Lessons for Tomorrow’s Communities

We keep hearing that communities must become more collaborative and resilient in dealing with the problems they face.  Successive crises from the global credit crunch to the coronavirus pandemic have piled on the pressure, especially in areas where people are not accustomed to or supported in pulling together to respond to social and economic challenges.

Mere rhetoric won’t change anything.  No one should be under any illusion that political mantra about leaving ‘society’ to take responsibility for its own wellbeing while cutting back the state is little more than a code for letting people slide into greater insecurity and suffering.  

 

If communities are to take on a more influential role in the future, they need to be helped in their development, and that should be guided by informed views of what works and what does not in practice.  There are many important lessons to be learnt from the numerous cases of effective community-based transformation.  We can look at 12 key findings under three categories:

 

How to achieve transformation of socioeconomic relations in communities:

 

[1] Substantial improvements to economic health and social cohesion can be achieved by establishing the legal and financial framework for community-based organisations to develop their assets, facilities and services to respond to local concerns.

[2] Alternative mediums of exchange such as local currencies and time banking can promote an ethos of mutual support in otherwise fragmented communities, as well as increase the overall resources that are retained in the local economy.

[3] Raising the understanding and influence communities have in relation to regeneration initiatives that affect them, can help build an informed consensus on what to prioritise and how to maximise the impact of the available resources.

[4] The development of businesses that are owned and democratically controlled by local people who work in them can, with the help of platform technology, increase the quantity and quality of income-earning opportunities.

 

How to achieve transformation of collaborative behaviour with communities:

 

[5] The distrust and misunderstanding that undermine partnership working between government bodies and community groups can be significantly reduced through the use of inclusive dialogue techniques and shared objective-setting.

[6] Community learning, backed by trained facilitators, can help people explore the real causes of the problems they face, contribute to the formulation of viable solutions, and develop confidence in joint action.

[7] Structural changes to engagement practices that empower communities to get involved as equal partners can increase participation levels, and reduce the likelihood of delays and costly mistakes damaging public projects.

[8] Replacing rigid target-setting and inflexible monitoring by adaptive planning processes and responsive evaluation can help to avoid the wrong goals being pursued, and deliver outcomes that reflect changing needs and circumstances.

 

How to achieve transformation of policy outcomes by communities:

 

[9] The co-production of public services can be strengthened by incentivising service providers through a form of preventive infrastructure to seek input from communities to improve both the public satisfaction with and financial viability of their services.

[10] The adoption of the multi-stakeholder cooperative model can radically transform the health and social care sector to enable the people who provide care and those who need it to work out the optimal service provision.

[11] Tackling food insecurity and related social problems by integrating community interests and contributions into planning and management arrangements can secure more effective outcomes and enhanced dignity for the communities concerned.

[12] Environmental challenges can be better met when communities are actively involved in awareness raising, option evaluation and selection, and impact monitoring in matters such as neighbourhood designs, energy, transport and air quality.

 

Anyone interested in learning more will find detailed analyses and recommendations set out in the book, Tomorrow’s Communities: lessons for community-based transformation in the age of global crises: https://policy.bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/tomorrows-communities

Can Rights Go Wrong?

Invoking rights to champion a cause is a popular approach because it strikes a firm tone – declaring that the rights in question must be respected unconditionally.  To assert a right is to be like a judge banging the gavel – it is the end of discussion.  Case closed, except of course it isn’t.

 

Rights are not metaphysical entities that a few bright Platonic minds can grasp and anyone not recognising them have only got their intellectual limitations to blame.  They are signifiers of legal, political, and/or moral agreement that prevails in a given society.  Claims such as ‘no one in this country should be tortured’, or ‘every citizen should be supported in overcoming poor health’, may have varying degrees of moral backing amongst the general public, embedded in the political culture in some nation but not others, and translated into legal commitments with different specific implications.

 

If the basis for determining rights is ignored, then the invocation if rights can easily become an arbitrary exercise.  Once we discard as irrelevant what legal, political, or moral consensus there actually is, then ‘rights’ cease to be anchored to social reality.  Different people can insist they have a right to this or that, and interpret what they can expect from having that right in any way they wish without reference to any process or arrangement that exists outside their own mind.

 

Many people who use the language of rights in aid of compassion, justice, or fairness are suspicious of demands to unpack the basis of the rights they claim.  They think their case might get diluted if they engage with what agreement there really is in terms of current legal, political, and moral expectations.  They want to block off any challenge by hoisting the banner of ‘rights’.  

 

But if that is the position they want to keep to, it also opens the door for other people (who care little for compassion, justice, or fairness) to invoke rights in a similarly absolutist way.  These people will firmly claim, for example, that they have a right to hire and fire workers without any intervention from anyone else; they have a right to say what they like even if others regard it as spreading lies and hatred; they have a right to do business in any way they wish irrespective of the concerns of ‘do-gooders’; they have a right to live in a neighbourhood of their own ‘kind’; or they have a right to treat their own children as they see fit no matter how vile or cruel others may consider that treatment.

 

Ultimately, rights are not absolute licences that can be plucked out of metaphysical thin air and deployed to secure whatever someone wants.  Rights have to be justified, their implications have to be assessed, and what is to be granted as entitlements needs to be formulated with care.  To differentiate rights that ought to be safeguarded from rights that are asserted without legitimate foundations, we have to go beyond the surface language of rights and consider the legal, political, and moral positions that exist in society.  Rather than holding up ‘rights’ as some immutable shield against critical discussions, we should recognise the reality in which we need to persuade, challenge, campaign for the changing of attitudes and arrangements to further what we can obtain wider agreement in advancing the values we share.