In praise of … the Japan Local Government Centre

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Chris Game

The Guardian newspaper has what it calls a daily editorial encomium: a short, benign tribute to a person or phenomenon featuring generally somewhere on the fringe of the day’s news. Entitled ‘In praise of’, its recent subjects have included Arunima Sinha – the first woman amputee to scale Everest – half-term holidays, male skirts, and Ringo Starr. This uncharacteristically uncritical blog is a lot longer than a Guardian encomium, but comes in a similar spirit.

The Japan Local Government Centre (JLGC) is the London (Whitehall) office of the Council of Local Authorities for International Relations (CLAIR) a joint organisation of Japanese local authorities, supported by the Ministry of Internal Affairs, and dedicated to ‘localised internationalism’: the fostering of international relations at the local level in Japan and the promotion of local Japanese culture and activities abroad.

It is the institutionalisation of a Japanese instinct that the British, not least in local government, tend not to share: a belief in the benefits, both intrinsic and instrumental, in seeking to understand how other countries do things. In addition, therefore, to its branches in each of Japan’s 47 prefectures (similar to our counties) and 20 designated cities (a case in point of a practice from which we could well learn), CLAIR also has seven overseas offices. The London office’s remit covers bits of northern Europe and Scandinavia, plus a responsibility for responding to research requests from the Japanese local authorities who provide most of its funding and a majority of the dozen or so staff.

That research function is one explanation of the extensive contacts we in INLOGOV have enjoyed over the years with JLGC, its rotating directors – mostly seconded from the Ministry of Internal Affairs – and both Japanese and UK staff. But far from the only one.

My personal association dates back to 1997, when I had the good fortune to be selected as a member of one of the Centre’s early annual study tours – in my case as one of a group of 10 mainly local government officers for a heavily subsidised and enormously enjoyable 10-day visit centred on Yokosuka City and Kanagawa Prefecture, just south-west of Tokyo. Unforgettable is almost as overused an adjective nowadays as incredible, but in this instance it is literally true and it paved the way for numerous succeeding contacts, relationships and revisits – from the latest of which, as it happens, I have recently returned.

I might well have blogged about it anyway, but that wouldn’t have justified the ‘In praise of’ peg, which by Guardian convention requires a relevant news item. That news item is (I shall resist typing ‘of course’) Japan400. In truth, the title refers to the yearlong programme of cultural events commemorating 400 years of diplomatic, trading and cultural relations between our two countries – as conducted through myriad organisations like CLAIR and the JLGC.

But the undoubted focal point of the year’s celebrations came on June 11th – exactly 400 years since the Clove, an aptly-named ship of the East India Company, finally made it across the East China Sea, up past Nagasaki to the south-west island of Hirado, and became the first British-commanded vessel to land in Japan.

The nautical detail is vital – especially for any like me, who, on first hearing of Japan400, were confused by thinking we’d already celebrated this quatercentenary more than a decade ago. I recalled clearly a fellow member of that 1997 study tour – Peter McLean, from the then Gillingham Borough Council’s Business Liaison Office (and the first UK local government officer I met who had a bilingual English/Japanese business card) – impressing upon us at every conceivable opportunity how the first Englishman to set foot in Japan, in 1600, had famously and indisputably been William Adams, a seaman from, yes, Gillingham in Kent.

Indeed, Peter, as was his wont, went further: presenting us all with a little book about the great man, The Blue-eyed Samurai, and his remarkable story of finding favour with the Shogun, becoming his trusted adviser, shipbuilder and the only officially recognised Western samurai, being granted a house and land, and spending the rest of his life in his adopted country.

All true and authenticated, and duly celebrated in 2000 in what by then, following Gillingham’s merger with Rochester, was the unitary Medway authority. William Adams was indeed Japan’s first English tourist, but – the big BUT – the ship on which he sailed was equally irrefutably Dutch: part of a Dutch fleet, owned by the Dutch East India Company, and commanded by a Dutch captain.

The Clove’s arrival 13 years later was very different. Though the voyage itself was hardly, as it were, plain sailing, it was heading from the outset to a known and at least minimally settled destination, and there was none of the drama occasioned by Adams’ landing. Quite the contrary, for the convoy commander, John Saris, brought official letters and gifts from King James I, and in turn was warmly welcomed by the local ruler – which I suppose makes it the more appropriate event from which to date the establishment of diplomatic and cultural relations.

It also offers a really clunky segue back to my own recent visit, during which I too met and was welcomed by local rulers, although they tend nowadays to take the form of elected prefecture governors and municipal mayors, rather than daimyo and samurai. I’m hoping to write something loosely comparative on local government leadership in the UK and Japan, and thought I’d take advantage of the invitation of a friend and former colleague to observe his ‘campaign’ for re-election as mayor of Setouchi, a ‘new city’ of about 40,000 residents in Okayama prefecture, roughly midway between Osaka and Hiroshima.

There are two sets of inverted commas in that last sentence, both intended to signal distinctive usage. First, the city. Though in area roughly the size of Manchester, Setouchi isn’t in truth a city at all, but rather the product of a 2004 merger of three real towns that now, of course, have lost most of their governmental identity – rather like Gillingham and Rochester. And Setouchi too is an artificial name, derived from ‘Seto inland sea’, in which as few people actually live as in the River Medway.

In much the same way as we have been relentlessly merging real places into ever larger and artificial constructs like Medway, the Japanese have been engaged on a fiscally incentivised merger spree that has to date cut the number of municipalities from over 3,200 in 1999 to barely 1,700 – one striking difference, though, being that some of the meaningless names adopted by their new creations at least sound more attractive than ours – Sakura (cherry blossom) City, Asagiri (morning mist) Town, and the like.

That, however, is not my point here. Rather, it is to note that this governmental engrossment, and the substantial reduction in the number of local politicians, seems to have done little to stimulate either greater electoral competition or greater voter participation. Japanese mayoral elections can take place in almost any month, but in over a quarter of the 80 held in April of this year the mayors were elected or re-elected without a contest; and in over 60% of the cities in which elections did take place, voter turnout hit record low levels. Political parties in this country aren’t the most popular of institutions, but democratically a weak and ineffectual party system is surely worse.

My friend was also re-elected unopposed, and, while I’m sure that was a testament to the breadth of his personal appeal, the excellence of his mayoral record, and his undoubted political negotiating skills, even I would be that much more reassured, had he not also been unopposed when first and previously elected.

It did not, incidentally, mean that there was no ‘campaign’ at all for me to witness, following my 6,000 mile journey. There were the personal posters, on publicly provided display boards, that are an integral part of all Japanese elections; loudspeaker campaign cars, organised hospitality, and endless meeting, greeting and exchanging of business cards. But it’s the final picture – the triumphal and collective BANZAI! (in which the ‘distinguished foreign guest’ enthusiastically participated) – that most truly captures the spirit of this particular election: considerably more acclamation than confrontation.

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None of which should be taken to suggest that Japanese mayors, particularly of larger cities, aren’t important political figures with substantial powers and influence, or that the country’s local politics is invariably low key. Last November’s mayoral election in Okinawa, for example, became effectively a referendum on the challenger’s platform of removing all US bases from the city and replacing the US-Japanese Security Treaty with a treaty of friendship – albeit one that he lost by quite a distance.

As for the politician currently receiving by far the greatest media coverage, both nationally and internationally, and performing the Farageiste role of scaring the hell out of the established political parties in the run-up to next month’s Upper House elections, Toru Hashimoto isn’t in Parliament at all, but the mayor of Osaka.

More of which possibly in the nearish future. For the present, though, simply a grateful reflection that, were it not for the JLGC, it’s quite likely that I’d never even have got interested in this stuff.

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Chris is a Visiting Lecturer at INLOGOV interested in the politics of local government; local elections, electoral reform and other electoral behaviour; party politics; political leadership and management; member-officer relations; central-local relations; use of consumer and opinion research in local government; the modernisation agenda and the implementation of executive local government.

Damaged reputations (and how to repair them)

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Ian Briggs

During a recent conversation with a senior product development engineer who works for a high end vehicle manufacturer, the importance of ‘halo products’ opened up an interesting conversation. Investment in such ‘halo’ products is a given in a highly competitive marketplace and the known impact they have on consumer behaviour is a strong justification for the high levels of investment needed in them.

The conversation turned to the near universally low esteem that this talented, hard working professional engineer held local public services in. To him, they were poorly managed, overly costly and rarely related to the wants and needs of the local people. Perhaps I should not have been surprised that he held this view but I did ask him if there was anything he really valued about local public services.

There was very little, but one service emerged as something that he did value – the local Fire and Rescue Service. He could find little to criticise about them. He cited a number of times that he was called upon to work professionally with them, and he saw them as having a very high level of professionalism when exploring vehicle safety issues. Any cut backs in this service he felt was poor political judgement. He was continually impressed by them and appreciated that in many cases the conditions within which they worked were challenging, dangerous and above all professionally demanding.

So why, if within the case he was putting forward that in the commercial sector investment in halo products and services is seen as a key way of leading and managing the overall brand, did the public sector not think and behave in the same way?

This contrasts with two papers that have crossed my desk recently. In both cases a strong argument is put forward for increasing the importation of private sector talent into the public service. However, in both cases the argument centres around the skills that commercial managers and leaders have in controlling inputs whilst at the same time improving the outcome quality of products and services. No mention is made of strategic investment in halo products and understanding of how careful promotion of those products and services that are known to be valued, even by those who consume products lower down the range, have a positive impact on overall consumer behaviour.

We did go on to discuss how the reverse could be true; could poor product perception have a negative impact upon products and services across the brand? The answer was a clear yes but the means by which this was countered was revealing. He cited cases of increasing management and leadership attention on those products and services that are valued. Clearly this has to be done simultaneously with rectifying where possible poor product and service across the portfolio, but it makes me reflect upon the tactics we apply in public service management. Are we missing a trick? The media is full of challenging stories of very serious public sector failure and the reputational damage that the NHS is suffering is potentially immense, as are sections of local government and other governmental agencies. But within this there seem to be few issues that lead to reputational harm to the Fire and Rescue Services – although I do not wish to tempt fate here!

So, should we explore this transferability of positive product and service a little more closely? My product engineer friend said that lessons could be learned in how these high value products are developed – in certain cases the positive impact of the product was achieved through a ‘less is more’ approach. Consumer behaviour can be positively impacted on by taking out unnecessary or unappreciated elements of a product or service; this is perhaps counterintuitive but is now an established mechanism for commercial organisations. The giving of more or adding more leads to a rapid acceleration of wants and needs but positively promoting the efficiency of a product that closely matches the expectation of the consumer adds value.

It would appear that within the highly tuned commercial mindset the notion of meeting the needs of the consumer is not always about the surprise and delight extras that are offered, but rather exists within the precise tailoring of need to product – even if somewhat perversely it may cost the provider more to take things out than to put additional things in.

What seems to be key here is the amount of attention that is paid to understanding what you do well whilst at the same time seeking address what you may not do so well. This is a principle that is commonly adopted in commerce – it is drawn from the theoretical perspective of ‘appreciative enquiry’ – seeking to understand what is positive and then taking active steps to deploy the factors that lead to success. There is an extensive literature on the subject that rarely seems to have an airing in public management circles, but perhaps this is something that we could learn from other sectors.

The key point here seems to be the accepted dimension of the transferability of reputations, both positive and negative, and the need for commercially savvy organisations to pay close attention to the ‘halo’ product and service. If that positive transferability is a reality then we should perhaps pay more attention to where we are succeeding and achieving high reputational advantage, even if the media still wants to pay rightful attention only to those areas where we may deserve a poor reputation. Maybe it could be a case of not seeking to import private and commercial sector savvy to wider public services, but to recruit more fire-fighters into wider public sector jobs.

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Ian Briggs is a Senior Fellow at the Institute of Local Government Studies. He has research interests in the development and assessment of leadership, performance coaching, organisational development and change, and the establishment of shared service provision.

Hashtag politics: seven top tips for civil servants using social media

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Stephen Jeffares

The Commons public administration select committee’s call for open policymaking, published on 3 June, envisages civil servants as the guardians of wiki-style policymaking, with public sector leaders embracing digital technologies and using platforms such as Twitter and Facebook.

But these social media platforms can be a double-edged sword for policymakers.

Never has it been easier, or cheaper, to launch or consult on new policy initiatives. The possibility of creating a hashtag and reaching both the influencers and the wider public is seductive. Yet it can also result in something close to a Dr Frankenstein scenario: you have created a hashtag, and it will destroy you!

Once unleashed, public, tag-able, searchable and unique policy ideas are vulnerable to all kinds of comment, including critique and derision. Keeping abreast of what is being said about your initiative, activity or organisation can be difficult when you are busy with everyday matters, as former BBC director general George Entwistle found to his cost.

The rise of social media has brought with it a goldrush, with numerous companies and social media consultants offering “social listening” technologies, related advice and services. These tools can be configured to alert organisations of both positive and negative discussion of their initiatives, opening up opportunities to capitalise or take action. Metrics are provided to show the most influential users discussing an initiative, and who should be approached to help spread the message.

New tags are created daily – #compassionatecare, #MyPCC, #Greendeal, and, a personal favourite, the probation-related tag #transformingrehabilitation, which takes up 20% of a tweet.

Succeeding at hashtag politics is challenging. Here are my top tips:

1. Acknowledge the craft

In the battle to disseminate a message in a competitive environment with multiple channels and information overload, the creation of effective labels – such as hashtags – for policy ideas is part of the craft of policymaking.

2. Expect and accept some loss of creative control

Since its inception, big society has been frequently criticised as nebulous and vague. However, vagueness is part of the appeal of a policy idea. Its very nebulousness is what draws people to it and allows them the important opportunity to attach their own meanings and demands. Organic labels, hashtags and alternative meanings will arise. Take, for example, the Home Office’s #MyPCC, which was usurped by #PCC.

3. Listen

Invest modest resources in social media monitoring software, but, more importantly, recruit and train policy researchers to integrate new forms of data into their work.

4. Diversify

Hashtag policymaking is more about creating memorable policy ideas than explicit hashtags. Following one hashtag or set of users is not enough. You have to adapt to changing language to be able to capture the conversation.

5. Peek under the hood now and again

Do not rely solely on automated analytics, such as sentiment monitors, when making decisions.

6. Engage more and broadcast less

Be prepared to engage in informal discussion with citizens, without the need for approval from above. Waiting three days for sign off to reply to a Facebook comment is not engagement.

7. Be prepared to let go

Every day your initiative is online, accept that attachment to policy ideas is gradual, cumulative and eventually disruptive. Learn to recognise when the policy idea is entering its final stages, be prepared to disinvest, and do not mislead your collaborators.

This post was originally published by the Guardian Public Leaders’ Network.

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Stephen Jeffares is a Roberts Fellow in the College of Social Sciences based in INLOGOV, Institute for Local Government Studies.  His fellowship focuses on the role of ideas in the policy process and implications for methods.  He is a specialist in Q methodology and other innovative methods to inform policy analysis.

What do MMR and personal budgets have in common?

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Catherine Needham

The recent spike in measles cases in Swansea and elsewhere has a particular salience for local government, occurring just as authorities took on new responsibilities for public health. Events in Swansea brought back into public attention the decline in uptake of the MMR (Measles, Mumps, Rubella) vaccine that followed a spate of media stories several years ago reporting an apparent link to autism. Despite the thorough discrediting of the link, MMR take-up rates have not recovered.

Declining rates of vaccination are not a UK-phenomenon and cannot wholly be laid at the door of a single rogue study. Research that I have been doing with Anat Gofen from Hebrew University in Jerusalem has highlighted that vaccination rates are dropping across western democracies. Often, in each country, the decline will be associated with a particular vaccine and a set of commonly circulating myths surrounding it. In the US, for example, it has been a rise in cases of whooping cough that has provoked most concern.

Whilst vaccine take-up rates have always been low within some disadvantaged communities, what has grown is the prevalence of parents practicing a form of so-called ‘scientific citizenship’, in which they research issues for themselves, make use of official and oppositional websites, and weigh the perceived risks. They may opt to delay the jabs until a child is older or to split combined vaccines into separate shots rather than not vaccinate at all. If they decide not to proceed with vaccination, they will find an online community of fellow resistors with whom to share stories and provide support.

What has this got to do with personal budgets in social care services? In both cases, citizens are challenging conventional notions of professional expertise and authority, and making a claim to know what is best for them and their families.

The two cases have many dissimilarities: accepting that older people and people with disabilities know best about their immediate care needs and should have choice and control about how they spend their time is clearly very different from accepting that parents know best about a medical intervention like vaccination. Personal budgets have been the culmination of many years of campaigning by disability organisations for recognition that the person using services is an “expert on their own life” and has widespread support in government and civil society. Vaccine refusal is a widely criticised activity with dangerous consequences for public health.

However for health and social care professionals on the frontlines, navigating the boundaries of citizen expertise is a growing challenge. With personal budgets expanding into the NHS as personal health budgets, it is no longer assumed that health interventions should always be determined on the basis of a traditional clinical evidence base. Like ‘expert patient’ programs, health budgets have been principally targeted at people with chronic conditions which require self-management and enable them to develop knowledge over the long-term. Other areas of health, such as vaccination, remain off limits.

However, citizens themselves may not accept this demarcation. Declining vaccination rates highlight the difficulties that officials face in attempting to ‘hold the line’, encouraging citizen expertise in some sectors of health and care whilst denying it in others. There are challenges for practitioners in explaining why you can be an expert patient but not an expert parent.

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Catherine Needham is a Senior Lecturer at the Health Services Management Centre, University of Birmingham, and is developing research around public service reform and policy innovation. Her recent work has focused on co-production and personalization, examining how those approaches are interpreted and applied in frontline practice. Her most recent book, public by the Policy Press in 2011, is entitled, Personalising Public Services: Understanding the Personalisation Narrative.

Some seasonal thoughts on definitions of plagiarism and fraud

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Chris Game

In the higher education world June means two things: the assessment season and the publication of university league tables. We had the Guardian University Guide rankings this week and here at the University of Birmingham we were very excited, having apparently shot up in a single year from 30th out of 119 institutions to 15th rankings. We seem to have cracked the system, so watch out, Oxbridge, here we come!

Rigorous assessment, as the Education Secretary regularly reminds us, is a vital part of any educational package, and certainly in HE it’s guaranteed to appeal to fee-conscious parents, if not necessarily to their prospective student offspring. Here in my little corner of the university, therefore, we like to feel we’ve done our bit towards our university’s startlingly improved ranking with our work on rooting out and publicising plagiarism.

Go too deeply into it and plagiarism – appropriating someone else’s work, language, thoughts, ideas, or whatever as your own – can quickly become over-complicated. What counts as a thought? Can you plagiarise yourself? Is wrongful appropriation a crime or an ethical lapse? So we try to keep it simple: it’s cheating, it’s bad, and the more of it you detect, the better.

In what we might call the dark ages, plagiarism rates were the numbers or percentages of all students’ marks that, on investigation, were found to be higher than they should have been, due to the students having cheated. Regrettably, because either our investigations were insufficiently diligent or students weren’t actually cheating that much, the rates were mostly pretty low and risked making us look careless about these matters.

How, then, could these disappointingly low rates be boosted without actually forcing students to cheat? Easy! What we’re really interested in is detecting marks wrongly assigned. But ‘wrongly assigned’ makes it seem as if we, not students, are responsible, so let’s keep the useful term ‘plagiarism’, but extend it to include ALL marks that were found to have been wrongly assigned.

So, if a student falsely claims to have handed work in on time, thereby avoiding a mark penalty for late submission, that’s plagiarism. If our external examiner finds we’ve over-marked an assignment, that’s plagiarism. If the Examinations Office incorrectly records or transcribes a mark, that’s plagiarism. The result: we’ve got stats that plagiarism detection software manufacturers would kill for.

At which point, I should emphasise, at John McEnroe-like volume, I AM NOT BEING SERIOUS!! Or rather, I am being serious, but not about plagiarism. Almost everything in the last few paragraphs – apart from the UoB’s Guardian ranking – derives from my warped imagination.

However, rewrite those paragraphs, replacing plagiarism or intellectual fraud with ‘benefit fraud’, and you’ve got a fair description of how in the real world Ministers and the media manipulate statistics to get them to tell a more convenient story. In brief, if you bundle various unrelated activities together and label them collectively as ‘fraud’, then feed the numbers to the media, you can have voters baying for all the benefit cuts you were going to introduce anyway.

Let’s take the most recent benefit fraud outrage panic, prompted by the release of some latest figures by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) hard upon the manslaughter trial revelations of benefit scrounger Mick Philpott. The Daily Telegraph went with “Fraudulent and wrong benefit claims hit £3.5 billion record”. The Daily Express launched a “Call for new blitz on benefits to cut £3.6 billion fraud bill”.

Don’t bother about the slight statistical discrepancy; we’ll come back to it shortly. Besides, what does the odd hundred million matter when most of your readers presumably subscribe broadly to the average view of respondents in a recent YouGov/TUC survey: that 41% of the entire welfare budget goes on benefits to unemployed people, and that 27% of the welfare budget is claimed fraudulently.

In fact, DWP statistics show that of the total 2012/13 welfare budget of £167 billion, nearly half (£80 billion) went on state pensions, 14% on housing benefit, 8% on disability living allowance, 5% on pension credits, and 3% each (just over £5 billion) on jobseeker’s allowance, income support, and council tax benefit. The TUC’s ‘correct’ answer to its ‘benefits to unemployed people’ question is the 3% for jobseeker’s allowance, and even if this does, perhaps misleadingly, ignore other benefits for which the unemployed may qualify, it’s still massively closer to the true picture than 41%.

As for the popular guesstimate of 27% of the welfare budget going in fraudulent claims, the DWP’s more evidence-based estimate is contained in the annual publication referred to above, the clue to which is in its title: Fraud and Error in the Benefit System. Yes, it covers fraud, but its purpose is to measure the total cost to the taxpayer of all incorrect benefit payments made, whatever the cause – and, most importantly, to distinguish between those causes.

The preliminary estimate for 2012/13 is that total over-payment due to fraud and error across all benefits was £3.5 billion, or 2.1% of the total welfare budget. That’s where the Daily Telegraph’s figure came from, except that the paper didn’t bother clarifying that only a third of it was actually the result of deliberate claimant fraud. The other two-thirds were caused by claimant error with no fraudulent intent, and error by DWP or local authority officials.

Moreover, non-fraudulent claimant and official errors were also responsible for under-payments of £1.4 billion, so the net cost to the taxpayer of all benefit fraud and payment error was £2.1 billion or a little under 1.3% of the total budget, with actual fraudulent claims being responsible not for £45 billion, which would be 27% of the budget, nor for £3.5 billion, but £1.2 billion or 0.7%.

Interestingly, the Daily Express recognised that £1.2 billion is the correct fraud figure, but, possibly not to be outdone by the Telegraph, they got their headline by trebling it to £3.6 billion to cover a three-year period.

It’s always tempting, when one knows roughly the respective figures, to compare benefit fraud and tax fraud – but not that easy. First, there’s the terminology. HMRC don’t investigate anything as crude as tax fraud. Rather, they measure tax gaps, between what should be and actually is collected, and talk only of people circumventing or evading paying their taxes. In 2010/11 they measured a tax gap of £32 billion, representing 6.7% of total tax liabilities, and 15 times the net benefit overpayment gap. As usual, by far the biggest gap was in VAT – £9.6 billion, or over 10% of the tax due.

When it comes to differentiating tax-circumventing behaviours, HMRC reckon that unambiguous tax evasion accounts for 46% of the gap, or £14.7 billion – although it seems unlikely that some of the other behaviours, like failure to take reasonable care, would be quite as sympathetically interpreted, were the perpetrators benefit claimants.

Time, I think, to make my own position clear. By trying to identify the most accurate recent measures in what is inevitably an immensely difficult and controversial policy field, I do not diminish in any way the financial, political or moral importance of either benefit or tax fraud. I welcome in particular The Local Government Fraud Strategy, both for the work that it is spearheading and for the increased knowledge and awareness to which it will lead.

My concern is with the deliberate distortion of public knowledge and awareness. Politicians, even Ministers, cannot be held entirely responsible for the public’s misconceptions of how the world works, but they can be criticised when they pander to those misconceptions by falsely presenting or encouraging the false presentation of their own figures. DWP Secretary Iain Duncan Smith – rebuked again only last month by the UK Statistics Authority for distorting his department’s figures on the impact of the benefits cap – and junior minister, Lord Freud, have both had publicly to apologise for exaggerating the extent of benefit fraud, so now they just rely on friendly media to do their dirty work for them. They, above all, should know that the subject’s importance deserves much better.

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Chris is a Visiting Lecturer at INLOGOV interested in the politics of local government; local elections, electoral reform and other electoral behaviour; party politics; political leadership and management; member-officer relations; central-local relations; use of consumer and opinion research in local government; the modernisation agenda and the implementation of executive local government.

What is the place of emotion in the making of policy?

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Kevin Harris

In the years I spent shuttling between local initiatives in low income neighbourhoods and oddly clean cupboard rooms in Westminster, I never really cracked the way the experience of disadvantage was absorbed or dismissed as ‘personal’ and disconnected from policy.

You see this constantly in the skirmishes of local democracy of course – a local meeting where an officer or elected member gets a thorough bashing by a resident who’s living a kind of hell that current policies don’t address. Fierce steam gets released but policy is unaffected.

Such occasions can be off-putting for the well-meaning policy maker. I think most are aware of the gravitational effect here, caused often by internal pressures of work, of the risk of gradually becoming detached from local experience.

Politicians shield themselves from occasional bombardment, and disparage the ‘personal’ as ‘emotional’ while routinely exploiting examples through the media when it suits them to do so.

Sometimes politicians try to use public events to draw the sting of citizens’ anger, and occasionally find they’ve over-estimated their own political skills. When they view confrontation with residents as political sport and not as a chance to understand and address needs, that illustrates the tension I’m talking about.

At the same time, people who have profound experience of the failure of social systems to protect them, may not have the perspective that helps anyone relate it to policy in a meaningful way. But sometimes you hear a really considered, articulate exposition of experience that takes the personal and places it in a generalised policy context. That’s rare, and risks diluting the very emotion of lived experience that gives pertinent urgency to the cause. And often intermediaries, like housing workers say, who can speak the equivocal language of policy while combining understanding of several individual examples of disadvantage, can make contributions that are valued and welcomed by both sides.

So what is the place of emotion in the making of policy? Rosie Anderson has done some work on this ‘essential but difficult territory’ and TSRC have just published a fascinating paper based on policy making around poverty in Scotland (Summary; 4-page briefing; working paper). Emotional knowledge, she says, is frequently described by her informants as ‘ambiguous, unreliable and potentially overwhelming knowledge – in contrast with “rational” knowledge, which is the prerequisite for “professionalism” in policy-making and a necessity for making policy decisions.’ This sounds a lot like what Ivan Illich described as a ‘cognitive disorder’, resting on the illusion that

‘the knowledge of the individual citizen is of less value than the “knowledge” of science. The former is the opinion of individuals. It is merely subjective and is excluded from policies. The latter is “objective” – defined by science and promulgated by expert spokesmen. This objective knowledge is viewed as a commodity which can be refined… and fed into a process, now called “decision-making.” This new mythology of governance by the manipulation of knowledge-stock inevitably erodes reliance on government by people.” (Tools for conviviality, 1973).

Anderson makes the point that policy processes are contrived to exclude subjectivity and individuality. And if people are to engage with those processes, it’s hard to see what else they are to bring to them. I have been in public meetings where a roomful of people, having collectively an enormous wealth of knowledge about the local issues under discussion, have sat in disconnected silence because the language and process disenfranchised them at the very point they were supposed to be being ‘invited’ to participate. Even the most well-meaning policy makers can flounder at this point.

Conversely, there are those meetings which seem like unstructured and unruly free-for-alls, a sequence of barely related angry rants. As Anderson says,

‘In practice this process of moving from the particular and emotional to general and impersonal, so simple-sounding on paper, is actually very difficult to get right in the eyes of policy practitioners because of emotional knowledge’s ambiguous status in policy.’

Partly, I have no doubt, this is an educational issue. As I have said often before, too many of us emerge from the education system with no idea how local democracy functions. For a long time it’s been in the interests of politicians to keep things that way, although some of them appear to be less sure nowadays (that’s a network society effect, I think). And Anderson raises the question of how we provide better support for policy workers emotionally when they engage with such lived experience.

We’ve all talked about emotional intelligence over the years. But it strikes me as curious that no-one seems to have got to grips with this topic before. This is a hugely important site of conflict and potentially fruitful understanding, and Anderson has pin-pointed the significance of ‘the negotiation and policing of the boundary between “personal” and “professional” knowledge about social change.’

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Kevin Harris runs a community development consultancy, Local Level, offering expertise and advice on community engagement, community cohesion, involvement and participation, and neighbourhood development. He has 25 years’ experience in community development with a particular emphasis on how people communicate, share information, and interact at local level. Kevin has published several books, chapters and articles, online articles for the Guardian, and reports to government. He is Senior Associate Consultant to Breslin Public Policy and co-founder of Networked Neighbourhoods. He was previously a British Library Research Fellow.

This post was previously featured on the Neighbourhoods blog.