Community involvement. What for?

I really must encourage you to spend some time with the snappily titled "Empowering communities to influence local decision making. A systematic review of the evidence" which has just been published. It was commissioned by the Communities and Local Government department in the UK government. It is densely written but not un-readable and buried within its academic prose are some absolutely riveting nuggets.

Now if you have stumbled on this blog because of my posts concerning the RSPCA's media strategy then this may not be the post for you. Call back soon; I'll be criticising another much loved charity. If you are involved in communication for local authorities, housing associations, health services or the myriad other bodies that might be congealed into a local strategic partnership then read on. For you it's going to be (quite) interesting.

The review has looked at a range of ways in which communities have been brought in to influence local decision making. It also looked at ways in which this might have been expected to bring benefits. Then it looked at whether these benefits did in fact accrue.

Quick sidebar. What a good idea it would be to list, when planning a new community engagement strategy for example, all the benefits that we would like our strategy to deliver.

It is the section on community governance that pricked my interest. This looks at projects that aim to involve communities in the governance or management structure of a project (think housing association board or local strategic partnership).

Who benefits?

They said that community governance could bring benefits to up to three areas: to the decisions that are made, to the participants and (or) to the community. I have provided a sophisticated diagram summarising this. Which has appeared to the left here.

Then after a great deal of use of the word Boolean they say that there seem to be four types of community governance in use and that these have different strengths and weaknesses. They bring benefits to some areas but not, necessarily all.

Which type are you?

The four types are organisational proxy, semi-professional, local knowledge or expertise, local representation. Not titles that trip off the tongue but let's briefly go through them.

Organisational proxy is a form of engagement where voluntary groups (or even an organisation representing voluntary groups) sits on a board or partnership to represent the members of a given community (they are their proxies you see). Interestingly the authors struggle to identify any benefits flowing from this model. They also mention that VCS representatives (for so are they named by bureaucrats) often get a reputation as "the usual suspects" and in consequence are sidelined in any case. I certainly recognise this from a number of partnerships I've been involved in. It is devisive and destructive. Just don't do it.

Semi-professional is the model where people from the community are recruited (often in a formal way with an application and interview) to serve on partnerships and boards. Usually it is their personal skills and abilities rather than their community links which get them selected. This model does at least show some benefits to decision making and the individuals involved often benefit from training and skills development. They can't find evidence of benefit to the members of the community though.

Local knowledge is where people from the community are invited to play a role in decision making because they are the experts on the local area. They don't play a role in the final decision though. The authors said about half of the case studies they looked at were this sort of engagement and it is easy to see why: many public bodies prefer to retain decision making for councillors or board members but are happy to provide them with evidence in the form of community views. The report finds that it is usually difficult to see the link to the actual decisions and that very often those taking part recieve little support themselves. So there may be little benefit to decision making and little benefit to the participants. There could be some benefit to the wider community.

This is an interesting area because it should lead to better decision making but mostly doesn't.

Finally local representation is their term for a situation where memebrs of the community take part in decisions and are open and accountable to their community for their decisions. Case studies only got included in this category if they also showed ways in which members of the community were supported and involved in the process as well as having their representatives taking decisions.

It's a big ask in resource terms. It is the only situation they looked at where decision-making, participants and the wider community all benefit. They called it the best for of community empowerment.

In conclusion

I have to say I find simple models like this pretty useful. Every situation is different of course but looking at a new project or an existing scheme or partnership and asking which of the four types it most closely resembles and who benefits from the process could be the first step on to developing better forms of engagemnet and empowerment in your area.