Neighbourhoods - Will Push come to Nudge?

Posted by Ben Lee NANM Director

The new Government’s commitment to train community organisers in every neighbourhood has been derided by some - the most barbed put-downs often coming from the Right. If delivered however, this presents a massive opportunity. And for those asked to implement this policy it presents a real challenge – how exactly does Government become a ‘community enabler’? That’s been the question in our minds since last Wednesday (also the day of our own conference).

Many of those already involved in community and neighbourhood organising sense an old paradox looming. Governments have already tried on various occassions to facilitate community-led change, but ended up rolling-out top-down ‘programmes’. These put form before function, focusing more on what organisations look like or are called, than what they do. We hope new Ministers heed this and ask civil servants to devise ‘Nudgier’ alternatives to the push/pull levers of legislation, national grant programmes, regulation and guidance.

First let’s not forget how far we have come.

The past few years have seen a major shift in mindset among those running in local public services. Even before the spending crisis, momentum was building around re-designing services to be more intuitive and responsive, empowering and ‘amplifying’ the actions of the public and frontline staff, and enabling citizens to do more to improve our neighbourhoods and help out in our communities. The spending crisis and Total Place simply strengthened the argument that re-designing services around individuals, and working closer with communities is preferable to incremental ‘salami-slicing’.

But translating this change in mindset into changes in practice remains a difficult task for Government, councils, health trusts and other public bodies.

So we urge policy-makers to look outside the traditional municipal sector for alternatives to top down programmes. A growing number of organisations have succeeded as ‘community enablers’. Definitive or exhaustive lists seem pretty pointless, but to give an idea of what we are referring to we mean organisations like Balsall Heath Forum in Birmingham, the Eldonians in Liverpool, Knowle West Media Centre in Bristol, Bradford’s parish and neighbourhood forums, Manton Community Alliance in Nottinghamshire, Community Links in Newham, Castle Vale, Royds Community Association, the Shoreditch Trust in London’s east end, the Goodwin Trust in Hull, Paddington Development Trust, Lairdside Community Trust in the Wirral, and the Beacon Estate in Falmouth. We could easily name more.

These organisations all operate at small geographic scales (a square mile or so in towns, larger in rural areas), with a focus on improving public services and the local area, and with high levels of community participation in governance and day-to-day practical activity. The most important things these organisations do is to promote change and innovation, getting services more responsive to citizen’s needs, and helping local people get involved in issues they care about. Often these outcomes overlap – where volunteer residents report local streetscene problems unnoticed by the council, or where groups of young people create alternative social activities to those offered by the statutory youth services.

So what are the Nudgier alternatives?

Well how about if Government started by investing directly in community organisations which already empower and amplifying citizen activity? Then over time organisations would see an incentive to do the same - good practices would spread by choice instead of prescription (similar to farmers moving over to organic). To do that would require Government to be really clear about what it is trying to achieve. They might highlight - making it easier for residents to influence service decisions, embracing potential volunteers, giving the poorest families more control over their lives, making civic action more fun and exciting, or other things. And the individual officials running the programme would need to be schooled in how community groups work, and how to spot good ones - perhaps they would go on field trips first, or even be recruited from local groups themselves.

And most of all Ministers would have to accept that while it is neat and symmetrical to have community organisations all starting at once, evenly spread across the regions, that might not happen; just because you put money in one place cannot ‘make’ the community do what Government wants. It will take time, as the incentives do their work.