Coproduction

Navigating between narratives of ‘vulnerability’ and ‘active citizenship’: how urban professionals facilitate citizen participation in marginalised neighbourhoods.

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Simone van de Wetering

Residents of marginalised neighbourhoods have long been governed as a vulnerable group in need of help. Today, they are increasingly expected to be active citizens and (co-)creators in improving their neighbourhood. In the Netherlands, like in other European countries, local and participatory approaches are now central in urban policy for marginalised neighbourhoods. But what does this shift in governance approach look like in the work practice of urban professionals who give shape to citizen participation?

Urban professionals are known to play a key role in realising citizen participation: municipal and non-municipal professionals, ranging from civil servants to professionals working for welfare organisations and other social partners linked to the neighbourhood. What their role exactly entails is, however, not really clear. Especially in terms of the (dis)empowerment of urban residents and in marginalised neighbourhoods. 

On the one hand, urban professionals are seen to empower citizens. They can navigate between different roles and mediate between ‘the state’ and ‘the people’ due to their unique position in between. On the other hand, they can undermine residents’ power. This can happen when, despite emancipatory aims, decision-making authority remains in the hands of public officials or is shared only with a small group of already privileged residents.

I explored how urban professionals gave shape to citizen participation in my ethnographic study of a participatory governance approach in a Dutch marginalised neighbourhood. Here, I found that the work of these urban professionals cannot be classified simply as either empowerment or disempowerment.

While the participatory approach was discursively positioned as embodying active citizenship, in the work practice of urban professionals the idea of vulnerable places and people in need of help was not so easily replaced. Residents were viewed as having problems and simultaneously as having talents and capabilities; they were assumed to be in need of help from the government and from professionals, while also being able to come up with and execute initiatives to improve the neighbourhood.

As urban professionals translated the broader shift in the governance of urban marginality to their work practice, they navigated between narratives of ‘vulnerability’ and ‘active citizenship’ and employed, what I call ‘selective empowerment’. This is a differentiated approach towards citizen participation in which professionals ascribe a significant role to themselves as a continuous support system for citizens. In the words of one urban professional: “Participation needs to be supported. . . . We [professionals] need to create a canvas on which participation can go nuts. But you can’t expect a painting to arise without bringing the brushes.” Moreover, they facilitate participation within a normative framework of ‘appropriate’ or more traditional expressions of active citizenship. For instance, youths who violently protested in response to the COVID-19 evening-curfew were redirected to a youth council.

By employing selective empowerment, urban professionals reproduced existing categories of vulnerability while reworking the meaning of ‘active citizenship’ or ‘citizen participation’ with marginalised groups. Acknowledging vulnerability is then not (only) a reproduction of existing inequalities. It is also an embedded approach employed by urban professionals to facilitate context-specific citizen participation against the background of urban marginalisation. A discursive shift in governance approach is not automatically synchronised with the work practice of urban professionals. Based on my research, I propose a more nuanced understanding of the work of urban professionals beyond mere empowerment or disempowerment. These insights may provide a starting point for urban professionals’, and, more generally, local governments’, reflexivity: to challenge not only their perceptions of residents as ‘vulnerable’, but also the storyline of residents as ‘active citizens’. Such reflexivity could imply a move beyond discursive ideals of ‘active citizenship’ towards context-specific practices of participation in local neighbourhood policy.

Simone van de Wetering is a PhD candidate at the Department of Public Law and Governance of Tilburg University. Her research focuses on identity and inequality in the city. In her PhD project, she studies citizen participation in marginalised urban neighborhoods in the Netherlands and France. Taking an ethnographic approach, she zooms in on the strategies of citizens and the state to make urban change.

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Collaborative management in the face of government response to COVID-19? Evidence from care home staff and stakeholder experiences in West England.

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Luke Bradbury

Picture credit: https://socialvalueportal.com/support-national-effort-covid-19/resources/news/social-value-in-action/support-national-effort-covid-19/

As a student on the MSc Public Management course at INLOGOV and having worked part-time in care for a number of years, I felt my final dissertation project was an opportunity to investigate the impact of COVID-19 on adult social care and the implications of government intervention. The works of organisations such as SCIE (Social Care Institute for Excellence) have already shown that inaccurate government guidance – combined with years of underfunding – resulted in the sector being ill-prepared for dealing with a pandemic and that care policy and practices had to rapidly adapt to unforeseen circumstances with limited support.

This case study aimed to explore this in the context of two care homes in West England during the early months of the pandemic. It was also interested in the role of collaborative management between care homes and their surrounding communities including local authorities, charities, businesses etc. ‘Collaboration’, in this context, took some influence from Helen Sullivan and Chris Skelcher’s conceptualisation of a collaborative agenda governing the (often mutually) beneficial cooperation between different public bodies and community agencies. One might consider how care homes may have banded together with their own local communities to ensure they still had the means to provide quality care in the face of COVID-19. Indeed, recent research by Fiona Marshall et al. has shown that, where government support was scarce, many care homes formed resource networks with external stakeholders such as local businesses, dentists, veterinaries, and domiciliary care agencies to source vital materials including personal protective equipment (PPE), electronics, toiletries, bedding and even food.

This study used semi-structured interviews and recruited five participants via a combination of snowball and non-probability purposive sampling. This included two deputy care home managers representing two different care homes in West England as well as a carer, a local parish councillor, and a co-owner of a local chemicals firm. The latter two participants were recruited as active members of the local community for one of the two participating care homes (or ‘external stakeholders’). Thematic analysis and grounded theory-based coding was then used to interpret the data.

The analysis firstly uncovered a strong dissatisfaction with the central government response to COVID-19 amongst all participants. Care staff spoke about how the implementation of the Coronavirus Act forced them to take on extra patients from hospital without an effective COVID-19 testing system in place and that inconsistencies between government guidance and company policy led to confusion amongst managers. Practices were forced to adapt; for example, adhering to stricter infection control measures and taking on extra care duties such as virtual GP consultations. External stakeholders also spoke about how these circumstances encouraged some level of collaboration within the community and a desire to assist local care organisations; for instance, a parish council was enabled to collaborate with the local chemicals firm and local school to source PPE such as goggles and hand sanitizer which could then be distributed to care providers.

Despite this opportunity to establish a resource network, collaboration between the two care homes and their surrounding communities was not evidenced as Marshall et al. had found previously. This was attributed to two main reasons. Firstly, resource dependency was less prevalent because effective internal management within both care homes meant they already had a sufficient supply of PPE. As one of the deputy managers recalled, the manager for her home made the decision to stock up on PPE and to lockdown early, therefore minimising the spread of the virus. The second reason was down to external circumstances that aided both care homes. Since both operate within rural areas of West England, they occupy less densely populated regions than care homes within inner city locations and therefore surrounding transmission rates remained relatively low. The implication is that locality largely eliminated the need to establish support networks with external stakeholders because they were not experiencing the same level of devastation seen in many other care homes. This was corroborated by staff who felt ‘fortunate’ compared to what they were seeing on the news.

These findings indicate the importance of effective management but also the extent to which contextual circumstances may or may not have necessitated collaborative networking between care homes and their surrounding communities during the early months of the pandemic. Whilst collaboration was less necessary here, the background coordination of parish council and local actors to produce a ‘safety net’ of resources did highlight the potential of localised collaboration and intervention in times of crisis. Perhaps, had such coordinated localised governance been enabled within the surrounding communities of less fortunate care homes, they may have been spared some of the devastations of the pandemic. Regardless, there is certainly a strong call for greater support towards the care sector for government and policymakers to consider – particularly in terms of clearer guidance, increased funding, and enabling localised governance to support care organisations.

Luke Bradbury graduated from the MSc Public Management in September 2021.

How can we nurture urban transformation?

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Dr. Catherine Durose

The complex, rapidly changing, increasingly precarious nature of cities has highlighted the limits of a traditional ‘top down’ master governance plan. How then can we shape and transform cities in order to address the challenges we face as a society, from sustainability to social cohesion?

Rather than attempting to discipline the urban governance environment, academics are increasingly trying to use different ways of thinking about the urban environment in order to work with its messiness, focusing on contingency, emergence and interaction. In our recent research, we have embraced this approach, but sought to develop it by also acknowledging the role of human agency in shaping and nurturing urban transformation.  Our work has given a sustained focus on how different people – those working on the front-line of public services, or in voluntary, community or social enterprise organisations, activists, and residents – can create change in urban neighbourhoods. Our new research places those working for change at the centre of debates on how cities transform.

We conducted a 30 month study in neighbourhoods in Amsterdam, Birmingham, Copenhagen and Glasgow. With local partners, we identified individuals who had a reputation for making a difference. We interviewed and observed them, and created spaces for them to come together to reflect on what they do, how they do it and why it matters. Our research discovered examples of how people made use of and nurtured four common resources:

  • Vision: a set of ideas to bring people together and offers a collective narrative for the future.
  • Relationships: ongoing engagement with a range of different people, often across cultural, economic or organisational boundaries.
  • Different ways of knowing: from professional knowledge to local.
  • Materials: from buildings to human bodies.

Living Lab in Birmingham

Examples included: how a mobile bakery in Amsterdam brought people together to take action, how historic buildings were re-purposed in Glasgow to offer a different future for the neighbourhood, how healthy lifestyle opportunities in Birmingham helped women from under-served communities realise their potential, and how resources were re-used and shared in Copenhagen to build a sustainable neighbourhood food economy. 

Seen together these examples begin to demonstrate a different way of thinking and showing how cities may be transformed:

First, how transformation may come from giving meaning to action and a pathway to a more liveable neighbourhood. 

Second, nurturing rather than extracting resources.

Third, engaging with people as community members to foster a sense of belonging and solidarity.

Finally, recognising and valuing different kinds of knowledge and harnessing them to respond creatively to social problems.

These practices did not begin with, focus upon, or end with those formal institutions that govern a city. Indeed, they often reflected institutional limits. Instead, they were guided by a belief in fostering power in communities towards a shared vision of a different future. 

The understanding of change expressed here, brings together a recognition of the role of people in catalysing urban transformation by bringing together different resources in a way that is purposeful, but also allows for a process of becoming that emerges over time. The work and resources we draw attention to here were often precarious, hidden, unvalued and yet hard to replace. Opportunities to experiment, to nurture, to fail, to reflect were all crucial, but we should acknowledge are also under severe pressure.

Our research brings together the history of different urban neighbourhoods, and their potential, and recognised the actual whilst considering the possible. We hope these insights contribute to ongoing learning and critical imagination in how we can approach the future of cities differently. Our article, ‘Working the urban assemblage: a transnational study of transforming practices’ by Catherine Durose, Mark van Ostaijen, Merlijn van Hulst, Oliver Escobar and Annika Agger has now been published in Urban Studies, and is available open access.

Catherine is Reader in Policy Sciences at INLOGOV, with a specific interest in urban governance and public policy.

Help council commissioning to ‘build back better’

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Jason Lowther

Local government is digging deep into its financial reserves and hiking council tax bills by double inflation, but still anticipates making further service cuts in 2021–22. The Public Accounts Committee report earlier this month shows how central government support hasn’t matched Covid-related budget reductions. More positively, at the same time, councils and partners are eyeing the improvements made to commissioning and procurement during the pandemic and asking whether these could help balance the budget. Can adding value to local government’s annual procurement spend of £100bn help improve outcomes for citizens, sustain local councils, and build a better recovery?

As NESTA’s recent report, A Catalyst for Change, evidenced, councils’ collaboration with other public sector bodies, citizens and the voluntary and private sectors was at the centre of the response to COVID-19. Local authorities ‘stepped into their role as conveners, leveraged their existing relationships and partnerships, and forged new ones to dynamically address key issues. This allowed organisations to link up volunteers with vulnerable people, support businesses, deliver food parcels or find temporary accommodation for rough sleepers’.

I’ve heard from some of the council managers on INLOGOV’s teaching programmes of the amazing agility and flexibility councils have been able to develop with partners in areas such as social care and housing. Commissioning and procurement processes that in the past were seen as inflexible, slow, risk-averse, price-obsessed and lacking innovation were transformed rapidly in response to the immediate threats of the pandemic. Data was shared in more depth and quickly, enabling better targeting of services. More flexible financial and performance management arrangements opened the door to flexible service delivery.

Now, a major research programme led by Dr. Richard Simmons at Stirling University, called Optimising Outcomes, is looking at the impact of Covid on partnering and procurement. The programme is working with key sector bodies such as CIPFA and SOLACE as well as universities and research councils, to answer key questions such as:

  • How, and how effectively, are local authorities deploying their commissioning and procurement functions to address the challenges posed by Covid-19? What are the successes to be celebrated? Where are the tensions that need to be managed? Where is the system at risk of breaking down?
  • What are the opportunities for improved procurement performance? How do local authorities optimise every aspect of procurement spend?
  • Can local authorities adopt more innovative, strategic, entrepreneurial and relational approaches to strengthen local resilience and avoid a weak and incapacitated system?
  • What role can greater data-analytic capacity play in supporting a more agile and effective response?

As part of this research, council managers have been invited to take part in a survey to capture learning from the many challenges and achievements of the sector during the last year.  The survey is aimed at all UK council managers (there is a separate survey for procurement teams) and takes around 10 minutes to complete.  The closing date for responses is 21st June.

If you are a UK council manager and haven’t yet taken part, please would you complete the survey here.    

This is a great opportunity to ‘build back better’ by applying the lessons and innovations councils and partners have developed over the last 18 months. I’ll report back on the results later this year.

Source: DHSC website

Jason Lowther is Director of the Institute for Local Government Studies (INLOGOV)

Local authorities and climate change: responding to the green challenge

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Jon Bloomfield

What lies ahead for local government in 2021? We know the pandemic will continue to loom large. But all the signs are that with the UK hosting the crucial, international climate change conference (COP26) in Glasgow next November, the issue of climate change will be high on the policy agenda.

Over the last 18 months many towns and cities have responded to the growing environmental emergency and declared their commitment to go carbon-neutral. In early December, 38 local authority leaders committed to cut their own carbon emissions to net zero by 2030. Among the leaders to sign the net zero pledge set out by the NGO UK 100 are the metro mayors of Greater Manchester and the West Midlands, plus council leaders in Birmingham, Bristol and Edinburgh. Together the signatories represent almost a third of the U.K. population. A  Zoom virtual conference saw more than 500 council leaders and officers participating.

The international political climate is favourable. Reversing four decades of Washington neo-liberal consensus, the International Monetary Fund has given its seal of approval to public investment strategies irrespective of the rising debt consequence. The national mood music is positive too. Boris Johnson’s 10 point plan for a Green Industrial Revolution recognised that we need a low carbon transition transforming all sectors in the economy. In the lingering shadow of Trumpist climate denialism, it was reassuring. The really tough question is how to make good on these national and local targets. The words are easy: the action is harder.

What is the best pathway to follow? The green recovery should focus on the exploitation of what we already know can fulfil a low carbon, ‘levelling up’ agenda. Here there are three key policy arenas, energy, mobility and buildings and in all three,  local authorities, their staff, community groups and local neighbourhoods have key roles to play.

Take buildings. The country needs a large-scale programme of state investment in the regions to both reduce emissions and create jobs. The quickest and simplest way to do that is to focus on decarbonising our building and housing stock. Renovation works are labour-intensive, create jobs and the investments are rooted in local supply chains.  Central to green recovery should be programmes where budgets are devolved to enable localities to design initiatives appropriate to their needs, in partnership with local stakeholders. That means looking to develop neighbourhood schemes so that entire streets are renovated together, rather than the government’s current green grants to individual householders. A community approach would bring economies of scale; permit accredited programmes with approved contractors; enable retrofit to be undertaken along with boiler replacements and renewable energy installations; introduce smart, digital appliances; and   on-street vehicle charging infrastructure. In other words, a comprehensive approach that takes citizens with you. Neighbourhood renovation and refurbishment offers lots of new jobs across the whole of the UK, with warmer homes, lower fuel bills and plenty of opportunities across the building supply chain. Plus a chance to engage local people in the revitalisation of their own streets and communities. What’s not to like?

But this all requires council officers to have the understanding and grasp of climate change transitions thinking and with the social and participatory skills to engage with neighbourhood and local groups. Climate change policies cannot be simply imposed from above. A huge social challenge won’t be addressed without some friction and tension. As we have seen with the Low Traffic Neighbourhoods policy over the last few months, if people aren’t engaged, then suddenly vocal resistance to these measures can arise.

Addressing climate change means we shall have to alter the ways that we live, move and work. The issues of climate transition are effectively an emerging policy arena. They require an understanding and marshalling of a new combination of skills amongst a wide cadre of local government officers, councillors and engaged citizens. Planners, traffic engineers, housing officers, finance and procurement staff: these and more all need additional skill-sets. Councils can set ambitious targets. But unless they have the staff within their ranks with the competence and skills to tackle them, then they will fall short.

Jon Bloomfield has been involved with the EU’s Climate KIC programme for over a decade, helping to develop educational and training programmes and experimental projects which help companies, cities and communities to make effective transitions to a low carbon economy.

Councils should make better use of churches to bring communities together

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Dr Madeleine Pennington

As if one were needed, Croydon Council’s issue of a section 114 notice in November offered a further stark reminder of the financial challenges facing local authorities. After a decade of austerity, the pandemic is stretching (and will stretch further) councils already running on a shoestring – and one consequence of reduced public spending is a reliance on faith and community groups to plug the gap.

This phenomenon has already led to a quiet shift in the role of faith in society. Faith-based volunteer hours rose by almost 60% from 2010-2014, and in 2015 this time contribution alone was valued at £3 billion. Between 2006 and 2016, faith-based charities were the fastest growing area of the charity sector. Two thirds of the nation’s growing number of foodbanks are now coordinated by the Trussell Trust – a Christian charity whose most recent figures show an 89% increase in need for emergency food parcels in April 2020 compared to April 2019. As of 2017, 93% of Anglican churches alone were involved in foodbanks in some way.

The result is one of the unspoken paradoxes of modern society: faith is increasingly assumed to be private, and yet is becoming ever more public in some very concrete ways.

However, taking churches as a case study, research published last month by Theos think tank observes that councils’ engagement with faith groups has predominantly been driven by necessity rather than positive embrace. Nervousness around proselytism and the inclusivity of faith-based services mean that local authorities tend to work with a few churches they trust, and the level of engagement varies hugely between areas: while some councils were described as “open and willing” in this research, church-based participants in other areas felt “invisible” or viewed with “suspicion”.

At the same time, while churches are increasingly relied upon to provide necessary services, they are far less often included where the wider health and flourishing of their local communities is concerned.

This is particularly problematic given that many of the challenges facing the country (and our local communities) fundamentally go beyond a financial shortfall. The Leave campaign won on an argument that Brexit was about more than economics. So too, the pandemic is more than a public health crisis: it is an act of solidarity for individuals so profoundly to curtail their freedom to protect the most vulnerable in our communities. Likewise, our response to many other critical issues facing our society – racial injustice, loneliness, our willingness to welcome migrants – rests on investing in the strength of our common relationships.

In other words, these are social cohesion challenges – and churches are uniquely placed to meet this relational need. They provide an unrivalled source of physical capital scattered equally throughout the country, acting as the social capillaries of their communities, protecting a wellspring of formal and informal leadership, convening difficult conversations between groups, motivating individual members of their congregations to give to wider society, and seeing (and enacting) the full potential of their communities where others do not. 

Most churches have also reflected deeply on the appropriate role of faith in their community work; having an open conversation about boundaries and expectations here is far preferable to writing off their contribution altogether. But neither should councils assume the “appropriate” role of faith in the community is no role at all; rather, it is churches’ desire to love and serve their neighbours which makes them so well-equipped to serve their communities in the first place.

As budgets are further slashed in the months (and perhaps years) ahead, churches will undoubtedly be called upon even more to bridge the growing chasm between need and capacity. However, if the context of those relationships can move from a reluctant “needs must” basis to one of open and compassionate collaboration, councils may well find that churches have much more to offer than they currently are. Given the steep climb ahead, that is surely a welcome revelation. 

The Church and Social Cohesion was commissioned by the Free Churches Group, and prepared independently by Theos, and published alongside a ‘how to’ booklet for policymakers and local authorities hoping to engage better with churches. Download them here.

Dr Madeleine Pennington is head of research at the Christian thinktank Theos

This article was published in the Local Government Chronicle on 1st December 2020.