Civic entrepreneurs and local brokers

How to build civic engagement at the neighbourhood level

Department for Communities and Local Government Enquiry Week

15 March 2012

Catherine Durose

Senior Research Fellow, Department of Politics and Public Policy, De Montfort University

cdurose@dmu.ac.uk

Questions

• What needs to be done to encourage/create the space for communities to innovate and tackle problems/ deliver services at the local level?

• How to we enable the management/mitigation of real and perceived risks so that the devolution of power to communities is real?

• What are the preferred frameworks to devolve power to neighbourhoods, create space to innovate and manage real and perceived risks? What is central government’s role? Who needs to do what? What needs to change?

Starting point

• Despite challenging a perceived tide of managerialism in the public sector, current initiatives to encourage the ‘Big Society’ are still:

o Highly bureaucratic

o Taking a ‘one size fits all’ attitude to ‘community’ and ‘neighbourhood’

o Undermining and neglectful of local good practice

o Neglect of the facilitative role of the existing neighbourhood working

• To move forward, need to identify key ‘local brokers’

‘Working’ local governance• Front-line workers are now charged with reconciling the emergent demands of governance – notably communities – with the remnants of local government

• The experience for many at the front-line is one of chaos. But this also presents opportunities for innovation

• Work is:

- driven less by rules and guidance and more by relationships, particularly with key active citizens in the community

- resourced by ‘local knowledge’, their often assumed mundane yet expert understanding of local communities

- essentially on the periphery and in new spaces of local governance, notably the neighbourhood level

Civic entrepreneurialism to local brokeringCivic Entrepreneurialism Example Local Brokering Example

‘Reaching’ Identifying marginalised and excluded groups and signposting them to community resources and service providers

Working with children and young people from asylum-seeking families and economic migrants

Retrenchment to formal structures of community engagement

Identifying community priorities through Community Committees and thematic task groups

‘Enabling’ Building the skills and capacity of marginalised groups to engage with the wider community and interact with service providers

Building social networks and skills with children and young people

Building the skills and capacity of community groups and facilitating their relationships with other communities and voluntary sector groups to act together

Facilitation of Community First

‘Fixing’ Reconciling government objectives, organisational opportunities and community priorities

Tackling health inequalities by addressing financial exclusion

Linking community groups with identified opportunities for funding and support outside the public sector

Tackling crime by addressing environmental concerns

Where now?

• Agenda is trying to run before it can walk in more disadvantaged areas, need for an active local state not just a smaller one

• Need to focus on developing synergies within central government and between central government initiatives and existing local practice

• Active citizens and local brokers are key

• Work with local authorities to identify, network and support these individuals

More on this research

Durose C. (2011) ‘Front-line workers in local governance act as ‘civic entrepreneurs to make order out of chaos for their communities’ British Politics and Policy at the London School of Economics

(http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/category/contributors/catherine-durose/

accessed 15 February 2012)

Durose, C. (2011) ‘Re-visiting Lipsky: front line work in UK local governance’ Political Studies 59(4) 978-995

Durose, C. (2009) ‘Front line workers and “local knowledge”: neighbourhood stories in contemporary UK local governance’ Public Administration 87(1) 35-49

Durose, C. (2007) ‘Beyond “street level bureaucrats”? Re-interpreting the role of front line public sector workers’ Critical Policy Studies 1(2) 196-213