Community Assets

Empowering Communities: How Councils Can Boost Wellbeing Amid Austerity

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Alice Munson

This is the first of two blogs resulting from this year’s INLOGOV undergraduate summer intern project, which examined how councils can boost wellbeing amid austerity. This first article summarises some of the key literature, the second article (next week) will explore practice examples.

In a period characterised by fiscal austerity, local governments confront major hurdles in providing basic services while working with tight resources. Spending cuts have far-reaching consequences for communities, frequently having a negative impact on the public’s well-being and standard of living. In response to these issues, community initiatives have arisen as viable mechanisms for minimising the harmful effects of austerity policies whilst also promoting community belonging in neighbourhoods. This paper will begin with a literature review surrounding the topic, examining studies that have demonstrated the impact of community initiatives.

This article starts with a literature review examining the potential for community initiatives to achieve wellbeing outcomes, emphasising how councils may successfully collaborate with communities to reduce the negative effects of budget cuts in an age of permanent austerity. Since the 2008 global financial crisis, several nations have undertaken austerity measures that have considerably impacted local government finances and services (Lowndes and McCaughie, 2013). This ‘age of austerity’ has caused councils to reassess their approach to providing public services and ensuring community well-being (Hastings et al., 2015). In response to the spending, councils can and, on occasion, have turned to community initiatives as a possible way to preserve or improve wellness within the community.

Research consistently demonstrates that community-led initiatives can effectively address service gaps resulting from austerity measures while enhancing local decision-making practices and overall community well-being. Crisp et al. (2016) believe that community-led alternatives can assist in addressing service gaps caused by funding reduction. Their research of community-based organisations in the UK revealed that these projects might assist in areas such as employment, training and social care. Evans (2008) and Fletcher-Etherington (2010) also draw attention to the advantages of community-led initiatives, particularly highlighting enhanced decision-making procedures. Building on this concept, Fung and Wright (2003) provide further empirical support through their examination of participatory governance cases. Their research demonstrates that including the community in the decision-making process can result in more successful and fair policy results, which are more likely to improve the community’s general well-being.

Community initiatives are vital for improving public health outcomes, with research consistently showing their positive impact on physical and mental well-being. There is a strong link between community initiatives, social capital, and health outcomes, as revealed in various studies. For example, Kawachi and Berkman’s (2000) research provides compelling evidence that social connections, cultivated through community efforts, are associated with better physical and mental health. This link between community involvement and health is further explored in specific contexts, such as mental health initiatives. Knifton et al. (2010) investigated community-based mental health programs in Scotland and found that they have the potential to reduce stigma, increase social support, and improve access to mental health services. Moreover, South (2015) offers a comprehensive guide to community-centred approaches to health and well-being, emphasising the crucial role of local government and the NHS in supporting these initiatives. South’s research underscores the importance of integrating community-led approaches into broader health and social care strategies, highlighting how such integration can lead to more effective and sustainable health outcomes for the community. Strong partnerships between the council and the community, along with insights from studies like Kawachi and Berkman (2000) and Knifton et al. (2010), are crucial in this process. These studies underscore the value of community-centred approaches in improving public health and suggest that policymakers and health professionals should prioritise integrating community initiatives into mainstream health and social care strategies to promote positive well-being outcomes.

Community initiatives provide significant economic and environmental benefits, offering viable solutions for councils to improve well-being within financial constraints. Imbroscio (2013) has found in many cases that locally-driven community initiatives can create more sustainable and equitable economic outcomes compared to top-down approaches. Krasny and Tidball (2009) examined community-based environmental initiatives. They discovered that these programs not only benefited local ecosystems but also promoted social learning and community resilience. These findings are consistent with a growing global trend in communities engaging in environmental stewardship (Bennett, 2018). Examples include community-based conservation and locally managed marine areas, which have emerged in sectors such as fisheries, forestry, and water management (Berkes, 2004). This shift recognises that community initiatives can address environmental concerns while also building social connections and, therefore, well-being.

Asset-Based Community Development (ABCD) has emerged as a transformative approach to community well-being initiatives, emphasising the inherent strengths and resources within communities. McKnight and Kretzmann (2005), pioneers of the ABCD approach, argue that sustainable community development must start with recognising the capacities, skills, and assets of local residents and their associations. Their work emphasises the importance of mapping community assets as a starting point for development initiatives. The methodology is driven by community members and focuses on harnessing the inherent strengths and assets of individuals, associations, and communities to promote social change (Mathie, 2003). ABCD represents a shift from traditional deficit-based approaches to community development. Instead of focusing on needs and shortcomings, ABCD emphasises the existing strengths and resources within a community. This approach is based on the principle that every community, regardless of its challenges, possesses a wealth of assets that can be mobilised to address local issues and enhance overall well-being. The effectiveness of ABCD relies on several key mechanisms. Harrison (2019) highlights the importance of building strong, trusting relationships within the community as a fundamental aspect of this approach. These relationships form the foundation for cooperation and collective action, which are essential for the success of community initiatives. Additionally, Harrison emphasises the role of reciprocity and accountability among community members in sustaining engagement and ensuring that initiatives are both community-driven and beneficial. While ABCD is fundamentally community-driven, the role of local authorities in supporting and facilitating this approach is crucial for its success.

Local authorities play a pivotal role in nurturing and sustaining ABCD initiatives through strategic support and facilitation. Forrester et al. (2018) identify several key strategies local authorities can employ. These include participating in appreciative inquiry, which is asking positive, strength-based questions to identify and build on community successes. Local authorities can also build social capital by developing networks of connections, which are critical for community resilience and well-being. Furthermore, sponsoring local economic initiatives can assist in establishing long-term economic prospects while improving general community well-being. ABCD emphasises empowerment. According to García (2020), empowering people in the community to identify their own assets and skills can help local authorities to establish long-term community initiatives. This empowerment boosts self-efficacy and gives community members a stronger sense of ownership and duty. ABCD’s success depends greatly on a supportive and trustworthy atmosphere. Harrison et al. (2019) observe that when community members feel supported and trusted, they are more likely to actively participate and contribute to the success of community efforts. ABCD offers a promising approach to community development by focusing on the positive aspects of communities rather than their deficiencies. This strengths-based approach can lead to more sustainable and impactful outcomes. However, it is important to recognise that the success of the ABCD relies heavily on the presence of a supportive environment and the active involvement of local authorities. Local authorities must adopt a facilitative role, providing necessary support and resources and allowing community members to lead (Forrester et al., 2018). ABCD represents a paradigm shift in community development, offering a promising framework for sustainable well-being outcomes when effectively supported by local authorities and embraced by community members.

Alice has recently graduated from the University of Birmingham with a first class degree in Policy, Politics and Economics. She was awarded the Jane Slowey bursary in her final year for her research on the Homes for Ukraine scheme. Alice is currently seeking further opportunities and can be contacted at [email protected]

References

Berkes, F. (2004) Rethinking community-based conservation. Conservation Biology, 18(3), 621–630. doi:10.1111/j.1523-1739.2004.

Forrester, G., Kurth, J., Vincent, P., & Oliver, M. (2018) Schools as community assets: an exploration of the merits of an Asset-Based Community Development (ABCD) approach. Educational Review, 72(4), 443–458. doi:10.1080/00131911.2018.1529655.

Fung, A. and Wright, E.O. (2003) Deepening democracy: Institutional innovations in empowered participatory governance. Verso.

García, I. (2020) “Chapter 4 Asset-Based Community Development (ABCD): core principles”. In Research Handbook on Community Development. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing. doi:10.4337/9781788118477.00010.

Harrison, R., Blickem, C., Lamb, J., Kirk, S., and Vassilev, I. (2019) ‘Asset-Based Community Development: Narratives, Practice, and Conditions of Possibility—A Qualitative Study With Community Practitioners’ Sage Open, 9(1). doi:10.1177/2158244018823081.

Hastings, A., Bailey, N., Gannon, M., Besemer, K., and Bramley, G. (2015) ‘Coping with the Cuts? The Management of the Worst Financial Settlement in Living Memory’. Local Government Studies, 41(4), 601–621. doi:10.1080/03003930.2015.1036987.

Henderson, C., Evans-Lacko, S. and Thornicroft, G. (2013) ‘Mental Illness Stigma, Help Seeking, and Public Health Programs’. American Journal of Public Health, 103(5), 777-780. doi:10.2105/AJPH.2012.301056.

Imbroscio, D. (2013) ‘From Redistribution to Ownership: Toward an Alternative Urban Policy for America’s Cities’. Urban Affairs Review, 49(6), 787-820. doi:10.1177/1078087413495362.

Kawachi, I. and Berkman, L. (2000) ‘Social cohesion, social capital, and health’. Social epidemiology, 174(7), 290-319.

Knifton, L., Gervais, M., Newbigging, K., Mirza, N., Quinn, N., Wilson, N., and Hunkins-Hutchison, E. (2010) ‘Community conversation: addressing mental health stigma with ethnic minority communities’. Social psychiatry and psychiatric epidemiology, 45, 497-504.

Kretzmann, J. P. and McKnight, J. (2005) Discovering community power: A guide to mobilising local assets and your organisation’s capacity. Evanston, IL: Asset-Based Community Development Institute, School of Education and Social Policy, Northwestern University.

Local Government Association (2023) Working with housing association ‘Bolton at Home’ to reduce unemployment and deprivation – Bolton Council. Available at: https://www.local.gov.uk/case-studies/working-housing-association-bolton-home-reduce-unemployment-and-deprivation-bolton (Accessed: 20 July 2024).

Lowndes, V. and McCaughie, K. (2013) ‘Weathering the perfect storm? Austerity and institutional resilience in local government’. Policy and Politics, 41(4), 533-549.

Mind (2024) 5 ways to wellbeing. Available at: https://www.mind.org.uk/workplace/mental-health-at-work/five-ways-to-wellbeing/ (Accessed: 21 July 2024).

New Local (2024) Re-occupying Union Street: How we built back our neighbourhood. Available at: https://www.newlocal.org.uk/case-studies/re-occupying-union-street/ (Accessed 13 June 2024).

NHS Providers (2024) Co-production and engagement with communities. Available at: https://nhsproviders.org/media/698572/co-production-health-ineq-1e.pdf (Accessed: 25 July 2024).

Nudge (2024) Local love, local jobs, local spend, local change. Available at: https://www.nudge.community (Accessed 12 June 2024).

South, J. (2015) A guide to community-centred approaches for health and wellbeing. Project Report. Public Health England / NHS England.

Stirchley Baths (2024) https://stirchleybaths.org (Accessed: 22 July 2024).

Trup, N., Carrington, D. and Wyler, S (2019) Community hubs Understanding survival and success, Available at: https://www.powertochange.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Hubs-Report-FINAL-120719.pdf (Accessed: 24 July 2024).

Some thoughts on how universities can benefit the people and communities that they serve

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Shailen Poppat

On Wednesday 12th and Thursday 13th June 2024, I will be speaking on a panel with Dr. Rhiannon Jones of the University of Derby and Martin Ferguson of Socitm who invited us as part of their annual President’s Conference on the approaches that can be provided by universities for the benefit of the people and communities that they serve. As time is short on the day, I thought that I would put a few points in writing.

Hub for Collaborations

A University can provide a hub for collaboration between organisations in multiple sectors. Universities inhabit an in-between space – they are part of the country where they are situated and also very international both in terms of the composition of students and staff, and in the reach of their networks and research collaborations. Universities also exist in the cloud, with many courses being entirely online or hybrid, and many library resources now being electronic. Universities are measured on impact and therefore they also lie in that in-between space between academic knowledge and real-world practice within increasing emphasis to show how research and teaching is impacting communities outside of the institutions. Universities are also large employers and magnets for resource in their geographical location. Many suppliers have contracts with universities and many local businesses rely on student expenditure during university term times. This gives a university the influence and gravitas to be able to bring people together in a way that very few institutions can do, and I would advocate that it is something that we need to do much more of in a more organised manner. It does happen but it tends to be driven by individual academics or certain research projects rather than as part of a wider strategic plan either by a college or school.

Spaces to Reflect

Public service workplaces are busy places and over these last 15 years everyone has had to adopt the mantra of achieving more with less resource! This means that public service workers have been doing more than one person’s job which consequently means less time for them to reflect, learn, and develop themselves. Conversations with colleagues provide valuable support within stressful and complicated situations, however, they can often be action and task focused – we are talking shop when we talk to each other in a workplace. And this is where the learning development partnership with universities can be so helpful. I would say that a university course can provide a public service practitioner space to think about bigger philosophical themes that do not get focus in the workplace although implicitly public service practitioners know what these are. At the Institute of Local Government Studies, we deliver three master’s programmes, two of which are part-time programmes and one which is full-time programme. All of these programmes take a student through a learning journey to reflect upon six key questions:

Unless we are thinking about these things we just carry on moving on the treadmill without pausing and considering whether there are alternative approaches to the way things are currently.

Connecting Academic Knowledge with Practice Knowledge

When I am training practitioners or attending knowledge-exchange events, I always keep in-mind that I have to convince people that academic knowledge can be of relevance to their work. Both types of knowledge (academic and practice) can inform each other as much research is really the observation of practice and then taking those observations and formulating theories that can help us to better understand exactly what’s going on. For example, one of my roles in the School of Government is to represent us in a partnership with a civil service college in Ghana. I conducted a training there in March on the topic of understanding organisational cultures which was quite a novel topic for them. One of the models that I used from the academic literature in a workshop format was this one by Johnson et al. (2008).

Participants were mayors, assembly members, city managers, and other public managers, and they were asked to use the model to reflect upon their own work situation for approximately 15 minutes. They then split into smaller groups and shared experiences with each other and this seemed to provide them with a rich understanding of the dynamics that they were experiencing day-to-day but they would not necessarily have analysed what was going on without this exercise, and the academic framework provided a structure in which they could contain their thoughts. The feedback that I received was very positive for example,

‘After the CPD training, I have been able to gradually change the attitude of some staff towards work in terms of lateness, absenteeism, efficient use of material resources, client focus, participation, etc.’

‘By understanding the organization’s mission, vision and goals, as well as foster collaboration, innovation, learning and team effort in achieving the organizational overall objectives. Organizational culture also helps me build shared values and unified efforts among my colleagues, hence it helps to contribute to achieving the organization goals and objectives.’

So, you can see that universities can provide practice with spectacles with which to see what is going on so the practitioners gain better clarity on how to create change.

Shailen Popat works as an Assistant Professor in the Institute of Local Government Studies at the University of Birmingham where he is Director of the MSc in Public Management. In 2022, he was awarded the accolade of University Outstanding Teacher, and in 2023, he was awarded a Senior Fellowship of the Higher Education Academy.

Democratising public administration through public-common partnerships: the case of the Citizen Assets Programme in Barcelona

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Marina Pera and Sonia Bussu

In a recent article titled Towards Democratisation of Public Administration:Public-Commons Partnerships in Barcelona, part of a Special issue on The International Journal of the Commons (edited by Dr Hendrik Wagenaar and Dr Koen Bartels), we explored public-commons partnerships in Barcelona through a relational lens, examining how they might be contributing to deeper democratisation of public administration.

The commons refer to those cultural and material resources collectively managed by the community and represent an alternative to both the state and the market. Recent literature emphasises the capacity of the commons’ prefigurative politics to develop alternative institutions to neoliberal regimes and/or deliberative and collective forms of resource management. The grassroots movements managing the commons often take an oppositional stance to the state, but they might also depend on its resources. By the same token, the state has an interest in supporting assets and services managed as commons, which offer flexibility and efficiency, while encouraging citizen participation in local politics.  

Within political contexts sympathetic to progressive socio-economic projects, such as  new municipalism in Barcelona, formalised alliances between the local state and the commons started to emerge, facilitating the development of novel policy instruments that respond better to the demands of the commons and open opportunities for more participatory policymaking. So-called public-common partnerships are long-term agreements based on cooperation between state actors and the commons members. In our paper, we wanted to understand better the relational work behind these partnerships and the role of boundary spanners that build bridges between two worlds, such as the state and the commons, which are often quite distant in terms of visions of local democracy and the language to articulate such visions.  We take the case of the Citizen Asset Programme (CAP) in Barcelona to explore the relationships between public officials and commons members, highlighting how these collaborations shape governance practices and can help foster a collaborative culture within public administration.

CAP was approved in 2016 and aims to create the institutional framework to recognise and support commons-managed municipal assets in the city. Based on qualitative analysis of interviews with public officials and commons members involved in the partnership, as well as official documents, we drew out insights on the relational dynamics that facilitated the creation of two policy instruments under CAP: The Community Balance Metrics and the Social Return on Investment of Can Batlló. The first one is a set of indicators to evaluate the performance of community-managed assets considering their transformative potential and including dimensions of internal democracy, care, inclusion, and environmental sustainability. The second helps to measure the value of activities and volunteer work carried out in the community centre of Can Batlló.

Through a series of vignettes depicting the different state and commons actors involved, we examined how they forged alliances and employed creative thinking to manage conflicts, resistance, and scepticism from both the local administration and the grassroots movements. Public officials from the Active Democracy Department were able to build trust among commons representatives by recognising their needs and potential. They explained the workings of public administration in a clear language. They created spaces of open-ended dialogue between grassroots movements and different departments to facilitate the development of policy instruments, measures and indicators that valued the commons’ innovative work, while still coherent with existing legal requirements. For instance, a working commission was set up involving members of Can Batlló, the Legal and the Heritage Department, as well as representatives of the District administration. This public-commons partnership developed a comprehensive agreement to regulate asset transfers, which fully recognises the social and economic value of the commons.

By the same token, the commons members played a crucial role in communicating to grassroots movements the work of the Active Democracy officials and build mutual trust. On the one hand, they helped the commons understand feasibility issues of their demands; on the other they pressed the public administration for greater transparency and creative interpretation of existing regulatory framework to strengthen democratic values underpinning asset transfer agreements.

Two cooperatives supported these partnerships as consultants. They contributed knowledge of innovative public policies from across the world. They also facilitated knowledge sharing to encourage cooperation between commons members and state institutions, for instance by inviting grassroots groups from other parts of the world to share their experience of working with the state.

The work of these public-commons partnerships is gradually reshaping the administrative culture and fostering more transparent and democratic working practices within the public administration. An example is the joint work to develop the Community Balance Metrics, which helps evaluate the performance of the commons using indicators agreed upon by both local public administration and the commons. However, these processes face a number of challenges, as they clash with established working routines and performance evaluations of public administrators that hardly ever value participatory work. Existing literature suggests that despite the introduction and encouragement of new practices, there is a tendency to revert to traditional policymaking methods when faced with unexpected problems. When boundary spanners that had supported the partnership exit the process, they can leave a vacuum that is hard to fill and that can jeopardise the partnership. In Barcelona, ongoing discussion between Can Batlló members and the City Council on who is responsible for funding the refurbishment of one of Can Batlló’s building is causing friction within the partnership and some of the work has stalled.

Inevitably this collaborative work is hard to sustain, but in the face of multiple and overlapping crises facing local government, these public-commons partnerships are also beginning to open safe space to experiment and do things differently.

Picture credit: Victoria Sánchez.

Sonia is an Associate Professor in INLOGOV. Her main research interests are participatory governance and democratic innovations, and creative and arts-based methods for research and public engagement. She led on projects on youth participation to influence mental health policy and services, coproduction of research on health and social care integration, models of local governance, and leadership styles within collaborative governance.

Marina is a researcher at Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB). She holds a PhD in Public Policy from UAB and a M.A. in Sociology from Columbia University (New York). She has been a visiting scholar at CUNY Graduate Center (New York) and at INLOGOV, University of Birmingham. Her research interests
include community assets transfer, democratisation of public administration, community development and public-common partnerships.