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Cultural Diversity and Collaboration in Dandenong, Melbourne.

March 22, 2017March 22, 2017abuaro01

Helen Sullivan, Hayley Henderson and Brendan Gleeson report on findings from a second round of research in Melbourne carried out as part of our collaborative governance under austerity project, sponsored by the Economic and Social Research Council as part of its Urban Transformations Network.

Our selection of Dandenong as the site of our Melbourne case study reflects our concern with the long term impacts of economic restructuring on a locality reliant on manufacturing and with significant levels of disadvantage amongst its communities. The ‘Revitalising Central Dandenong’ program was a state led attempt to intervene in this process, through physical, economic and social development. Our research undertaken more than a decade on from this program, examines how Dandenong is faring post the 2008 financial crisis and its likely resilience to further economic instability and welfare reform. We have examined the ways in which social forces are configured in the locality and with what effect. In particular, our focus has been on the different forms of collaboration that exist in relation to the revitalisation process.

Our study of how different actors have become involved and interrelated in Dandenong’s urban revitalisation process led us to uncover many details about the evolving landscape of collaboration in urban governance. We discovered how changes to government administrations affected the resilience of collaborative structures through shifts in funding but also, and more importantly, through political and policy repriotisation. We gained greater insight into how different levels and areas of government interact and we observed how collaboration between tiers of government and across sectors relies heavily on informal and personal interactions. Some of these findings may have been expected by those familiar with governance practices locally, and they are certainly in keeping with the relevant literature.

What we didn’t know at the outset but which has stood out stubbornly throughout the study is the way that cultural diversity acts as a centrepiece for collaboration and revitalisation and plays a major role in the configuration and mobilisation of resources and actors: Dandenong is a community defined by its capacity to absorb, accept and integrate different waves of migrants, and this strength has been capitalised on in local practices of urban governance. Cultural diversity may be typical of many Australian cities since World War Two, where scholarship has long noted the dynamism, fluidity and positivity of new cultural inflows within expansive urbanisation. There is, of course, no reason to suppose that such relations hold true forever, and we are mindful that in recent years news urban cultural tensions have emerged around Islam and asylum seeking communities.

But, in what ways is cultural diversity supported and perceived to succeed in the Dandenong case?

And how is this made use of in collaborative modes of governance for urban revitalisation?

Some observations from our empirical work. The main pillar that supports cultural diversity and what in turn enables it to be used as a backbone for collaboration in urban revitalisation is widespread validation of multiculturalism in the community, by businesses and government. Both State and local government policies embrace cultural diversity. As explained by a local government representative, “diversity is not seen as a threat; it’s a great thing and we want to praise it and celebrate it and remove any stigma of it: it is a very clear message.” This validation of cultural diversity is translated into action through government-funded services that support integration, for example from settlement services, English language classes, libraries with specific programs, services and resources, police training (i.e. through multicultural liaison officers), targeted anti-racism or domestic violence campaigns and programs, a general public education and health services. The business community sees cultural diversity as important in offering and sustaining a diverse and resilient retail market. The community sector values cultural diversity in Dandenong as an element of community building. For example, a representative from the local interfaith network described Dandenong as a place where there is “freedom to go wherever you want” and you will find “diversity and cohesion” with “no fear,” only an “openness, trust and invitation” to interact. People are very proud of the diversity and want to preserve it. They see it as healthy.” We encountered these sentiments repeatedly.

Before the revitalisation process began in 2005, Dandenong already had a culturally diverse community. As a local government representative explained, “…diversity is not something that exists in pockets (in Dandenong). It is a piece of margarine that’s spread across the entire geographic area of the municipality.” The scholar Michele Lobo commented from her own work in 2010 that this ‘everyday multiculturalism’ in Dandenong “provides the potential to blur fixed ethnic boundaries and contribute to interethnic understanding and a sense of belonging”. For many people we interviewed, the existing geographic mixing in neighbourhoods of cultural groups provided a basis for mutual understanding and acceptance of difference. As related to us by representatives from the State government’s lead renewal agency, the urban revitalisation process “built off the success of the cultural diversity” (local government representative) to change perceptions about Dandenong from a place suffering economic decline to be seen as “a multicultural mecca”. A State planning manager explained:

… I think it comes back to that point of understanding what the essence of the place is…you could see 27 cultures that worked together regularly and respect one another. It’s the cultures and the background that those communities bring that makes it a unique place. And that’s what actually creates the outcomes.

It is from this basis that the strategy for revitalisation and ‘place-making’ drew on cultural diversity as a theme, according to a representative from the renewal agency, to “give people a voice, engender pride in place and enable businesses to succeed.”

Food emerged as a central theme for understanding how cultural diversity was used as a basis for collaboration and also for revitalisation during the period of our observation. First, it is used by government as a medium to bring people of different cultures together, support interaction and build understanding. “If you make some flat bread, you all get sit around and talk. And so, we’ve used it as a mechanism of engagement. In other words, food is recognised as a…social unifier to bring together” (local government representative). Next, it is also used as a way to respond to social needs in diverse communities and provide a link between government, non-government organisations and people in the community, for example through organised food alliances. Lastly, food has been used in place ‘marketing’ and in creating and growing a local tourism industry through collaboration between the local, State Governments and different cultural groups, creating places that offer specific cultural precincts or activities, such as the Afghan Bazaar or Little India. These public realm assets act both as familiar sites for gathering by cultural groups and draw in other members of the public:

“…not only are they fantastic from a social cohesion point of view, they’re also destination drivers to Dandenong…to celebrate the diversity of the place, the diversity of the food offering” (past Place Manager, State Government renewal agency).

In turn, the success experienced by migrants in business, from food, retail and commercial activities such as land development, contributes to local economic prosperity and community cohesion in Dandenong. From this basis of strong integration, cultural groups are increasingly well organised and able to influence urban policy through political means. For example, specific traders or community groups have flourished and are able to influence local policy through “advocacy, lobby and engagement” (local government representative). “They’ve grouped up and they have a strength that was unimagined in the 1980s when the Indo-Chinese groups came. By grouping up, they have developed a voice in the community” (local Federal Member of Parliament). Another feature of government that reflects the success of multiculturalism locally is the diversity in local political representation. For example, at the local level “Dandenong has had in the last five years a Buddhist mayor, a Muslim mayor, a Jewish mayor, a Christian mayor, and an atheist mayor.” A notable theme emerging from the Dandenong case study is of multi-cultural fluidity and peaceful co-existence. Whilst the degree of inter-community integration, however, remains an open question, it does appear that public programs and civic structures have allowed for and encouraged socio-spatial co-existence and formal dialogue. We note, however, new strains in social discourse, in Dandenong and more widely in urban Australia, around Islam and asylum seekers.

Overall, a recipe for different modes of collaboration between actors has emerged in Dandenong that rests on the particular value of cultural diversity. Beginning from a position of widespread support for multiculturalism and mutual understanding in the community linked to the distinctive morphology and socio-ethnic functioning of the city, multiple forms of engagement and collaboration between actors is an important part of the revitalisation effort in Dandenong. These have included collaboration between government and non-government actors in the design of cultural precincts, as well as in the evolution of political action led by cultural groups to influence the trajectory of urban policy. Our research suggests that not only has cultural diversity been a useful theme for collaborative efforts in urban revitalisation, but that the recognition of cultural diversity and the different forms of collaboration that exist have supported an inclusive and culturally responsive form of urban revitalisation.

Helen Sullivan is Professor and Director of the Crawford School of Public Policy at the Australian National University.

Hayley Henderson is a PhD candidate in Urban Planning at the University of Melbourne.

Brendan Gleeson is Professor of Urban Policy Studies and Director of the Sustainable Society Institute at the University of Melbourne.

The Logic and Practices of Austerity Governance in Dublin

March 16, 2017abuaro01

This post outlines the main findings from the second round of research carried out by Dr Niamh Gaynor and Ms Nessa Ní Chasaide in Dublin as part of the Collaborative Governance under Austerity project. It forms part of a second series of eight blogs from the covering the comparator cities in the project.

Dublin has often been hailed as ‘the poster child of Europe’ for its discipline and compliance in managing austerity. The Irish Finance Minister’s repeated mantra that ‘Ireland is not Greece’ serves to reinforce this image of social cohesion and stability so crucial to the attraction of foreign investment. With property prices rising once again in the city and investors returning, there is much talk these days of economic recovery and growth.

However, as my previous post highlighted, this narrative masks the more complex and variegated experiences across the city. In that post I outlined the socio-economic, administrative and political impacts of austerity throughout the city – the ‘what’ of austerity. In this post I would like to turn to the ‘how’ of this – the logic and the practices employed in governing Dublin’s communities and neighbourhoods in such challenging times.

The logic

Austerity governance in Dublin, as in many cities worldwide, is underpinned by a strong orientation to ‘the market’. This manifests in two principal ways. The first is the close relationship between property developers and city officials. As the housing crisis escalates – a 117 per cent increase in homeless children last year alone – many properties lie vacant and unused across the city with no pressure on owners to sell them on. Any proposals to tax vacant properties are reported to have met with strong resistance from council and national officials. Indeed, in a recent (January 2017) response to a parliamentary question on council powers to tax vacant sites, the Minister for Housing stressed that no tax be imposed ‘in order to help alleviate the financial burden faced by owners of vacant sites’. This is in marked contrast to Barcelona where the council introduced legislation to fine banks that keep empty houses on their books. In addition, spiralling rents are pushing many residents in the rental market out onto the streets as efforts to introduce rent controls are consistently blocked. With little or no control over housing costs, many can no longer afford to live in the city.

The second manifestation of the city’s market fetish is the adherence to market-based solutions in service provision, including housing, water and refuse. According to the long-awaited Housing Strategy, the city’s housing crisis – the product of failed public-private partnerships where developers reneged on contracts following the crash in 2008 – is to be addressed by more public private partnerships as the City Council is not permitted to build houses itself. The city’s aging water infrastructure was to be tackled by a new company established in 2013 called ‘Irish Water’. The fiasco surrounding this – cronyism on the board, over Euro 50 million awarded in consultant fees; widespread confusion over changes to charges; widespread billing errors; and a lack of accountability for the ensuing chaos – led to a general election in early 2016 and, over a year on, it remains unclear to date how the botched water privatisation is to be resolved. It seems little or nothing has been learned from past experiences. The privatisation of waste collection across the city over the past decade, resulting in a chaotic service for residents and eroded working conditions for staff, has already offered valuable lessons on the subject of market-based approaches.

The practices

Our research has uncovered four principal practices of austerity governance. The first concerns control over information particularly and the overall narrative more generally. The dearth of systematic information available on both the impacts of the spending cuts and their spatial and sectoral breakdown has been noted by many research participants, including city councillors. Indeed, one of our respondents (a councillor) reported that his request for a breakdown on spending cuts was denied on the grounds that resources were not available to carry out this additional work. The annual council budget meeting in 2016, which we observed as part of the fieldwork, began with an announcement that the overall figure councillors were being asked to debate and vote on had now changed. The meeting collapsed into disarray as it became clear that some councillors had been appraised of this development while others had not. While these information gaps could be benignly interpreted as symptoms of a poorly organised system, the dearth of systematic socio-economic data cannot. Systematic cuts in central government funding to key research institutes from 2007 forward has left the city bereft of important socio-economic data – most particularly relating to the impacts of austerity policies in specific neighbourhoods.

The second facet of austerity governance in Dublin is the erosion of power and continued de-legitimisation of local authorities. Despite much talk of local government reform and the renewal of local accountability and democracy, the hollowing out of local government continues apace with cuts to the city council of between 20 and 25 per cent reported to affect principally services and personnel at the coalface. The result is an ageing and somewhat demoralised workforce. While recruitment is reported to have recommenced, local community based personnel report that this remains limited to more senior, centralised positions.

The third practice mirrors findings reported from Leicester in relation to the reconfiguration of civil society. The narrative and climate of austerity has accelerated the state’s process of cutting, shaping and disciplining publicly funded civil society organisations. As a number of our respondents note, the 38 per cent cuts in funding to community and voluntary sector organisations primarily affected small, community-based groups with strong linkages within their communities. Moreover, funding has become restricted to service provision and training only, and important research and advocacy functions now secure no state support. As one state official noted ‘we’re funding groups to deliver frontline services in the main, not to be there with megaphones leading…’. And, as respondents from surviving civic groups note, this has narrowed if not closed important spaces for critique and dissent within local communities.

This reconfiguration and reshaping of civil society extends to a fourth practice which aims at (re)constructing citizen-subjects as responsible, dutiful and ‘active’ citizens diligently working in a voluntary capacity within their local communities to plug the gaps arising from austerity cuts. An intolerance of public questioning and dissent has long been a feature of social life in the city. While the reasons for this are clearly complex and diverse (ranging from the historical legacy of a particularly bitter and divisive civil war in the 1920s; the strong influence of the Catholic church and its privileging of conservatism and consensus; the prevalence of clientelist politics at local levels; the lack of sharp left-right political divisions; and the relative weakness -or co-option- of the trade union movement), the homogenous branding of all activists mobilising against austerity policies as ‘unpatriotic’ and ‘violent’ has exacerbated this trend.

Reactions

While the logic and practices of austerity governance in Dublin certainly resonate with those of other cities grappling with similar crises of welfareism, the various and diverse public reactions to them perhaps highlight some particularities. While the official discourse promotes images of a dutiful and compliant public, our research has uncovered a range of mechanisms of resistance – from traditional protest to innovative, social media driven acts of solidarity and support – taking place across the city. Possibly the most significant factor in these is the range and number of ‘new’ activists of all forms, together with the multiplicity of tactics and techniques they employ – many of which fall under the radar of those focusing narrowly on the more traditional model of ‘angry protestors’. Although this resistance is rooted in the city’s working classes, many of these new activists are middle class and female, reflecting both the broad-based impacts of austerity and its highly gendered nature. While much of their efforts are either miss-represented or not reported at all, they have been and continue to be highly effective. The privatisation of water services has been effectively abandoned and the housing crisis – surely a misnomer as the quality and affordability of housing in the capital has long been an issue – has become the number one political issue (notwithstanding that the various proposals and strategies to address this remain ambiguous and unclear). And although there are attempts by some left-wing parties to channel these ‘new’ activists into formal politics, our respondents report that many prefer alternative political avenues in their quest for social justice.

As Dublin’s ‘water wars’ have demonstrated, hegemonies are never victorious. They are always contested and contestable and subject to change. Pressures to reverse the severe damage of ongoing austerity policies and to build a more equitable city may well come from outside rather than inside the formal governance system.[i] Therefore, a more systematic, honest and open form of state engagement (with disaffected, yet innovative and determined citizens and communities) may well be what is needed.

Dr Niamh Gaynor is Senior Lecturer in Development Studies at Dublin City University. Nessa Ní Chasaide is an independent researcher and Research Assistant for this phase of the research.

[i] Austerity in Dublin is far from over. In his last budget, the Finance Minister announced that government debt is to be reduced from its current target of 74 per cent of GDP to 45 percent over the next 10 years. There is no way to achieve this other than through more austerity cuts

Transforming Barcelona’s Urban Model? Limits and potentials for radical change under a radical left government

March 15, 2017abuaro01

Ismael Blanco, Yunailis Salazar and Iolanda Bianchi report on findings from a second round of research in Barcelona carried out as part of the collaborative governance under austerity project, sponsored by the Economic and Social Research Council as part of its Urban Transformations Network.

The multidimensional and multi-scalar crisis of 2008 has placed considerable strain on the so-called Barcelona model. As observed in the exploratory phase of our research, public-community and public-private collaboration have traditionally been fundamental characteristics of this model since the restoration of democracy. On the one hand, the City Council has promoted an active role for social and community organisations in policymaking through a myriad of formal mechanisms of citizen participation, different formulae of public-community collaboration and the community management of public facilities and spaces. On the other hand, the city’s model of governance has been complemented by different public-private partnerships for the joint management of public services, urban regeneration, tourism development, and the attraction of financial capital. These kind of collaborative arrangements have been heavily criticised for different reasons, including the tokenistic character of participatory mechanisms and the capture of key public policies by economic elites.

The exploratory phase of our research was developed in the first year of the Barcelona en Comú government, the citizen platform emerged from social movements that won the municipal elections in 2015. In that phase, we already detected a strong ambition of the new government to promote radical changes in power relations in the city. In the second phase, the key question has been the feasibility and the capacity of the new government to lead and to execute such changes in public-private and public-community relations.

In both phases of research, our respondents agreed that this is a different crisis from previous ones in the 80s and 90s in the sense that this is deemed a structural crisis with characteristics of an epochal change. In the words of one of the interviewees:

‘This crisis marks a before and after for many people, in their perception of the economic system in which we live and of the democratic system, the politics that we have lived. In the past, there had not been such emotional, ideological and almost psychological impact over the city’.

The crisis has generated three main types of political responses in the whole country, according to another respondent:

Separatism: a political response led by a complex and contradictory coalition between a plurality of social and political organisations in Catalonia claiming the ‘right to decide’ and the independence from the Spanish State.
Left radicalism: a multi-scalar and spatially variable coalition between old and new social and political subjects emerging from the anti-austerity mobilizations and the 15M movement and rooted in the municipal tradition of the alternative left.
Conservatism: a pro-establishment coalition between the big national parties (PP and PSOE) and Ciudadanos (a key piece to offset the emergence of Podemos).

Barcelona en Comú embodies the new, alternative radical left in the city of Barcelona. The increase in urban segregation, social inequalities and social exclusion as a result of the crisis and of austerity policies are amongst the main concerns of this political platform. Consequently, one the of the main measures taken in the first months of the Barcelona en Comú’s government has been an Emergency Plan focused on four main aspects: 1) Employment and Model of Production, 2) Basic Social Rights, 3) Public-Private Relations and 4) Regulation of the City Hall and of their members’ privileges. In this plan, the new government outlines the fundamental characteristics of a New Municipalism based on the notion of the commons as an alternative to urban neoliberalism. Citizens and social movements express high expectations on the possibilities of the new city government to reverse neoliberal policies, transforming public-private relations, and fostering the logics of the commons against the privatization and the commodification of the city.

Two factors favor the room of maneuver of the new government: first, the special powers granted by the Municipal Charter (which, for instance, allows the City Council of Barcelona to play an important role in policy fields like welfare and education); and, second, the good financial situation of the City Council, which has accumulated several surpluses despite the severity of the crisis. However, local government powers are significantly limited by different recentralisation measures adopted by the Spanish Government like the restriction to staff recruitment, as well as by the lack of key competencies in areas like tourism, employment, housing, refugees, energy and public procurement. As expressed in one of the interviews:

‘The tools are very tiny and the expectations are great. How can the City Council of a city that is globally located on the map of the relevant cities in the world, which attracts migratory flows, capital flows… how can it manage a power that it does not have? The City Council does not have the power of the city. It is a very small portion of power. In fact, even in the fight against the hardest forms of poverty, we have serious limitations. There are several elements that escape the capacity of the City Council’.

Another important factor to bear in mind when considering the limits of the new government is the lack of a wide majority in the City Council, which obliges it to reach political agreements with the opposition forces to pass such important measures as the municipal budgets. One year after the municipal elections, Barcelona and Comú reached an agreement with the Socialist Party (the party that ruled the city between 1979 and 2011) to enter the government with its 4 councillors, an agreement that generated strong contradictions between different segments of the radical left.

In spite of these limitations, the new government has implemented important measures to address the problem of mass tourism and its consequences for the quality of life for the city’s inhabitants, such as: a) the suspension of licenses to open public audience premises (pubs, restaurants, discotheques…) in the neighbourhoods with the largest number of tourists; the pass-by of the PEUAT (Special Tourist Accommodation Plan), which amongst other aspects, establishes a zero-growth policy of tourist accommodation and the re-balance of tourist accommodation all-across the city; the application of sanctions to the website Airbnb for offering illegal flats (close to 40% of its total offer in Barcelona), which are considered to have contributed – together with other causes – to the rise of rental prices and to processes of gentrification and touristification. In addition, and related to the housing problem, the City Council has imposed fines on the banks that maintain vacant dwellings after evictions.

As part of a strategy of transformation of economic power relations, the City Council has developed a Social public procurement guide that promotes new social criteria for public procurement in areas such as: social rights (i.e. gender equality, universal accessibility and recruitment of workers with disabilities); workers’ rights (i.e. fair wages and stable workforce); the promotion of a new cooperative and social economic model; and social participation. Such policy aims at expanding the range of companies able to take part in public tendering processes, diminishing the competitive advantage of big companies and promoting “sustainable and inclusive growth”. One of the recent episodes reflecting the limits of local autonomy is the attempt of the local government to include an “anti-energy poverty clause” as part of the criteria for the allocation of the City Council’ services of energy and telecomunications, a clasue that has been suspended by the Tribunal for Public Procurement of Catalonia. Other on-going measures in this field include attemps to reverse processes of privatisation of public services initiated by the former conservative government of CiU (2011-2015) through the re-municipalisation of services such as water and nurseries.

Regarding public-community relationships, the local government expresses a strong commitment with the enhancement of direct citizen participation in policymaking. The new government of Barcelona en Comú has popularised the concept of (policy) coproduction, a key notion that reflects the will to outweigh the traditional approach to citizen participation – deemed merely informative, consultative, bureaucratised, and tokenistic. Measures adopted in this field include a series of on-going reforms in existing participative rules, structures and processes and a new regulation for the community management of public facilities and spaces. Moreover, the new government places a strong emphasis on the notion of the commons as self-governing practices complementary to public institutions.

It is too early to reach conclusions on the impact of reforms promoted by the government of Barcelona en Comú, which has ruled the city by less than 2 years. The rigidities of local bureaucracy, the lack of a solid majority, the lack of powers in key policy areas, the global scope of the economic and financial flows, as well as the strong pressures by the mass media and the economic elites, amongst other factors, impose strong limits to the autonomy of local government and to its ability to promote radical changes. The incremental (and sometimes erratic) changes that this government is promoting in fields like tourism, housing and public procurement, among others, reflect an ambitious agenda of transformation of power relations with specific and tangible results in the city’s life. Beyond the city itself, the experience of Barcelona symbolises the will and the possibility of building a counter-hegemonic political project from the bottom, with strong potential impact at national and transnational level.

Dr Ismael Blanco is Lecturer at the Department of Political Science and Public Law and Research Fellow at the Institute of Government and Public Policy (IGOP) at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB)

Yunailis Salazar holds a Degree in Political Science by the Central University of Venezuela and a Masters Degree in Social Policy and Community Action from the Autonomous University of Barcelona. She is a Research Fellow at the IGOP, UAB.

Iolanda Bianchi is a PhD Student at the UAB and the Univeristy IUAV of Venice. Iolanda holds a MSc in Urban Regeneration from the University College of London. She is a Research Fellow at the IGOP, UAB.

Austerity Leicester: Between Revitalisation, Retrenchment and Resistance

March 3, 2017March 14, 2017abuaro01

Professor Jonathan Davies reports on findings from a second round of research in Leicester carried out as part of the collaborative governance under austerity project, sponsored by the Economic and Social Research Council as part of its Urban Transformations Network.

Leicester is a revitalised city. Since I began working at De Montfort University in 2011, the centre has been transformed, with new developments continuing apace. Two great unexpected dividends – the discovery in 2012 of the remains of Richard III and Leicester City winning the Premier League in 2016 – gave the city a huge cultural and economic boost. Our urban campus at DMU has contributed by growing student numbers and transforming its own environment in a way that complements and extends city centre revitalisation. Leicester rightly prides itself on its ethnic super-diversity, and makes full use of the economic potentialities in branding the city. As the City Mayor, Sir Peter Soulsby put it in a public lecture recently, Leicester is well on the way to getting over its “collective inferiority complex”. Economic revitalization is deeply enmeshed with this sense of an urban cultural renaissance.

The juxtaposition of revitalized Leicester with austerity is not, however, a comfortable one. From the City’s point of view, there is not much local government can do in the current national climate than deliver the cuts, preserve services where possible and mitigate the most devastating effects of welfare reform. Development is about trying to grow quality job vacancies in the city and ensure, as far as possible, that local people are up-skilled to fill them. Most of our respondents support this approach, though anti-austerity activists see an up-market city centre as intensifying the marginality of working class neighbourhood-dwellers, deprived of the resources to enjoy it. But, even staunch supporters of the Mayoral strategy know that revitalisation cannot compensate the privations of austerity in full. In my last posting, I discussed the devastating impact of welfare reform under austerity upon thousands of Leicester citizens. Social suffering – homelessness, unemployment income poverty, malnutrition, ill-health and destitution – are indelible features of the austerity landscape. These grim consequences have been recorded and studied in depth by other researchers, for example Hirsch, Padley and Valdez.

Our focus here is on the implications of austerity for the governance of cities. Despite endless government rhetoric about “localism”, which started over a decade ago under New Labour, our research suggests that local governing capacity is very limited. This is in large part to do with drastic budget cuts and the ongoing devolution of local government finance. It is also partly to do with the enduring culture of central government meddling in local politics, reflected ironically in the chaos around so-called “devolution deals” (see Adrian Bua’s reflections elsewhere on this blog). Continuous churn in the names, functions and territories of local institutions and offices is difficult even for politically active citizens to understand. Fragmented, complex and unstable governing landscapes are one factor alienating people from politics. Hence, shrinking local government does not mean the state disappears. On the contrary, if you claim benefits the state, in the guise of the local offices of the Department of Work and Pensions, controls the way you live, under threat of sanction. Our research suggests that this overwhelming control, which affects thousands of people, can in and of itself sap civic life by stealing time and head-space. The capacity to be neighbourly, to volunteer or engage in politics is curtailed by “workfare”.

So, the key governance problem to which we want to draw attention in this blog is how the state is reorganising itself under austerity and, in the process, disorganising elements of local civil society: the locally based voluntary and community organisations that provided citizens with a voice in the corridors of power, or a service. To put it provocatively, the reorganisation of the state fragments local civil society in a way that compounds the injustices of austerity. We do not have space to map processes of “disorganisation through re-organisation” in any depth here. There are many of them and they will be discussed in detail in future postings. But, in addition to the community-sapping rigours of “workfare”, swathes of the voluntary sector have been wiped out by cuts, decimating government-civil society networks that once supported the welfare state and denying a voice to some of the communities worst affected by austerity. Grants have mostly disappeared, while contract funding for remaining local organisations is sparse, short term, competitive and bureaucratic. This situation has important implications for the governance of multiculturalism. The local authority used to fund several Black and Minority Ethnic umbrella organisations as a means to support inter-community dialogue and capacity building. It stopped funding most of these organisations in 2016. The implications of uprooting this longstanding governance model remain to be seen, but one of the de-funded organisations closed at the end of last year, leaving the communities in question without an organised voice. At the same time, vast third-sector organisations, what might be called “voluntary sector multi-nationals”, are now far more likely to mop-up government contracts, themselves set on onerous terms. “Super-majors” in voluntary sector vernacular have no connection with local people and their business practices can be as predatory as corporations.

In the worst case scenario, then, the austerity state is refitting civil society from bottom to top and hollowing it out. Where publicly funded voluntary and community organisations, for all their flaws, had strong organic connections with local people, and were there to provide voice and support, the trajectory of austerity governance is towards a larger and more remote voluntary sector enmeshed in authoritarian workfare management, cutthroat competition and managerial bureaucracy. Actors on the front line say that even in a future age of abundance it could take decades to rebuild what austerity has destroyed and to destroy what austerity has built in terms of this new apparatus. So much for the “big society”. We believe that the issues we find in Leicester are almost certainly replicated to a greater or lesser extent across the country.

What, then, of the future? As I commented at the outset, none of our interviewees suggested that urban revitalisation is enough on its own to counter the privations of austerity, or reverse the damage done to social networks in the city. Case studies from across the world attest to the fact that cities that rely on competitiveness and entrepreneurialism are unjust cities. The first challenge for Leicester is to square this circle: to make renaissance, always fragile in a turbulent political economy, work for all its citizens. The second challenge is how the city can sustain and revitalise civil society as a vibrant network of local organisations capable of mobilising citizens, providing support and voice and speaking truth to power. Despite the damage done by austerity, there is no shortage of political energy in Leicester. The defence of Belgrave Library was the best example we witnessed in our study, and the trenchant campaign to defend the Glenfield Heart Centre exemplifies the potential for unified political, trade union and community campaigning against cuts. There is the appetite for an alternative politics in Leicester, and we find the same in greater abundance in other case studies. In Barcelona, where anti-austerity activists run the City Council, there is even talk of a “New Municipalism”. Such language might seem absurd in the grindingly austere British context, but if it can happen in cities that have been even more badly affected, why not here in Leicester?

Jonathan Davies is professor of Critical Policy Studies and Director of the Centre of Urban Research on Austerity at the De Montfort University

Baltimore: Governing Two Cities in ‘Crisis’

March 3, 2017March 3, 2017abuaro01

Madeleine Pill reports on findings from a second round of research in Baltimore carried out as part of the collaborative governance under austerity project, sponsored by the Economic and Social Research Council as part of its Urban Transformations Network, and led by Prof. Jonathan Davies.

Baltimore exemplifies the US conception of ‘urban crisis’ – our focus on the crises of welfarism resonated with elites and citizen activists engaged in or seeking to change the city’s governance. They cited the challenges the city faces in terms of its ‘fiscal squeeze’, compounded by population decline, poverty concentration and the resultant struggle to provide even basic services, aggravated by very high levels of public safety / police spending shrinking funding for other priorities such as education and job training. But an underpinning narrative about Baltimore’s racial division and the resultant trauma was also clear – heightened by the ‘uprising’ in the city in April 2015. This had disrupted the city’s governance, interrupting ‘business as usual’ – but did it herald change? Looking at the spatial and institutional manifestations of the city’s divisions shows that whilst its governance has seen a degree of adjustment in style and tone, the goals and fixes largely remain the same.

Baltimore’s Spatial Governance

Evoking ‘a tale of two cities’ when talking about Baltimore is a cliché with good reason – it helps navigate the deep divisions so fundamental to understanding the city’s governance. Lawrence Brown’s two Baltimores – the White L and the Black Butterfly – capture their most stark spatial expression. Initial research found that the uprising after the death of a young black man following injuries sustained in police custody was perceived as a pivotal moment in seeking to overcome the city’s divisions. The emphasis on social justice since the uprising was widely regarded as having increased but views differed on any meaningful changes in practice. Many of the elites perceived the problem in terms of lack of resource and insufficient economic inclusion, with ‘workforce’ development measures regarded as a significant step. But an advocacy organisation echoed the institutional racism cited by others, relating the uprising to:

‘[The] ton of unhappiness and dissatisfaction in the black community with the black leadership and the extent to which the black establishment has really been acting in the interest of black neighbourhoods, poor black residents’

The two neighbourhoods talked about by nearly all those interviewed – Port Covington and Sandtown-Winchester – illustrate the persistence of ‘twin track’ Baltimore and demonstrate that in the ‘fiscally squeezed’ city, neighbourhoods only gain attention when they intersect with the priorities of city elites.

Port Covington is the city’s current waterfront megaproject. The developer, Sagamore, is owned by Kevin Plank, CEO of “Under Armour” (a sportswear company) whose corporate headquarters will anchor the development. It has received approvals for $660 million of tax increment financing, the biggest financing package in Baltimore’s history and subject to much city-wide debate, protest and advocacy. Elites did acknowledge that the development raises ‘gentrification and race issues’. It was also cited as an example of developers’ becoming more ‘socially conscious’ since the uprising. Citizen activists and advocacy organisations in contrast were clear that the development was ‘tone deaf coming on the heels of the uprising’ and another example of where ‘we’re disinvesting from places that need it the most… and the benefits promised don’t materialise’.

The other space of the city most mentioned was Sandtown-Winchester in West Baltimore – Freddie Gray’s home neighbourhood and the epicentre of the uprising after his death. It became the symbolic location for the launch of Project CORE, a State and City demolition initiative which counterpoints the Port Covington development by focusing at the other end of the spectrum – the city’s ‘stressed’ neighbourhoods with the highest levels of vacant and blighted properties. Elite and citizen activist perspectives on the initiative were unsurprisingly bifurcated. A major non-profit saw it as an example of where there is now at least more ‘talking about listening to communities’ and other elites agreed it was not ‘business as usual’. But community activists based in West Baltimore related it to practices of institutional racism, lack of community say, and saw it as a gentrification strategy clearing low income residents:

‘It’s insensitive of our community… not even considering the issues that gave us blocks and blocks of blighted properties… this is a low income neighbourhood so you’re proposing all this demolition to lure developers…. it’s a slow gentrification process’.

What about other neighbourhoods? Some benefit from elite attention where they are able to gain leverage from the proximity of anchor institutions, notably Johns Hopkins university and medical system. The Central Baltimore Partnership gains support and resource given its proximity to Johns Hopkins’ Homewood campus and its Community Partners Initiative. This encourages other resource flows (such as from the State’s neighbourhood initiative and foundation and bank support for its new development fund). A focus of the city’s major community organising coalition, BUILD, on the east-side Oliver neighbourhood levers on its proximity to Eager Park (an earlier city megaproject), anchored by Hopkins’ hospital. Some see such prioritisation as ‘common sense’, the path to pursue when resources are limited. Others made explicit that neighbourhoods that don’t offer opportunities are ‘written off’ with a West Baltimore anchor institution official describing it as being located in a ‘containment area’.

Civil Society? Citizen activism and the ‘non-profit industrial complex’

The bifurcation between elite and citizen activist views of spatial governance priorities underscores the city’s institutional divisions as well as its exclusion of the citizen from governance. Citizen activists contrasted their embedded work in communities with Baltimore’s ‘non-profit industrial complex’. A government official agreed, critiquing the ‘whole infrastructure here of non-profits and others’ that ‘co-opt community voice and say, this is what the community wants’. In stressing the importance of relationships with ‘key community leaders and activists’, a major non-profit alluded to its instrumental need for consensus by getting ‘diverse neighbourhoods to think collectively’. Overall, the research revealed the stark schism between the city’s mostly white-led non-profit sector and its activist community, particularly its younger African American members. The racial (and spatial) disconnect between larger, grant-receiving organisations and target communities was emphasised, undermining ‘the development of independent black institution building that’s so necessary for communities to actually have the power needed to address a lot of these problems’. The role played by the city’s non-profit (and foundation) sector is imbued with the contestability and mutability of ‘civil society’ as a Tocquevillian counterbalance to, or Gramscian integrated part of, the state, one activist pithily explaining that ‘one of the biggest issues that we have in Baltimore… is a condensation of non-profit and foundation forces that then are allowed to produce policies’.

Most found some reasons to be hopeful about the city’s future. Some stressed the need for consensus, ‘ways of partnering in a positive manner’, others stressed the need for transformational, systemic change. What was clear was the growing voice of black, young activists ‘trained outside of the local non-profit formula’.

The two city analogy remains popular, activists envisaging ‘two parallel tracks’ – one ‘like Port Covington, a neoliberal city’, contrasted with their ability to produce a ‘parallel structure, a parallel narrative… [a] vision of community empowerment from the grassroots up, as opposed to seeing black folks as appendages of a neoliberal wave’. Others alluded back to the uprising in stressing the need for improved police-community relations to redress trauma as a prerequisite for other change in the city. In so doing the city’s divided spatial governance was reiterated:

‘Actual police reform… without change in the structure, the policies, the way they actually work in Sandtown… is the very first steps to actual change… even with this huge Sagamore and the TIF [Port Covington]… it gets diminished as soon as something happens with the Police Department’.

The research – which has involved 40 interviews with city government officials and members, citizen activists and those in the city’s foundations, universities and non-profit sector – points to the critical need to reconcile divisions within the city as part of any transformative change in its governance as a response to crisis.

Dr Madeleine Pill is Lecturer in Public Policy at the University of Sydney.

Governing Urban Crises of Welfarism: Reflections from our Eight-Case International Study

March 2, 2017abuaro01

In today’s blog Jonathan Davies introduces a series of eight further blog postings outlining the findings from our research in the cities of Athens, Baltimore, Barcelona, Dublin, Leicester, Melbourne, Montreal, Nantes and Sydney. These will be posted one-by-one over the next few weeks. The research is funded by the British Economic and Social Research Council (Ref: ES/L012898/1)as part of its Urban Transformations Network. The official project title is Collaborative Governance under Austerity: An Eight-case Comparative Study.

The first phase of our research, reported in our first series of blog-posts last year, explored what we called the “collaborative moment”. This term refers to the global wave of enthusiasm for network governance among intellectuals, policy makers and activists during the 1990s and 2000s: its capacity to join-up government, foster partnerships between state and non-state actors, and revive participatory democracy. Given the relative proximity of citizens and governing institutions at the urban scale, cities were viewed as particularly fertile arenas for building network governance. Our question was how far the zeitgeist of network governance – the spirit of the collaborative moment – survived the crash and austerity. We wanted to know, in other words, whether the “collaborative moment” was durable, or a transient phenomenon associated with long-gone “good times”.

The exploratory phase revealed that the terms “austerity” and “collaboration had very different meanings. The perceived economic and political significance of the crisis varied widely. So did the politics of collaboration. It is clear that while it has not disappeared entirely, the politics of the collaborative moment did not survive austerity, and had highly variable salience to start with. Consequently, we decided to broaden the research to take in wider conceptual and temporal horizons and bring our case study cities into a better conversation with one another. The research we are now reporting takes as its core problematic the urban governance of rolling crises of welfarism: the waves of dislocation and restructuring experienced in different ways and at different times in all our cities, since the heyday of the welfare state in the 1950s and 60s – including but not only the aftermath of the 2008 crash. What configurations of social forces are mobilised, to what ends and with what impact on the course of our eight cities?

In the final phase of the study, we will begin exploring comparisons and contrasts between the cases, to be discussed on this blog later in 2017 and thereafter.

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

Follow the Protest: Exploring the Limits and Torsions of Collaborative Governance in Nantes

July 26, 2016July 28, 2016abuaro01

In this post Steven Griggs, David Howarth and Andrés Feandeiro report the findings from the exploratory research in Nantes, carried out as part of the collaborative governance under austerity project, sponsored by the Economic and Social Research Council as part of its Urban Transformations Network, and led by Prof. Jonathan Davies.

Referendum watchers in June 2016 may have been rightly fixated on the Brexit vote, which led to the people of the United Kingdom choosing to leave the European Union. But there was another referendum that took place just three days later, even if its political legitimacy as a referendum or consultation was more open to question. On Sunday June 26, in the French department of Loire Atlantique, local citizens voted on whether to give a green light to the construction of a new international airport at Notre-Dame-des-Landes. The new airport, some 20 kilometres to the north-west of Nantes, would replace the existing Nantes Atlantique airport.

Roughly half of the electorate turned out to vote (51.08 per cent) in the referendum, with a little over 55 per cent of the local residents (55.17 per cent) voting in favour of the construction of the new airport. However, this overall victory masks a fragmented electorate, with villages and towns close to the proposed site for the new airport voting against the project. In the city of Nantes itself, opponents and supporters of the new airport were divided by only 100 votes, with the ‘yes’ vote winning just 50.05 per cent of the share of the vote.

Plans to build a new airport were first mooted in the 1960s. They dropped off the political agenda in the wake of the 1970s oil crisis. But they reappeared in the early 2000s, driven in part by the lobbying of the then Mayor of Nantes, Jean-Marc Ayrault, and his particular brand of urban boosterism. Renewed interest in the airport also served to re-ignite opposition to the proposed development. Campaigners brought together farmers, local residents, politicians, and environmental activists, thus giving a voice to a counter-expertise throughout the legal and planning processes, while drawing in support from across France and Europe. Protesters set up camps and took over vacant compulsory-purchased farms on the proposed site of the airport, transforming the government purchased ‘zone to develop’ into the ‘zone to defend’, where they pursued alternative forms of social organisation. Indeed, their expulsion from the proposed site in 2012 attracted national and international media attention as protesters clashed with riot police.

What, if anything, does this mean for the study of austerity and collaboration in Nantes? At first glance, it may appear that this story of the airport development operates outside of – or parallel to – the everyday practices of governance in the city. After all, it is, despite claims to the contrary, a national infrastructure project, which is subject to national planning practices. Indeed, the decision to hold a referendum was presented as an initiative of François Hollande, the French president. Here, however, we argue that the construction of the airport has come to act as a symbolic issue for protest and contestation across the city of Nantes. It has brought together a broad coalition of groups and campaigns, and poses a challenge to the dominant model of collaborative governance and the Nantes project of urban regeneration and economic boosterism. In other words, it has (potentially) come to define the very limits of collaborative governance and the Nantes model of participatory engagement.

Nantes has arguably not suffered the vagaries of austerity associated with other cities in France. The city continues to attract people and investment; it has reasserted its status as the capital of the west of France, transforming its workforce in the process. Since the closure of its shipyards in the 1980s, the city has been associated with a series of urban renewal initiatives, for example the development of its tram system, the regeneration of the Malakoff neighbourhood and the Ile de Nantes. Successive municipal leaders, not least Jean-Marc Ayrault, have sought to position Nantes at the forefront of European cities, developing its international reputation and attractiveness for its practices of innovation, culture and the environment. In 2015, Nantes was the European Green Capital.

This is not to deny the existence of deprivation across many neighbourhoods of the city. One of the key challenges facing politicians and policymakers in Nantes, repeatedly expressed in interviews, is the increasing number of people in various communities who were deemed to be at risk of falling off the back of the economic growth motor of Nantes. Yet, this risk of social exclusion was not constructed by local officials as a simple consequence of austerity. Budgetary constraints were clearly recognized. But viewed against the backdrop of a city that continues to grow and broaden its local tax base, Nantes was seen as facing a triple crisis. Economic constraints were interwoven with political challenges, as French citizens turn away from traditional politics, and social challenges were discerned in the form of the weakening of established community networks; all of which have prompted demands for new forms of service delivery and governance.

Much of the policy and political response to this triple crisis comes firmly under the rubric of collaborative governance. On the one hand, Nantes has embraced inter-communal collaboration, which has led to the sharing and coordinating of services with its local municipal partners in the inter-communal organisation that is Nantes Métropole. Nantes has indeed become one of the new metropolitan areas recently established by the French state. On the other hand, Nantes city council has invested markedly in moves towards citizen dialogue and co-governance. Like many other developments, this tradition within the city dates back at least to the mayoral term of Jean-Marc Ayrault. But it has become the defining policy commitment of the current Mayor Johanna Rolland. Indeed, building on its neighbourhood forums across the new urban space, the city has engaged in a number of ‘big conversations’, most notably its nine-month consultation on the management of the Loire river, which flows through the city and its region.

However, what are the limits of this collaborative governance in addressing this triple crisis? To answer this question, let us return to the plan to build an international airport at Notre-Dame-des-Landes. In many ways, this issue has become a mobilising or “nodal” issue for a number of demands against both national and local policies, in which protesters against the airport have also contested the dominant narrative of urban boosterism which has underpinned the official discourses of Nantes. At the end of February 2016, demonstrators against the new airport linked the campaign against the airport to a number of adjacent grievances and demands.

Such articulations were captured in a statement from Christine Poupin, one of the national leaders of the New AntiCapitalist Party, who participating at the February 2016 anti-airport protest in Nantes claimed that ‘there is a moment when it becomes necessary to say “STOP” … STOP to the airport obviously, but also STOP to its world, and its world is the same as that as the state of emergency as that of the destruction of the employment law…’ Students protesting in Nantes against the reform of labour rights made similar equivalences between struggles, with the regional newspaper, Ouest-France reporting: ‘they shout against police violence, the airport, capitalism, government, bosses.’. Indeed, the project at Notre-Dame-des-Landes has come to be seen as an ‘ideological battle’, in which there is a challenge both to the entire growth model, which many commentators have suggested is a key motif of the Nantes project, and to the very legitimacy of the French state. As expected, the referendum, which François Hollande publicly constructed as putting an end once and for all to debate over the airport has clearly failed to do so. Local residents have vowed to continue their campaign, with judicial reviews still in place over environmental impacts of the planned infrastructure on water and on rare species. Moreover, as we suggested above, protesters on the ZAD, the renamed ‘zone to defend’, which covers the proposed airport site, have established their own camps; they have built spaces in which to develop and showcase new ways of living, as well as exhibiting new forms of relationships. They are also preparing to defend another attempt to evict them forcibly from the site.

Such protests and campaigns, coupled with the painful creation of alternative spaces, evoke the limits of new forms of collaborative governance, while exposing various techniques and forms of depoliticisation. The latter might be seen as endeavours to exclude potential alternatives to the current regimes and models of governance under the guise of ‘pragmatic politics’ and the reaching of a rational consensus. Our intuition in this regard is that certain forms of protest and alienation may be rendered invisible or displaced by the dominant discourse of integration and community cohesion (as was arguably the case in the UK as part of the Third Way discourse). It is also possible in this regard that the local and national media focus on the overt and intense protests against the building of a new international airport in Nantes may serve unwittingly to conceal other sets of underlying tensions and cleavages. The protests against the airport have been largely spearheaded by middle-class environmentalists, peasants and anarchists, whereas the troubled neighbourhoods affected by the financial crisis tend to reflect class and ethnic divisions. By ‘following the protest’, while remaining attentive to the way in which ‘political resistance discloses the true operation of power’, our future fieldwork will focus on these related issues.

Steven Griggs is Professor of Public Policy at De Montfort University, David Howarth is Professor in Social and Political Theory at the University of Essex, and Dr. Andrés Feandeiro is a research assistant on the Collaborative Governance under Austerity project at De Montfort University.

Governing Austerity in Melbourne

July 18, 2016July 26, 2016abuaro01

In this post Hayley Henderson, Brendan Gleeson and Helen Sullivan report the findings from the exploratory research in Melbourne, carried out as part of the collaborative governance under austerity project, sponsored by the Economic and Social Research Council as part of its Urban Transformations Network, and led by Prof. Jonathan Davies.

Melbourne is the capital city of the state of Victoria and the second most populous city in Australia, with a current population of 4.5 million spread over more than 9,900 square km. The sprawling metropolis is governed via a multi-level system of centralised state and dispersed and diverse local government. Our research focuses on The City of Greater Dandenong a significant municipal region 30kms southeast of the Melbourne CBD and home to a major regeneration initiative ‘Revitalising Central Dandenong’ (RCD 2005-25). RCD is emblematic of the kind of ‘place-based’ targeted interventions led by governments in Australian and other developed economy cities in the last two decades. It affords the opportunity to situate strategies and practices suggestive of contemporary ‘collaborative governance’ in time and space to illustrate and help explain their particular character.

Traditionally a seat of industrial activity, Dandenong experienced sectoral economic decline in recent years with the long run contraction of Australian manufacturing. However, strong plural migration furthered the community economy, or at least its prospects in the context of significant disadvantage, as an array of migrant communities asserted a stake in the area’s commercial, retail and property sectors.

Initiated under a state Labor administration in 2005 RCD brought multiple actors from State and local governments together formally and funded a program of work on common goals over a long-term period to combat structural issues of disadvantage. The project commenced with an unprecedented investment in a single urban renewal site of AUS$290 million. This investment supported land acquisition, staff costs and infrastructure delivery over the first five years of the project life. It leveraged both considerable private investment in development (the aim is for a 1:10 public to private ratio in investment) as well as local government spending of approximately AUS$120 million in complementary improvement projects.

The preliminary findings from the Melbourne case study suggests that the central concepts ‘collaborative governance’ and ‘austerity’ are problematic in the Australian (and especially Melbourne) context.

The idea of collaborative governance has limited purchase amongst practitioners; rather the idea of ‘integrated planning.’ is preferred. This may reflect the distinct spheres that urban planners and scholars inhabit in contrast to their public policy colleagues – a distinction that does not necessarily apply solely to Australia. It is also likely a product of a particular interpretation of ‘collaborative governance’ as the shared rule of interdependent actors from all sectors. This does not resonate in a context where state governments and their agencies dominate in terms of resource power, and where municipalities have (or are perceived to have) limited capacity to act as assertive collaborative entities in contexts that invite or demand the ‘joining up’ of policy settings.

Collaborative activity abounds however, across policy areas and between different sectoral actors. RCD is characterised in almost entirely collaborative terms with repeated references to relationship-building, community-building, formal ‘cross-government’ structures and processes, ‘partnerships’ with non-government entities and informal strategies for effecting change in a multi-actor context. Informality is key here. Where structures are deemed to be weak or lacking, actors and their practices are deemed to be able to make things work.

The concept of ‘austerity’ is also rather alien to Australian urban policy discourse. Austerity is not a label generally used to describe or conceptualise public fiscal cutbacks, constraints or institutional change (e.g. corporatisation, privatisation). Rather a more episodic language of ‘crisis’ is evident from 2000s, used to frame and rationalise specific instances of what might be regarded as austerity governance. Here too though the political rhetoric is rarely matched by the real material crises visited upon other cities and countries in recent decades. What is notable is the ongoing use of the rhetoric of a ‘migrant crisis’ to create a sense of othering amongst local communities. This can have material consequences for plural localities such as Dandenong.

It is the case that fiscal conservatism is the dominant political trope for both major national (and state) political blocs. This political trend towards restraint in public revenue and expenditure over the last 15 years (and earlier) is a persistent theme, frequently evidenced in expenditure cutbacks in specific areas and reductions of institutional effort and capacity. Even so this political aspiration has been more honoured in the breach, with expenditure and revenue across all levels of government at historically high levels throughout the 2000s.

Our case study examines an urban renewal episode that extended through Labor and Liberal-National state administrations. Amongst other things, our early findings show how Labor state governments are prepared to undertake intensive urban investments and interventions without departing necessarily from the general narrative of fiscal restraint. Commitment to integrated planning appears, inter alia, to be a means to maintain the uneasy balancing of these twin commitments – intervention and restraint – by aiming to enhance policy effectiveness and efficiency through strategic, place-based interventions. Under conservative rule, this tension is relaxed and fiscal minimalism is coupled to voluntaristic collaborative policy efforts.

Hayley Henderson is a PhD canditate in Urban Planning, Brendan Gleeson Professor of Urban Policy Studies and Professor Helen Sullivan director of the Melbourne School of Government at the University of Melbourne, Australia.

Governing Austerity in Montreal

July 12, 2016July 12, 2016abuaro01

In this post, Gregoire Autin reports the findings from the exploratory research in Montreal, carried out as part of the collaborative governance under austerity project, sponsored by the Economic and Social Research Council as part of its Urban Transformations Network, and led by Prof. Jonathan Davies. In developing this case study, Gregoire worked with Professors Roger Keil from York University and Pierre Hamel from the University of Montreal.

In Montréal, we started our exploration of the relationships between governance institutions and austerity measures by interviewing executive members of important collaborative institutions. This was an interesting starting point as it allowed us to gather insiders’ views of collaboration at the metropolitan scale. We conducted 11 interviews and our questions were largely oriented towards meanings and origins of “austerity” on one side and the forms, functions and practices of collaboration in, with and against austerity measures on the other. While using the general comparative framework built for the research, we had to adapt and take into account the specific context of Montréal.

One of the main specificities is that the city was not really hit by the crisis in 2008 in particular; it has rather undergone different consecutive and ongoing crises since the 1970s. Consequently, austerity is never presented nor understood as a necessary policy in times of crisis. It is rather understood as a policy (and a politics) of state restructuring, rooted in a conservative and neoliberal ideology. Many respondents made a distinction between a supposedly necessary austerity in countries undergoing economic crises such as Greece or Spain, for example, and austerity measures rooted in a conservative ideology such as the ones implemented by the federal government under former Conservative Canadian Prime Minister Harper (2006-2015) and by Quebec Premier Philippe Couillard’s Liberal provincial government. As such, the respondents’ understanding of austerity is strongly related to a deep dynamic of state restructuring in the context of a historic crisis of the Welfare-State. As an ideology, austerity – usually called “rigour” by the politicians in power – is upheld by conservative politicians, be it at the federal level of government under Harper’s reign or at the provincial level with Couillard’s government (in power since 2014).

One important aspect we investigated, and which remains to be further explored, is the articulation, at a local scale, of the different levels of government and decision-making. In Montréal, the history of collaboration is a long one: these different levels of government have always had to collaborate to some extent on different aspects. The three tiers of government – federal, provincial and municipal – don’t necessarily follow the same ideological approach. Thus, when the provincial administration undergoes serious austerity measures and cuts different programs, the municipal administration has to choose between increasing their participation in those programs (e.g. in public transportation), in order to supplement what has been cut at the provincial level, or maintain their financial participation and ask the other tiers of government to maintain commitments. This implies that the municipal government’s importance, at the local level, as a financing and regulating power, increases with the relative withdrawal of the provincial and federal governments.

But collaboration operates also at a different level, not only between the three tiers of government but also with actors of civil society, community organisations, the business sectors and trade unions. This is one of the notable features of Montréal where such tripartite consultations and collaborations have existed for a long time. Many community organisations get caught up between managing and contesting austerity measures which puts them in an uncomfortable place of tension: this fine line between providing a service and becoming a substitute to the state must always be walked by the different actors involved in collaboration. This is a sign of the conflicts and tensions of the state restructuring process going on in Canada and Quebec in general and more precisely in Montréal. After the failure of two successive urban regimes (from the 1950s to the 1970s and from the 1980s to 2010), Montréal is still in search of a new regime. It is interesting to see how collaboration mechanisms are redefined within austerity measures and how this impacts on the willingness of different social, economic and political actors to build a new urban regime.

Austerity measures are the harshest for the poor and underprivileged particularly in the health and education sectors. Reducing financing opportunities for the different institutions and community organisations, cutting in different programs, these measures usually target the welfare system and old social solidarity mechanisms. Even though it is difficult to predict what will come out of these austerity politics, it is still the poorer, the most underprivileged and the newest immigrants who will suffer most of it.

While those in power at the provincial level share a consensus around the “need” to reduce the public debt and, at the municipal level, the mayor has been willing to reduce its’ administration, in accord with the austerity ideology, other actors, notably the trade unions, community organisations and student movements, are actively contesting these measures. One of the main challenges these contesting actors face is coordination between them: in other words, mobilisation against austerity seems to be more sectorial than converging. Each actor faces their own problems and contradictions and this hinders the opportunity for collaboration and convergence in a movement against austerity.

This exploratory research allowed us to draw a general portrait of collaboration at the municipal level in Montreal, to look at the specificity of the context and, at the same time, the deeper trends and dynamics underlying austerity measures and programs and changes in collaboration patterns. What is particularly relevant to note is that austerity measures are not a new thing, born out of the 2008 crisis: it is rather rooted in a long historical process of state restructuring and redefinition of social solidarity and state legitimacy. It is in this perspective that we will have to continue analysing and studying collaborative governance and austerity in Montréal. The future research will focus more specifically on social practices looking at the way neighbourhood roundtables, managed by community actors, are promoting social values when negotiating or adapting to austerity measures.

Gregoire Autin is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology at the Université de Montréal

Governing Austerity in Dublin

July 4, 2016July 6, 2016abuaro01

This post outlines the main findings from the first round of research carried out by Dr Niamh Gaynor and Dr Eamonn McConnon in Dublin as part of the Collaborative Governance under Austerity project. It forms part of a series of blogs from the eight comparator cities in the project.

Situated at the centre of Ireland’s booming ‘Celtic Tiger’ economy from the late 1990s to 2007 and home to a quarter of the country’s population, Dublin has experienced a sharp contraction and decline since the rupture of the property bubble and associated banking crisis of 2008 onward. The resultant austerity policies – adopted as a condition of an IMF/European Commission and European Central Bank bailout package in 2010 – have impacted significantly on the city at a number of levels.

Socio-economically, austerity has hit the poorest and most marginalised in the North and Inner City severely. It has also impacted on a newly squeezed middle class, many of whom live in younger suburbs to the West of the city. There has been a drop of 21 per cent in mean disposable income across the city and the drop in the income of the unemployed is reported to stand at 22 per cent. Correspondingly, the rate of unemployment rose from 38,000 in 2006 to a high of 90,000 in 2012. Although this figure dropped to 75,000 in 2015, interview respondents highlight consistent difficulties in meeting debt and bill payments, and poverty and inequality appear widespread and pervasive. Political discourse and action on this has coalesced around the city’s massive housing crisis which is affecting working-class and middle-class families alike. The combination of unemployment and escalating costs and taxes associated with austerity have led to widespread mortgage arrears and dispossession. Homelessness is now a major issue across the city, most particularly in West Dublin. With its roots in the city’s previous austerity cuts of the 1980s when the shift from local authority to public-private partnership management and provision began, the current housing situation is perhaps a harbinger of some of the more long-term impacts of austerity’s neoliberal prescriptions more broadly.

Administratively, the austerity-driven public recruitment embargo combined with a downsizing of the public sector has resulted in a 13 per cent reduction in staffing in local authorities across the country. There have been significant attendant cuts to frontline services and supports. According to one senior Council official interviewed for this research, Dublin City Council has suffered a 20-25 per cent cut to its overall budget and has gone from a personnel of 6,800 in 2010 to 5,000 today. Other interviewees point to the ageing and somewhat fatigued workforce within the Council, suggesting there is little capacity or appetite for innovative governance within the city at this time of crisis. Yet, somewhat paradoxically, many of the city’s institutions of collaborative governance – celebrated for their flexibility and innovativeness in the 1990s – have now been subsumed within the Council. Notwithstanding these developments, there appears widespread agreement that the much touted opportunities for local government reform which formed part of the austerity package have been lost, and interviewees point to an ongoing torpidity and ineffectiveness within Dublin City Council.

Politically, a number of interviewees suggest that austerity has made a significant mark within the city due to the significant increase in the number of left wing ‘anti-austerity’ Councillors on the City Council following the last (2014) local elections. While some interviewees see this as a positive development for the city, others bemoan the lack of experience of many of these new incumbents. Others again point to their lack of power in any case as national political authorities continue to wield significant influence on the traditionally weak and powerless local council through both party allegiances and the central figure of the City Manager – a political appointee. While the formal institutions of Council politics remain a focal point for interviewees and critics of austerity more broadly, interesting things are happening across a variety of more disparate sites within the city which point to a range of new political actors, new political alliances and new ways of doing politics. Most noteworthy among these is the so-called ‘right to water’ movement – a national movement which is particularly active in coalescing around the newly introduced (2015) and much contested water charges. Survey findings which show that over 50 per cent of those involved are first-time activists concerned with austerity more broadly rather than water charges per se, point to significant developments across the city’s broader public sphere. And the fact that the water charges constituted the ‘red line issue’ in coalition negotiations between the two main political parties following the February 2016 elections attest to the political potency of this public sphere.

So what does all this mean for our overall research question – what happens to collaborative governance under austerity? In Dublin our findings to date point to two things. On the one hand, collaborative governance is continuing, albeit in a retrenched, rationalised and bureaucratised form which is now solely focused on coping with, surviving and managing the social fallout of austerity. The role for policy making and the flexibility and innovation associated with collaborative governance arrangements and configurations of the past is now gone and competition, rather than collaborative relationship-building and networking appears to be its overriding characteristic. On the other, new sites of more radical, direct resistance are evident which, through many of the newly elected ‘anti-austerity’ City Councillors, are forming new alliances and coalitions. Could we view these as new sites and forms of collaborative governance with new norms and practices, allowing for contestation and debate? Or does this signal the demise of collaborative governance in Dublin? Our next phase of research will focus on the two questions of a) if and how traditional collaborative governance actors and institutions interact with these new coalitions and interests and b) what the motivations, aspirations, plans and strategies of these new political actors and coalitions are.

Dr Niamh Gaynor is Lecturer in Development Studies and Dr Eamonn McConnon a Post-Doctoral Researcher at the School of Law and Government at Dublin City Univesrity