collaboration

How is Austerity Governed in Cities? Our First Reflections on International Findings

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We are pleased to launch a series of 8 further publications outlining the findings from exploratory research the 8 case study cities – Athens, Baltimore, Barcelona, Dublin, Leicester, Melbourne, Montreal, Nantes and Sydney – of the collaborative governance under austerity project, sponsored by the Economic and Social Research Council as part of its Urban Transformations Network. In this initial post, Professor Jonathan Davies provides an overview of the emergent findings from exploratory research across the 8 cases.

In the 1990s and early 2000s, intellectuals, policy makers and activists all became enthused by networks.  They reasoned that at a time of greater prosperity than ever before, conflicts along the lines of class, race and gender could be broken down and a social consensus sustained through trust. Networking could coordinate a public sector fragmented by new public management and foster partnerships across state, market and civil society.  For the most idealistic thinkers, it could transcend social cleavages and usher in a revitalised participatory democracy, overcoming the limitations of market competition and government hierarchies. We use the term “collaborative moment” to capture this wave of excitement about networks, which emerged in the aftermath of communism and waves of neoliberal restructuring.

Is the collaborative moment still with us? The first phase of our research explored this question in eight cities – Athens, Baltimore, Barcelona, Dublin, Leicester, Melbourne, Montreal and Nantes.  We were particularly interested in whether it influences governing philosophies and practices after the 2008 crash, a conjuncture in which many cities face degrees of austerity budgeting with public service and welfare cuts, spiralling fees and charges, privatisation, foreclosures and severe unemployment and poverty. Over the next few weeks, we will post blogs from each of the research teams telling the story of their city, so far. The following paragraphs highlight some key messages.

First, it is clear that austerity bites very unevenly in time and place.  The perceived economic and political significance of the 2008 crisis varies widely. It has far greater impact in European cities than in Baltimore, Melbourne or Montreal. And, while 2008 was a crucial moment for Athens, Barcelona, Dublin and Leicester, it was not in Nantes.  Equally, some cities have been exposed to the full force of the economic crisis and turbo-charging of austerity urbanism, while a sense of business as usual persists in others, albeit with risks and threats on the horizon. Governing strategies differ too, depending for example on local political traditions and the powers and resources (or lack thereof) invested in public institutions at the urban scale. For example, where deficit budgeting has long been strictly prohibited in UK local authorities, it was commonplace in Spain until the austerity regime prohibited it in 2011 and it still is in France.

Concerning our core question about the resonance of the “collaborative moment”, the research shows that cooperation between government, business and civil society organisations remains very important, as has always been the case.  However, the politics of collaboration bear little resemblance to the idealised model of network governance.  It is not that the idealism of network governance has disappeared altogether – it is prominent among local elites in Nantes.  The problem is that even when the ideas retain some influence, they become subsumed in state-centred practices, enmeshed in realpolitik or overtaken by political activism against austerity. For example, we found instances where activists distance themselves from dialogue with the state, questioning its relevance and purpose – notably Barcelona, Dublin and Montreal. So far, our inquiries do not suggest that the “collaborative moment” is a critical theme in the urban politics of 2016.

In the second phase of our research between now and summer 2017, we will take a step back from the immediate questions of austerity and collaboration, developing a broader focus on the urban governance of rolling welfare state crises. We ask how different social actors organise around the multiple waves of dislocation and restructuring, experienced in different ways and at different times in all our cities, since the heyday of welfarism in the 1950s and 60s.  The research will endeavour to show how some strategies and alliances succeed and others fall by the wayside, and draw lessons about the future of urban and local politics.

Jonathan Davies is Principal Investigator on the Austerity and Collaborative Governance Project, as well as Director of CURA and Professor of Critical Policy Studies at De Montfort University

Taking Power Back: Response by Simon Parker

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This post is the latest in the series debating Simon Parker’s recent book ‘Taking Power Back‘. The debate began with an outline by Simon of the main argument of his book, followed by a response by Jonathan Davies and Adrian Bua from CURA. In this post Simon highlights areas where our thoughts overlap and diverge. If you are interested in contributing to the debate further please email adrian.bua@dmu.ac.uk.

The striking thing about Jonathan and Adrian’s article is how much we agree on the fundamentals. We are clear that Britain’s mix of the big central state and free market economics has not delivered on its promises. And I think we broadly agree that a politics of commonism – the creation of a vastly expanded realm of self-help, mutual aid and social enterprise – represents a credible and desirable way to secure social progress in new times.

The challenge I have been posed is less about the ‘what’ and more about the ‘how’. Jonathan and Adrian are right to ask how we get from a world where power and assets are overwhelmingly enclosed by the state and market, to one in which commoning becomes, well, commonplace. They argue that far from encouraging mutual aid, the British state is more often engaged in expanding the reach of profitable activity while simultaneously choking off the social sector through austerity. Is my vision of the creative commons not pure idealism without some sort of struggle against the power of capital?

One of the challenges I face in answering this is that I am deeply suspicious of top down, structural change. I do not have some kind of Marxian revolution in my back pocket. They tend to end badly. Instead, I think commonism will emerge from decentralised trial and error in the real world. But I accept the charge that my bottom-up approach runs slap bang into some very big and ugly vested interests in both the state and the business world. The commons is not the strongest force in society, but where I differ from Jonathan and Adrian is that I think this might already be starting to change.

My first reason for hope is that commoning is already starting to grow in the midst of the very neoliberalism Jonathan and Adrian decry. Take, for instance, the 25% boom in the number of co-ops over the three years from 2010, or the 10% growth in community businesses over 2015. These organisations are generally not old-school charities funded by grants, but organisations which use their community roots and freedom from shareholder demands to develop innovative business models in response to local needs and demands.

My second reason for optimism is the fact that the economy is starting to change in ways which might favour commoning. I am hardly the first person to point to the rise of automation, which has the potential to destroy a vast number of jobs without replacing all of them. This reduction in paid labour is a horror for the old Labour movement, but when you think about it a world with fewer of what David Graeber calls ‘bullshit jobs’ is hardly a bad thing.  Imagine more people, with more free time and vastly cheaper goods and services, searching for more meaning in their lives.

My third reason for hope is that I can already see some of the institutional changes that might help to unlock a world of commonism. The first plank in my agenda is a universal basic income, both to manage the economic consequences of automation and to liberate people to pursue more meaning free from the demands of paid labour. This is the key policy change which would turn a dystopian world of mass unemployment into a world where work became more like play (and the commons is the perfect space to play in).

I think we need a new public service architecture which actively encourages commoning. This means city-level social investment funds which can support the early stages of commons-based organisations, governed by the public, private and commons sectors to ensure that the money flows towards their shared priorities. Local authorities and others need to direct their commissioning to spotting and scaling up the parts of the commons that work best.

My response to the question of how we grow the strength of the commons is to transform the role of government into growing and protecting the realm of mutual aid. This will help to grow a strong and independent domain of community ownership. My answer to austerity is that a smaller state might be a good thing as long as we also have a smaller private sector and much more social activity in-between them. Commonism is not a utopian project, but a practical route through which ordinary people can adapt their lives to a changing economic context.

Simon Parker is director of the New Local Government Network and a leading expert in public policy, public services and government.

Reclaiming Local Democracy: Ines Newman

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In this post Ines Newman describes the argument of her recent book “Reclaiming local democracy: a progressive future for local government“. Ines argues against the market fundamentalism informing the changes in British local government since the 1980’s, outlines an ethical framework to guide decision making by local politicians and argues for a vibrant, and genuine, participatory democracy.

Local government has become increasingly dominated by what George Soros, Joseph Stiglitz and others have called ‘market fundamentalism’. It was Nicholas Ridley (then Environment Secretary with responsibility for local government) who proposed in 1988 that the local state should be an ‘enabler’. Councillors should meet once a year to hand out contracts to the private sector. New Labour furthered this approach, suggesting that ‘community leadership’ and ‘place-shaping’ were the new roles and local authorities should not get distracted by service delivery. This could be left to managers with pressure to perform to targets set by central government. Finally, the Coalition Government has argued that local government should not deliver any services directly but should ‘be excellent and open commissioners of those services which cannot be devolved to individuals and communities.’

In my book, Reclaiming Local Democracy: A progressive future for local government, I argue that the impact of all this has been negative in three ways.   Firstly there is a confused focus on ‘what works’, with limited consideration of the question ‘works for whom?’ The focus is usually on symptoms rather than causes and decision-making is technocratic, concentrating on efficiency and cost.

Secondly, there has been increased marketisation of public services. Michael Sandel has argued that in the USA you can currently buy most things, from prison-cell upgrades to your doctor’s mobile phone number. Market values have come to play a greater and greater role in social life, corroding the way we value public goods, and increasing inequality.

These consequences lead to the third problem:  a growing lack of trust in representative democracy. If decision-making is technocratic and public goods no different from private goods, what is the role of the councillor? ‘Politics’ becomes a dirty word. Instead we are taught to value ‘hard working’ individuals or volunteers, ‘ordinary people’ who do not need public services.

To turn this around, I have argued that local government needs to reignite an interest in political and ethical questions and support participative democracy.

In the book, I draw on political philosophy to argue that local authorities have an obligation to tackle injustice. I develop an ethical framework in the form of a set of eight principles that can be used to interrogate a policy to see if it would shift society from’ how things are ‘to how they ought to be’. The book contains many examples- from fairness commissions to support for new universal free school meals- showing the way local authorities can operationalise these principles.

Localism is a hollow concept. You will always need strong central government to tackle inequality. So the issue is not about devolving minor powers with limited funding. It is about opening up central government to the influence of joint campaigns run by local councillors with their constituents. This would help to reclaim democracy. It requires councillors to promote active citizens and participative democracy and, with their communities, to seek to influence the national agenda, so as to achieve progressive change.

These are profoundly different approaches to local government and have many implications which are discussed further in the book. The enabling council sees its role as ‘smart commissioning’ and reducing cost and in this process undermines an understanding of public goods, community and democracy. The ethical and democratic local authority is focussed outwards, listening to the voices of those who are usually not heard and discussing with their constituents how to make a better world. These processes cement an understanding of citizenship and the common good and make it possible to start to struggle to reclaim local democracy.

Ines Newman is an Honorary Visiting Senior Research Associate at the Department for Politics and Public Policy at DMU and a core member of the CURA team. Ines is a leading expert in local government and public policy and a trustee of the Paddington Development Trust. 

The London Communities Commission: Building Local Capacity

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CURAs Ines Newman writes about the independent London Communities Commission (LCC), which is tasked with looking into how citizens and communities in London’s most deprived areas might be strengthened and supported in these times of austerity.

The LCC was set up in September 2015, with eleven Commissioners from the private, public and voluntary sectors, convened by the Paddington Development Trust and supported by London Funders and City Bridge. Its set up is in response to growing concerns that, without external support and the active engagement of local people, the quality of life there may continue to deteriorate to levels that not only destroy the well-being of tens of thousands of citizens, but pose a threat to the social and economic sustainability of the whole capital.

Local authorities are facing a challenging period with a reduction of central Government grant of 44% in London from 2010-2015. The Spending Review announced further cuts and by the end of this Parliament local authority spending capacity will be lower that of any time since 1948. Not only has this led to a decline in services and under-investment in social housing but research has shown that in areas of greatest need the public sector cuts have led to a decline in bidding for foundation funding and a decline in volunteering. This is because austerity has resulted in a decline in the number of small voluntary and community organisations as well as in a reduction in the capacity of those that survive.

The Commission has highlighted the crucial role of citizens within deprived local London communities. Without local residents being involved in designing the services, which are meant to meet their needs, unsatisfactory solutions will be developed. In this time of austerity, it is essential to draw on potential resources that local communities offer in terms of knowledge, relationships, skills, and their passion and enthusiasm about making a difference to the area in which they live. Citizens are the key assets to healthier social and economic outcomes across London.

With strong leadership, citizens in neighbourhoods can influence new ways of working which not only reduce isolation and ensure access to services but also further develop self-management skills and capacity to increase personal and collective independence. These ways of working can also deal with problems before they become severe: they are the fences on the cliff not the ambulances at the bottom. By identifying and intervening early costs can be saved later. The Commission gathered evidence around new, community-led, ways of working, illustrated in our Report of Evidence. The Commission were excited about these positive initiatives which clearly show how power can be devolved to citizens in areas where there is some sense of belonging and how effective this can be if the devolution is supported by the funders, public, private, and voluntary sector.

However, individual citizens have limited power to change the world. In order to achieve real empowerment, they need to be able to build local support structures through which they can work together and release the value of individual and collective creativity. New citizen-led ways of working also require changes in the way local communities are funded and the terms by which resources get to the acute areas of growing poverty in London.

Commissioning, for example, needs to be radically reconfigured. More than 50 per cent of council spending is on goods and services bought from the private and community and voluntary sectors. Billions of pounds are invested in procurement by councils. In an attempt to save money on commissioning, councils are joining up with other local authorities and contracts are getting bigger and more complex. The result is that only very large organisations have the capacity and financial security to enable them to bid for such contracts. Four major government suppliers – Atos, Capita, G4S and Serco – between them held government contracts worth around £4 billion in 2012-13. The voluntary sector holds only 9 per cent of local contracts by value and 5.6 per cent of central contracts.

The large companies and national voluntary groups who get these contracts sub-contract to smaller voluntary organisation with tight numeric targets on outputs and little money to cover any overheads. Money is paid to the small organisations on results creating cash flow problems and transferring risk. The small organisations have no ability to alter the contract and outputs according to local needs. The funding does not give them the opportunity to build community capacity. They inevitably seek to fulfil their targets by first dealing with cases where they know they can achieve success- picking the low hanging fruit. Those with complex needs are only offered standard services and little time is invested in addressing their needs. Trust and relationships between service providers and those whose needs they are trying to address is broken down.

But commissioning does not need to be like this and there is plenty of evidence of better practice which we discuss in our report. We have amassed a wealth of evidence and are in a position to make recommendations to various bodies and institutions to tackle priority unmet needs and disadvantage in London’s most stressed neighbourhoods. In our recommendations for the Mayoral candidates we suggest that the new Mayor sets out a clear vision and ambition for the future of London to tackle poverty, deprivation, poor health and the increasing polarisation that threatens London’s sustainability. In particular we are recommending that the Mayor, working with the London Boroughs, defines a number of priority areas on the basis of need (Community Action Neighbourhoods). In each neighbourhood, the Mayor would assist the local community in establishing a citizen-led local Joint Action Board (JAB) with partners which would agree the local priority unmet needs together with the actions and outcomes to be achieved over a 5-7 year programme; it would administer, deliver, monitor and be publicly accountable for the programme in a way that ensured the involvement of smaller voluntary organisations. The Mayor would also realise new and imaginative funding mechanisms to support this new approach. Papers for the statutory providers, the corporate sector and the voluntary and community sector itself will follow shortly.

Ines Newman is an Honorary Visiting Senior Research Associate at the Department for Politics and Public Policy at DMU and a core member of the CURA team. Ines is a leading expert in local government and public policy and a trustee of the Paddington Development Trust. Her recent book ‘Reclaiming Local Democracy‘ sets out the principles to inform a progressive future for local government.

 

Taking Power Back: Simon Parker

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We are pleased to launch our book debates series with this blog by Simon Parker. Simon sets out the argument of his recent book ‘Taking Power Back’, where he makes the case for ‘commonism’ – a radical form of democratic decentralisation. Following this post, CURA members Professor Jonathan Davies and Dr Adrian Bua will share their thoughts on Simon’s work, after which Simon will publish a reply to our team’s commentary.

The British state stands poised at a moment of profound change. Caught between the demands of an ageing population and a limited public willingness to pay more tax, public services are under pressure as never before. Institutions from local government to the NHS are finding that their existing models of provision cannot cope with the strain. Something has to give.

Despite our self-image as swashbuckling Anglo-Saxon capitalists, the British are actually fairly statist. Until recently we had a large, highly centralised government machine which we expected to deliver the same outcomes to everyone across the country. We tend to see the world in terms of the market and state, without very much in between. The fact that both of these leviathans have let us down very badly in the recent past explains our national distrust of institutions.

And yet there is something in between state and market – a space for social activity that many people call ‘the commons’. Over the past decade or so we have seen this space being steadily filled by a remarkable flourishing of cooperatives and social enterprises. In my book, Taking Power Back, I argue that this vibrant realm of do-it-yourself social justice is vital to the way we should understand the future of government. We can already see examples of it in action. In my book I describe how initiatives in the UK and beyond such as Occupy Sandy, the extraordinary people-powered disaster relief operation in post-hurricane New York, are building on, and organising, people power to meet their needs and improve lives – without relying on the market or state action

The trends which the World Economic Forum bundles together in its concept of the Fourth Industrial Revolution will turbo-charge the commons over the next decade or two. This is partly because new technology is making it easier than ever to start to up small social organisations. The overhead costs of creating a company are falling, while the potential to create innovative networked business models is rising. The increasing automation of our jobs may create a world in which we spend less time working creating increased opportunities to transfer effort out of the realm of paid work and into the creative sphere of the commons.

It seems entirely credible that the space vacated by a retreating state could be filled at least partially by a surge in the creative commons. I the book I make the case for two very big changes that can facilitate this transition. First, we will need to support the commons by introducing a universal basic income, compensating people for the automation of work and giving them the time to contribute. Second, we need to radically devolve political power so it is closer citizens, giving individuals the opportunities and capacity they need to help build the civic commons in the places where they live.

It is a huge challenge, but the prize is a radical renewal of government and democracy, in Britain and beyond.

Simon Parker is director of the New Local Government Network and a leading expert in public policy, public services and government.