column, therefore, will start by illustrating the exceptional scale and importance of next Thursday’s ‘big picture’, providing hopefully at least a sense of the hundreds of momentous electoral battles happening across England, before gradually ‘homing in‘ on some of those in the West Midlands.

Over 7 million voters in England, Wales and Scotland will elect over 5,000 councillors  – including almost a third of so-called ‘principal’/top tier council representatives – and are widely expected to produce a set of results the like of which the UK has rarely, if ever, seen before.

The English results could collectively, as Proportional Representation campaigners Make Votes Matter put it: “be the most chaotic yet, with power won on tiny vote shares and whole swathes of the country left unrepresented”.  Sounds bad, if exciting. However, serious students of these things reckon the Scottish and Welsh national results could “open the way” to the break-up of the whole UK, so it seems right to start with them.

All 129 Scottish Parliament members are up for re-election, 73 representing constituencies, 56 their respective 8 regions. Each voter casts two votes on separate ballot papers, deploying two different electoral systems, designed to make it harder for one party to secure a majority. The Nationalists just managed it in 2011, paving the way for the 2014 independence referendum (55% ‘No’, for those with short memories), and they’re going for a more successful ‘breakaway’ repeat.  

The Welsh Senedd elections are, potentially at least, equally consequential. In the biggest parliamentary change since powers began being transferred to Wales in 1999, Senedd Members will increase from 60 to 96, with parties able to list up to eight candidates per constituency. Voters choose a single party or Independent candidate.

In contrast to Scotland, though, no party has ever won a Parliamentary majority, and the new system seems unlikely to change that. Currently, Nigel Farage’s Reform UK and Welsh nationalists Plaid Cymru are neck-and-neck on an estimated 36/37 seats, with Labour some way adrift, prospectively ending a century of dominance in Welsh politics.

And so to the 5,000+ seats across England’s unitary, county, district and London councils – and, of course, the 6 directly elected mayoralties. Always difficult to summarise, this year’s hundreds (of contests) and thousands (of candidates) are clearly impossible. PLUS, this year – surely the most exciting, and utterly unpredictable, bit – many contests will have candidates from no fewer than five parties currently polling between 10% and 29%, and therefore in with least a chance.

Oh yes, and just a few weeks ago, 30 councils whose elections had been postponed to 2027 due to forthcoming local government reorganisation – including Cannock Chase, Redditch, Rugby and Tamworth – were told, following Reform UK’s legal challenge, that they must reinstate them on their original schedule. Affecting 4.6 million potential voters, if you were wondering – you could hardly make it up! 

And so, in this reverse-order column, we’re back in the metropolitan West Midlands, with room left for only the briefest of numerical overviews of PollCheck’s most recent (March 30th) seat projections; 2022 comparisons, though some were elections by thirds; as many as space permits. They are, I hope you’ll agree, fascinating.

Birmingham  101 seats. Current – Lab (2012- ); Projected – No Overall Control (NOC)

Cons 23 (+2); Reform 20 (+20); Greens 16 (+14); Lib Dems 13 (=); Lab 10 (-42)   Others 19 (+6)

Coventry  54 seats.  Current – Labour (2010- );  Projected– NOC

   Reform 22 (+20); Lab 21 (-18); Greens 6 (+4); Cons 5 (-5); Others 0 (-1)

Dudley  72 seats.  Current – NOC: Cons minority admin. Projected – NOC

  Cons 26 (-7); Reform 24 (+21); Lab 14 (-9); Lib Dems 5 (=); Others 3 (-5)

Sandwell  72 seats.  Current – Lab (1979- );  Projected – Lab

  Labour 53 (-7); Reform 17 (+17); Cons 2 (-2); Greens 0 (-1); Others 0 (-7)

Solihull  51 seats.  Current – Cons (2011- );  Projected – Cons

  Cons 27 (+16); Greens 13 (+10); Lib Dems 7  (-1); Reform 4 (+4)

Walsall   60 seats.  Current – NOC: Cons minority admin. Projected: Reform

   Reform 33 (+33); Cons 17 (12/20); Lab (5/20); Others (3/20)

Wolverhampton  21/60 seats  Current – Lab (2011- )   Projected: Labour

   Labour 38 (-6), Cons 11 (-1); Reform 8 (+6); Green 1 (+1); Others (2).

Chris Game is an INLOGOV Associate, and Visiting Professor at Kwansei Gakuin University, Osaka, Japan.  He is joint-author (with Professor David Wilson) of the successive editions of Local Government in the United Kingdom, and a regular columnist for The Birmingham Post.