After I wrote a piece on Participation often isn't working recently, my friend Alexandra Rook dug out an article she produced a couple of years ago, but didn't publish at the time.
Alexandra makes the point that not only are the processes of involving people not working, the language isn't either. Councils and other power-holders have taken on the words, but not the appropriate attitudes:
The old mantras of ‘bottom-up’, community-led, ‘experts on tap not on top’ are now coming from those at the top. And that’s the problem: it remains a top-down initiated process, demanding that ‘the community’ gets off its backside and participates. (I put ‘the community’ in parentheses because it has become a much bandied about, hackneyed and increasingly de-valued term. It’s become part of the regeneration jargon. Forgive me if I refer instead to ‘local people’, those ordinary individuals who live in a certain area or get together for common purposes-those ‘communities of place and of interest’.) Participation has become something of an end in itself. In the nanny state there is an imperative to get out of bed and be a good citizen (we don’t remind ourselves any more that technically we’re all still subjects).
Alexandra adds:
‘The community’ is expected to not only identify its needs (relatively easy), but to prioritise those competing needs for limited resources (not so easy) and then to come up with solutions to those prioritised needs (much harder). Wasn’t it Tony Benn who said if democracy worked, they’d abolish it. Well, we don’t have much experience of participative democracy as opposed to representational democracy, and we all know what people think of that, because they’re voting with their feet. So we’re struggling with participation and the need to be ‘inclusive’, to reach those who were deemed to be ‘hard to reach’ or the 'hard to hear’ (recently re-badged, I noticed, as ‘the hard to find’; they must be running as fast as they can from the regeneration field).
Alexandra works for the Civic Trust, who do excellent work in regeneration and community engagement, so her views - while entirely personal - are based on wide experience. You can read the whole article below. It resonates with the research I was quoting, and also with an article written a few years back by Drew Mackie Dancing While Standing Still. I'll be looking out for more reality checks on participative democracy, and how to address the problems revealed - which is much easier if people like Alexandra and Drew help by being honest about the issues.
Consultation isn’t working! Or the words that we use.
There is a real dichotomy at the heart of the current regeneration agenda. Having spent most of my working life harping on about the need to involve local communities in major development, it comes as a bit of a shock when ‘the powers that be’ adopt the language and values of the voluntary/community sector. It leaves us rather naked. If the gamekeeper has turned poacher, where does that leave the poacher? Presumably the poacher has to turn gamekeeper or starve. And at no time has there been such a need to be gamekeeper, because the language, the clothes if you like, of the voluntary sector have been lifted and in the process subtly distorted.
The old mantras of ‘bottom-up’, community-led, ‘experts on tap not on top’ are now coming from those at the top. And that’s the problem: it remains a top-down initiated process, demanding that ‘the community’ gets off its backside and participates. (I put ‘the community’ in parentheses because it has become a much bandied about, hackneyed and increasingly de-valued term. It’s become part of the regeneration jargon. Forgive me if I refer instead to ‘local people’, those ordinary individuals who live in a certain area or get together for common purposes-those ‘communities of place and of interest’.) Participation has become something of an end in itself. In the nanny state there is an imperative to get out of bed and be a good citizen (we don’t remind ourselves any more that technically we’re all still subjects). I hear echoes in New Labour of that inimitable phrase of Norman Tebbit’s, ‘on your bike’; now wouldn’t that create a sustainable transport system.
‘The community’ is expected to not only identify its needs (relatively easy), but to prioritise those competing needs for limited resources (not so easy) and then to come up with solutions to those prioritised needs (much harder). Wasn’t it Tony Benn who said if democracy worked, they’d abolish it. Well, we don’t have much experience of participative democracy as opposed to representational democracy, and we all know what people think of that, because they’re voting with their feet. So we’re struggling with participation and the need to be ‘inclusive’, to reach those who were deemed to be ‘hard to reach’ or the hard to hear’ (recently re-badged, I noticed, as ‘the hard to find’; they must be running as fast as they can from the regeneration field).
I’m not very keen either, on the term ‘socially excluded’. It smacks of not being invited to the dinner party and carries with it a certain taint that you’re to blame if you’re not at the table (bad breath maybe, or your views will be too challenging and disturb the chattering classes). And yet we’re oh so compassionate about wanting the views of those who are homeless, experiencing mental breakdown, coping with being a single parent, taking to the bottle or trying to feel normal on drugs. We want to know what they think about the situation they find themselves in (‘give us a home not a park bench’; find me affordable childcare; don’t cross the road to avoid me). We know all that already, or we could make a good guess; no wonder that people say, ‘for God’s sake, not another survey. Don’t ask me again. Do something’. The more talk there is the less seems to happen.
We’ve created a regeneration game. Like children, we spend more time arguing about who’s going to get which part to play than we do getting on with the game itself. Remember when playing the game felt good? The wind in your hair, teamwork, the hot shower afterwards and down the pub to go over the glory moments? Do we ever get to that stage now? Perhaps, after a long slog. Castle Vale comes to mind; there are others. You can all bombard me with emails to remind an old cynic of better days.
At its worst there is a total abdication of civic leadership, at best maybe it’s merely a crisis of confidence on t he part of ‘local authorities’ (sic) after years of being told they were rubbish and deprived of resources. Mike Storey, leader of Liverpool City Council threw down the gauntlet two years ago at the social economy conference at Anfield, ‘Pounds in your Pocket’-some of you were there no doubt. It sounded good. If anywhere can do it differently because it has had to, it’s Liverpool. Of course, you’d rather put the money in local people’s pockets than into some company that’s ultimately owned by some foreign water company. But is it realistic? Do people of any persuasion, whether they’re comfortably off middle class, or struggling with poverty (a word that has fallen out of use, but an honest one. It was good enough for Joseph Rowntree) really want the bother of organising their own recycling, refuse disposal, street sweeping, street lighting; where will it end? We could end up with enclaves of private floodlit guarded ghettos or ones even worse than those abandoned areas we see now. Isn’t the municipal pride of people such as Joseph Chamberlain in turn of the century Birmingham worth emulating today? He said if he could not achieve as an MP what he had as a local councillor, he would resign.
I risk being accused of having become middle aged, middle class and reactionary, if I say that I believe consultation isn’t working, having spent my working life insisting that the ‘end user’ must be involved in determining the shape of things around them that directly impact on their lives. Specifically, as a lapsed landscape architect, I have been encouraging participation in the design and development process, and now as a much despised ‘regeneration consultant’ I have become a generalist, in order to adopt a more holistic approach to environmental, social and economic ills.
Maybe I am becoming jaded by being too far removed from the sharp end. One problem with ‘consultancy’ (sometimes I feel that I am fulfilling that old adage of a consultant who borrows your watch to tell you the time) is that it is time limited; it is helicoptering in for a short period of time to carry out a particular assignment. (George Ferguson, when President of the RIBA, famously said, ‘Consultants are like seagulls: they fly in, crap, and fly out’.) One thing I have learnt-or re-learnt- is the importance of interrogating the brief, not taking your client at face value, asking those seemingly naïve questions, and not making assumptions that what you are told bears any reality to anyone else, other than the person telling you.
Over the last 3 years, the Civic Trust has been running a programme, Neighbourhood Pride; an ambitious programme that set out to do much and that has achieved less in the real world. We thought we could investigate through our projects what works and why: what approaches to consultation and participation, what tools and techniques are effective; what the impact of training/’capacity building’ (quick in drawn breath at that one) on the community has. It has proved much harder to be certain that any of it works. For some people some of the time, it does. It does feel like they are being listened to and not talked at for once. It has been a fun day out and not another tedious meeting. They have picked up the confidence to communicate in a different way: to apply the subtle arts of persuasion and negotiation, instead of making demands in a loud voice; they have learnt to play the game. But the disparity between the commissioning client’s perception of where they are on the good old ladder of participation, and where those in the community think they are, is still shockingly far apart.
Top down has still a long way to go before it meets bottom up; a great deal more flexibility needs to be exercised (think yoga positions). A great deal more clarity needs to be shone on just what it is we are asking ‘the community’ to sign up to; are we asking for their views or are we asking them to take the flack for the decisions we have bottled out of making ourselves? Unless it is crystal clear exactly what role we expect the community to play- and if it is about ‘empowerment’, then there are ‘rights and responsibilities’ that need to be negotiated and understood, and the resources placed at people’s disposal to be able to take real decisions and bear the consequences- then we have not made much progress at all by the government adopting the values of the voluntary sector.
The Civic Trust may wish to disown me and on their behalf I must say that these views reflect none other than the author’s.
7th February 2003
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