Wednesday 25 November 2009
Climate Change and Democracy
Met with Halina Ward from the Foundation for Sustainable Development and Democracy today which sparked a number of interesting potential collaborations; on a general level it is strange just how cautious the sector is about inhabiting some of the bigger social issues of our time - Urban Forum's work on the community reinvestment act beign a departure from the norm. Increasingly post Every Action Counts, I've been looking at what next, given there simply has to be a push made on the worrying impacts of inevitable climate change. Community action will always quietly get on and do at the local level but it is increasinly untenable that we have a top down or two tier policy that constantly misses them out. The general focus on capacity building the sector as slighlty wayward public sector relations, in order to fulfil targets on individual behaviour change, is a waste of time but there is always the uneasy feleing that this is where money and partnership slide into once the rhetoric fades. My working solution to this at present is to run, as all community groups inevitbaly do, away from such things, I do not need to hear another third sector giant advocate on behalf of the sector that the problem is about poor VCS governance and a lack of leadership - talk about putting the ball in the back of your own net. We need to occupy the higher ground - the state and market has failed, big style, all we have left increasingly, esp if you buy into Tony Gibson's bleak prognistications, is each other, at a very local level, as the emmodiment of associative action. But from there we can as Cameron says, reimagine society, we'll suspend belief on the Tory vision for now, because I see little difference between the parties, all espouse localism. Joining up with the meeting with Halina made me realise I think the way forward is to reclaim the bigger debates about what kind of democracy we want, what kind of economic system can create socially useful outcomes and who can speak with independence and integrity on such things - not the bankers, not the pols, not even the contract led third sector, but in community associative action as the majority presence in civil society - yes we can.
Monday 9 November 2009
A Message to the Planners - Another Sector is Possible!
A Message to the Planners - Another Sector is Possible!
Introduction:
“(The voluntary sector) has developed largely on an unplanned basis. Social policy planning must therefore recognise this, and also recognise the limitations inherent in it. In the future greater political and policy focus on the role and structure of the sector will undoubtedly lead to its closer incorporation into social and economic planning, as is revealed by the new policy support for public service delivery in the sector... (A)t the same time planners must recognise that complete control over voluntary activity never could – or should – be achieved. Voluntary sector organisations will always seek out, and challenge, the gaps and contradictions in state welfare policy; and this capacity for innovation cannot be suppressed”
Pete Alcock - Social Policy in Britain
On the basis of the above quote and overwhelming evidence around us there is clearly an explicit ‘plan’ for the sector; this plan has been fashioned externally and is here to stay. A consensus has evolved and a judgement made that the sector needs to modernise, to change and enter more closely into the running of the country, into social and economic planning. So complete has been the incorporation of the sector into public service delivery over recent years that it is hard to imagine when this was not the case. The one problematic raised here being that control must be tempered to accommodate the essential contrarian nature of the sector that is the hallmark of its ground breaking creativity. However the latter point is by no means a given. In fact it may well be possible to suppress the capacity for innovation precisely by seeking out and implementing a certain kind of change.
At a time of even more considerable change which will sweep through both the voluntary sector and wider society[1] it is questionable whether the recent modernisation has inculcated a resilience that is now needed. Several emerging trends can be discerned of a more fractured civil realm that arguably, is weaker after the implementation of the ‘plan’ than it was before. If this is indeed the case, or even a partial truth, then it demands recognition and a policy response. Rather than superficial commentary on the glass being half full or half empty, the ultimate purpose has to be towards corrective measures, but also it is argued that real change cannot be exhorted from the sidelines but must begin from within the sector itself.
Three interrelating lines of inquiry are explored in this article:
The implications of an external intervention into the sector,
Recent discourses associated with modernisation
The importance of developing an alternative sector-led agenda
Interventions into the sector
Gabriel Chanan (1999) fixed on the central dilemma of “looking at the question through the wrong end of the telescope” with regard to improved community involvement in development schemes, which is readily applicable across the sector as a whole:
“The community exists first; the development scheme is an intervention in it. From local residents’ point of view, therefore, the question would be how to get the development scheme to be involved in the community. However, development schemes are mostly devised from the outside in rather than from the inside out, so the question of involvement initially presents itself from the perspective of intervention”
In a similar fashion policy affecting the voluntary sector is invariably an intervention from which a range of tensions and contradictions follow. The framework, the plan and the parameters are set so the natural instinct for people to transform the world, as Freire (1970) described, has already started and is marked out by a culture that dominates rather than liberates potential. The right to inscribe and prescribe is presumed, underwritten by Parliamentary sovereignty but hopelessly distant from the connection that needs to be made.
At the most fundamental level of identity, even the name of the sector, is subject to revision from outside. Both ‘third sector’ and ‘civil society’ have arisen without dialogue or consultation, the terms simply arrived and became normalised as part of a specific set of discourses around the role and value of the sector. The terminology is both hegemonic and isomorphic; it seeks both to lead public debate and ensure conformity to its cultural norms. However in exactly the same moment that one set of boundaries, both actual and conceptual, are constructed, another set of understandings also arise, that are both subaltern and interstitial (Bhabha 1994 [2]). Those who do not identify with the prevailing definitions will always find ways of articulating difference and this articulation rises up from marginal and ungoverned spaces as a celebration and insistence of human autonomy.
The voluntary sector, to the extent that it is able to resist external planning, is not only bucking the trend, but performing a valuable public service. The truism that dissent protects democracy, whilst most obviously defensive is also highly creative as can be seen by juxtaposing two recent thinkers. Chantal Mouffe (1993) has argued for an agonistic messy pluralism as essential to avoid the slide into authoritarianism, fearing the hollowing out of political debate into managed consensus in recent years parallels the rise of fascism between the wars. This negotiation, contesting and challenging of what is given and what is meant by living in a pluralist society led Amartya Sen (1999) to describe freedom as a creative space for constantly pushing the bounds of development, of what can be aspired to and achieved. Resistance, in this sense, is always fertile.
Recent discourse
Recent discourse around managerialism, capacity building, marketisation and empowerment has driven much thinking around the blueprint for modernization of the sector but in translation each have raised significant dilemmas for the sector, where it becomes possible to question there overall efficacy to fulfill even the externally stated goals of government.
The New Public Management of the 1980s has increased dramatically under New Labour, as evidenced by the proliferation of targets and audit from the centre, now under general attack for failing the public sector (Seddon 2008[3]). However such approaches have long been questioned in the voluntary sector (Cockburn 1977) where it felt that community development and corporate management pulled in different directions. Management gave tighter control over finance and staff; whereas voluntary sector work went outside of the organization, bringing people in, whose needs were less easily bracketed off. Internally the discourse of community capacity building has emerged as central strategy in community change politics, in particular the commitment to skills, technical support and training (Taylor 2003). It parallels the new public management approach, with its belief in externally calibrating value and is critiqued from within the sector for its deficit approach. The ChangeUp programme has built on the conceit that something is lacking in the sector, as distinct from more appreciative inquiry, and that the goal is market driven, with it’s argot of becoming ‘contract ready’ and ‘fit for purpose’.
The view of the voluntary sector as one of many quasi public markets is well established. Contracts, commissioning, procurement, social enterprise, loans and assets are at the forefront of policy however the concern must be that some public goods need to be protected for the wider good of society and a heavily marketised sector is not only more unequal but more fragile since the associative bonds are weakened in favour of competition. A more self confident sector would challenge not adapt to the presentation of state and market as models of perfection and would find supportive arguments to marshal a case in the areas of banking and parliamentary reform.
Finally the discourse around empowerment has arguably served to enervate both the public and voluntary sector. The demise of most Community Empowerment Networks, has greatly reduced the voluntary sector’s capacity to do participative work, but the assertion, by Sir Simon Milton, that “community empowerment is local government’s core business” (DCLG 2007) has not seen significant levels of subsidarity to either town hall or community hall. Leaving aside the fact the empowerment is narrowly prescribed around choices to be made around service delivery, the real deficit may be found in the central / local relationship. The same Sir Simon Milton in an address to Policy Exchange / Localis commented on the new central-local concordat that a “more mature relationship” was required and that “our vision is democratic” but that “there is little point in talking about devolution unless we are prepared to tackle local government finance”. The Operation Black Vote organising slogan that ‘power is never given’ would seem to be bourn out with regard to the lack of substantial shifting of power downwards. Arguably we may look back on this as a missed opportunity as local democracy continues to have ‘a painfully low salience’ (Rao 2000) and more explicit attention to the informal participative skills outside the state, within the voluntary sector, may have enabled more people to participate.
For Paulo Friere (1970), any of the four discourses, and indeed any form of external intervention should be understood as ‘false generosity’ because in seeking to mould and educate, they seek integration into a pre-set system. Whereas what is needed is a transformation led by those on the authentic thinking of those on receiving end. Although rooted in the conditions of 1970s Brazil Friere’s work informed countless adult education and community development work courses and the work of numerous NGO programmes. In his rebuttal of ‘poisonous pedagogy’ we might well find the answers that are missing from the capacity building courses now on offer in the UK voluntary and community sector.
The importance of developing an alternative sector-led agenda
One of the most alarming indictments of voluntary sector modernization has to be the growing inequalities within the sector, a trend that is absolute not relative and which is putting increasing distance between richer and poorer groups. At first sight this finding appears counter intuitive, at a time when more money came into the sector than ever before, most charities got less. Modernization on this reading would appear to be working against itself and generating effects that not only divide the sector but fail to maximize on the investment made. To its credit government has recognized this dilemma as captured below, but whether it can move to a more tempered and balanced intervention is unproven.
‘Not every organisation has grown. NCVO 2007 UK Voluntary Sector Almanac highlights the rapid growth of many large charities and the decline in income of many small or medium sized charities’ (Future Role of 3rd Sector in Economic and Social Regeneration (Treasury & Cabinet Office) 2007 – paragraph 1.1)
An alternative sector-led agenda would need to reverse the tendency to be acted upon rather than taking autonomously directed action. A tripartite view of society is implicit in most social conceptualizations and partnership arrangements. There are three basic sectors – state, market and civil or community, of which the voluntary sector is a subset of the latter. These tectonic plates have moved since World War Two away from the consensus years of Keynesian state intervention (1945 – 1970) to the primacy of neoliberal ideas which became ascendant by the end of the 1970s. When placed next to the state and market, the voluntary sector, even when expanded into the amorphous terms of civil or community is seldom envisioned as an active and equal third party in this tripartite model but rather is caught in the slipstream of both state and market ideologies. The repositioning of state and market call on the ‘other’ sector to ameliorate the stresses emergent from this new market settlement, in particular building up ‘social capital’ (Putnam, 2000) that has hemorrhaged from a more atomized, affluent society. But whilst the voluntary sector is called to action, the isomorphic cultures of state and market generate not only dilemmas but possibly radically inhibit the very action they seek to invoke.
Nikolas Rose saw this inversion at work in field of regeneration in the 1990s:
“Within a rather short period, what began as a language of resistance and critique was transformed, no doubt for the best of motives, into an expert discourse and a professional vocation – community is now something to be programmed… a new way of demarcating a sector for government, a sector whose vectors and forces could be mobilised, enrolled, deployed in novel programmes and techniques which operated through the instrumentalisation of personal allegiances and active responsibilities: government through community…Within this new territory of exclusion, the social logics of welfare bureaucracies are replaced by new logics of competition, market segmentation and service management: the management of misery and misfortune can become, once again, a potentially profitable activity”
This is an intervention of an altogether different order, where desires are managed, filiations corralled, where the voluntary sector realm is moved through. In the words of one London councilor
“The voluntary sector is a lost terminology – there are new and better ways of delivering it” (Scott 2009)
For too long the real importance of the voluntary and community sector has been missed, not as a vehicle for cheaper services but for the contribution it makes to society in its own right. What Rose conjures up is not a shift but the death of the social. The fatalism that this inspires can only be met with by a sense of agency. This reflexive countervailing tendency of the sector signals that another sector is not only possible but always in the making. It is a principle of democratic health alongside the right to free assembly, the right to self-determine one’s own agenda and says one’s truth. This is more than just challenging ‘the gaps and contradictions in state welfare policy’ as the quote at the start of the article usefully identified. We can go much further, by exploring exactly what might be at risk of being ‘suppressed’, venturing beyond the planners iron cage of anodyne instrumentalism, and applaud the assertion of a more profound agency that underpins democratic society.
References
Alcock, P (2008) Social Policy in Britain. Palgrave MacMillan
Bhabha, H.K. (1994) The Location of Culture. Routledge
Chanan, G (1999) Local Community Involvement: A Handbook for Good Practice. European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions
Cockburn, C (1977) the Local State: Management of Cities and People. Pluto Press
Department for Communities and Local Government (2007) An Action Plan for Community Empowerment: Building on success: Communities and Local Government Publications
Friere, P (1970) The Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Penguin
Milton, S (2007) Address to Policy Exchange / Localis 12 September 2007, London
Mouffe, C (1993) The Return of the Radical. Verso
Putnam, R (2000) Bowling Alone. Simon & Schuster
Rao, N (2000) Reviving Local Democracy: New Labour, New Politics? The Policy Press
Rose, N (1996) ‘The death of the social? Re-figuring the territory of government: Economy & Society Volume 25, August 1996 327-256
Scott, M (2009) Unpublished PhD paper on the role of community development in the modernising local government agenda
Seddon, J (2008) Systems Thinking in the Public Sector: Triarchy Press
Sen, A (1999) Development as Freedom. Oxford
Taylor, M (2003) Public Policy in the Community. Palgrave MacMillan
Treasury & Cabinet Office (2007) Future Role of 3rd Sector in Economic and Social Regeneration
[1] Including a general election by summer 2010, the effects of recession and massive public sector cuts whereby the state aided third sector is especially vulnerable, the collapse of the banking system and the potential for redefining financial services and market practice to ensure more socially useful outcomes, a malaise around democracy, civil society and community and a failure to reverse weakening associative bonds and climate change and the pressures to move to a low carbon economy.
[2] “Political empowerment ... comes from posing questions of solidarity and community from the interstitial perspective”
[3] ‘The regime remains obsessed with the unproven, damaging and demoralising doctrine of ‘quasi-markets’, based on an ideology described by Friedman as ‘liberalism’ which has increasingly penetrated the public-sector reform programme… What has this formula produced in practice? Problems with quasi-markets and targets are just the tip of the iceberg. Every public service with which I am familiar has been made worse by the specifications with which they have been obliged to comply… Public-sector morale is at an all-time low’
Introduction:
“(The voluntary sector) has developed largely on an unplanned basis. Social policy planning must therefore recognise this, and also recognise the limitations inherent in it. In the future greater political and policy focus on the role and structure of the sector will undoubtedly lead to its closer incorporation into social and economic planning, as is revealed by the new policy support for public service delivery in the sector... (A)t the same time planners must recognise that complete control over voluntary activity never could – or should – be achieved. Voluntary sector organisations will always seek out, and challenge, the gaps and contradictions in state welfare policy; and this capacity for innovation cannot be suppressed”
Pete Alcock - Social Policy in Britain
On the basis of the above quote and overwhelming evidence around us there is clearly an explicit ‘plan’ for the sector; this plan has been fashioned externally and is here to stay. A consensus has evolved and a judgement made that the sector needs to modernise, to change and enter more closely into the running of the country, into social and economic planning. So complete has been the incorporation of the sector into public service delivery over recent years that it is hard to imagine when this was not the case. The one problematic raised here being that control must be tempered to accommodate the essential contrarian nature of the sector that is the hallmark of its ground breaking creativity. However the latter point is by no means a given. In fact it may well be possible to suppress the capacity for innovation precisely by seeking out and implementing a certain kind of change.
At a time of even more considerable change which will sweep through both the voluntary sector and wider society[1] it is questionable whether the recent modernisation has inculcated a resilience that is now needed. Several emerging trends can be discerned of a more fractured civil realm that arguably, is weaker after the implementation of the ‘plan’ than it was before. If this is indeed the case, or even a partial truth, then it demands recognition and a policy response. Rather than superficial commentary on the glass being half full or half empty, the ultimate purpose has to be towards corrective measures, but also it is argued that real change cannot be exhorted from the sidelines but must begin from within the sector itself.
Three interrelating lines of inquiry are explored in this article:
The implications of an external intervention into the sector,
Recent discourses associated with modernisation
The importance of developing an alternative sector-led agenda
Interventions into the sector
Gabriel Chanan (1999) fixed on the central dilemma of “looking at the question through the wrong end of the telescope” with regard to improved community involvement in development schemes, which is readily applicable across the sector as a whole:
“The community exists first; the development scheme is an intervention in it. From local residents’ point of view, therefore, the question would be how to get the development scheme to be involved in the community. However, development schemes are mostly devised from the outside in rather than from the inside out, so the question of involvement initially presents itself from the perspective of intervention”
In a similar fashion policy affecting the voluntary sector is invariably an intervention from which a range of tensions and contradictions follow. The framework, the plan and the parameters are set so the natural instinct for people to transform the world, as Freire (1970) described, has already started and is marked out by a culture that dominates rather than liberates potential. The right to inscribe and prescribe is presumed, underwritten by Parliamentary sovereignty but hopelessly distant from the connection that needs to be made.
At the most fundamental level of identity, even the name of the sector, is subject to revision from outside. Both ‘third sector’ and ‘civil society’ have arisen without dialogue or consultation, the terms simply arrived and became normalised as part of a specific set of discourses around the role and value of the sector. The terminology is both hegemonic and isomorphic; it seeks both to lead public debate and ensure conformity to its cultural norms. However in exactly the same moment that one set of boundaries, both actual and conceptual, are constructed, another set of understandings also arise, that are both subaltern and interstitial (Bhabha 1994 [2]). Those who do not identify with the prevailing definitions will always find ways of articulating difference and this articulation rises up from marginal and ungoverned spaces as a celebration and insistence of human autonomy.
The voluntary sector, to the extent that it is able to resist external planning, is not only bucking the trend, but performing a valuable public service. The truism that dissent protects democracy, whilst most obviously defensive is also highly creative as can be seen by juxtaposing two recent thinkers. Chantal Mouffe (1993) has argued for an agonistic messy pluralism as essential to avoid the slide into authoritarianism, fearing the hollowing out of political debate into managed consensus in recent years parallels the rise of fascism between the wars. This negotiation, contesting and challenging of what is given and what is meant by living in a pluralist society led Amartya Sen (1999) to describe freedom as a creative space for constantly pushing the bounds of development, of what can be aspired to and achieved. Resistance, in this sense, is always fertile.
Recent discourse
Recent discourse around managerialism, capacity building, marketisation and empowerment has driven much thinking around the blueprint for modernization of the sector but in translation each have raised significant dilemmas for the sector, where it becomes possible to question there overall efficacy to fulfill even the externally stated goals of government.
The New Public Management of the 1980s has increased dramatically under New Labour, as evidenced by the proliferation of targets and audit from the centre, now under general attack for failing the public sector (Seddon 2008[3]). However such approaches have long been questioned in the voluntary sector (Cockburn 1977) where it felt that community development and corporate management pulled in different directions. Management gave tighter control over finance and staff; whereas voluntary sector work went outside of the organization, bringing people in, whose needs were less easily bracketed off. Internally the discourse of community capacity building has emerged as central strategy in community change politics, in particular the commitment to skills, technical support and training (Taylor 2003). It parallels the new public management approach, with its belief in externally calibrating value and is critiqued from within the sector for its deficit approach. The ChangeUp programme has built on the conceit that something is lacking in the sector, as distinct from more appreciative inquiry, and that the goal is market driven, with it’s argot of becoming ‘contract ready’ and ‘fit for purpose’.
The view of the voluntary sector as one of many quasi public markets is well established. Contracts, commissioning, procurement, social enterprise, loans and assets are at the forefront of policy however the concern must be that some public goods need to be protected for the wider good of society and a heavily marketised sector is not only more unequal but more fragile since the associative bonds are weakened in favour of competition. A more self confident sector would challenge not adapt to the presentation of state and market as models of perfection and would find supportive arguments to marshal a case in the areas of banking and parliamentary reform.
Finally the discourse around empowerment has arguably served to enervate both the public and voluntary sector. The demise of most Community Empowerment Networks, has greatly reduced the voluntary sector’s capacity to do participative work, but the assertion, by Sir Simon Milton, that “community empowerment is local government’s core business” (DCLG 2007) has not seen significant levels of subsidarity to either town hall or community hall. Leaving aside the fact the empowerment is narrowly prescribed around choices to be made around service delivery, the real deficit may be found in the central / local relationship. The same Sir Simon Milton in an address to Policy Exchange / Localis commented on the new central-local concordat that a “more mature relationship” was required and that “our vision is democratic” but that “there is little point in talking about devolution unless we are prepared to tackle local government finance”. The Operation Black Vote organising slogan that ‘power is never given’ would seem to be bourn out with regard to the lack of substantial shifting of power downwards. Arguably we may look back on this as a missed opportunity as local democracy continues to have ‘a painfully low salience’ (Rao 2000) and more explicit attention to the informal participative skills outside the state, within the voluntary sector, may have enabled more people to participate.
For Paulo Friere (1970), any of the four discourses, and indeed any form of external intervention should be understood as ‘false generosity’ because in seeking to mould and educate, they seek integration into a pre-set system. Whereas what is needed is a transformation led by those on the authentic thinking of those on receiving end. Although rooted in the conditions of 1970s Brazil Friere’s work informed countless adult education and community development work courses and the work of numerous NGO programmes. In his rebuttal of ‘poisonous pedagogy’ we might well find the answers that are missing from the capacity building courses now on offer in the UK voluntary and community sector.
The importance of developing an alternative sector-led agenda
One of the most alarming indictments of voluntary sector modernization has to be the growing inequalities within the sector, a trend that is absolute not relative and which is putting increasing distance between richer and poorer groups. At first sight this finding appears counter intuitive, at a time when more money came into the sector than ever before, most charities got less. Modernization on this reading would appear to be working against itself and generating effects that not only divide the sector but fail to maximize on the investment made. To its credit government has recognized this dilemma as captured below, but whether it can move to a more tempered and balanced intervention is unproven.
‘Not every organisation has grown. NCVO 2007 UK Voluntary Sector Almanac highlights the rapid growth of many large charities and the decline in income of many small or medium sized charities’ (Future Role of 3rd Sector in Economic and Social Regeneration (Treasury & Cabinet Office) 2007 – paragraph 1.1)
An alternative sector-led agenda would need to reverse the tendency to be acted upon rather than taking autonomously directed action. A tripartite view of society is implicit in most social conceptualizations and partnership arrangements. There are three basic sectors – state, market and civil or community, of which the voluntary sector is a subset of the latter. These tectonic plates have moved since World War Two away from the consensus years of Keynesian state intervention (1945 – 1970) to the primacy of neoliberal ideas which became ascendant by the end of the 1970s. When placed next to the state and market, the voluntary sector, even when expanded into the amorphous terms of civil or community is seldom envisioned as an active and equal third party in this tripartite model but rather is caught in the slipstream of both state and market ideologies. The repositioning of state and market call on the ‘other’ sector to ameliorate the stresses emergent from this new market settlement, in particular building up ‘social capital’ (Putnam, 2000) that has hemorrhaged from a more atomized, affluent society. But whilst the voluntary sector is called to action, the isomorphic cultures of state and market generate not only dilemmas but possibly radically inhibit the very action they seek to invoke.
Nikolas Rose saw this inversion at work in field of regeneration in the 1990s:
“Within a rather short period, what began as a language of resistance and critique was transformed, no doubt for the best of motives, into an expert discourse and a professional vocation – community is now something to be programmed… a new way of demarcating a sector for government, a sector whose vectors and forces could be mobilised, enrolled, deployed in novel programmes and techniques which operated through the instrumentalisation of personal allegiances and active responsibilities: government through community…Within this new territory of exclusion, the social logics of welfare bureaucracies are replaced by new logics of competition, market segmentation and service management: the management of misery and misfortune can become, once again, a potentially profitable activity”
This is an intervention of an altogether different order, where desires are managed, filiations corralled, where the voluntary sector realm is moved through. In the words of one London councilor
“The voluntary sector is a lost terminology – there are new and better ways of delivering it” (Scott 2009)
For too long the real importance of the voluntary and community sector has been missed, not as a vehicle for cheaper services but for the contribution it makes to society in its own right. What Rose conjures up is not a shift but the death of the social. The fatalism that this inspires can only be met with by a sense of agency. This reflexive countervailing tendency of the sector signals that another sector is not only possible but always in the making. It is a principle of democratic health alongside the right to free assembly, the right to self-determine one’s own agenda and says one’s truth. This is more than just challenging ‘the gaps and contradictions in state welfare policy’ as the quote at the start of the article usefully identified. We can go much further, by exploring exactly what might be at risk of being ‘suppressed’, venturing beyond the planners iron cage of anodyne instrumentalism, and applaud the assertion of a more profound agency that underpins democratic society.
References
Alcock, P (2008) Social Policy in Britain. Palgrave MacMillan
Bhabha, H.K. (1994) The Location of Culture. Routledge
Chanan, G (1999) Local Community Involvement: A Handbook for Good Practice. European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions
Cockburn, C (1977) the Local State: Management of Cities and People. Pluto Press
Department for Communities and Local Government (2007) An Action Plan for Community Empowerment: Building on success: Communities and Local Government Publications
Friere, P (1970) The Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Penguin
Milton, S (2007) Address to Policy Exchange / Localis 12 September 2007, London
Mouffe, C (1993) The Return of the Radical. Verso
Putnam, R (2000) Bowling Alone. Simon & Schuster
Rao, N (2000) Reviving Local Democracy: New Labour, New Politics? The Policy Press
Rose, N (1996) ‘The death of the social? Re-figuring the territory of government: Economy & Society Volume 25, August 1996 327-256
Scott, M (2009) Unpublished PhD paper on the role of community development in the modernising local government agenda
Seddon, J (2008) Systems Thinking in the Public Sector: Triarchy Press
Sen, A (1999) Development as Freedom. Oxford
Taylor, M (2003) Public Policy in the Community. Palgrave MacMillan
Treasury & Cabinet Office (2007) Future Role of 3rd Sector in Economic and Social Regeneration
[1] Including a general election by summer 2010, the effects of recession and massive public sector cuts whereby the state aided third sector is especially vulnerable, the collapse of the banking system and the potential for redefining financial services and market practice to ensure more socially useful outcomes, a malaise around democracy, civil society and community and a failure to reverse weakening associative bonds and climate change and the pressures to move to a low carbon economy.
[2] “Political empowerment ... comes from posing questions of solidarity and community from the interstitial perspective”
[3] ‘The regime remains obsessed with the unproven, damaging and demoralising doctrine of ‘quasi-markets’, based on an ideology described by Friedman as ‘liberalism’ which has increasingly penetrated the public-sector reform programme… What has this formula produced in practice? Problems with quasi-markets and targets are just the tip of the iceberg. Every public service with which I am familiar has been made worse by the specifications with which they have been obliged to comply… Public-sector morale is at an all-time low’
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