urban studies

Montreal: In search of a new approach for defining social solidarity

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GIF RGB 150 Pixels with BorderPierre Hamel, Roger Keil and Grégoire Autin report on findings from a second round of 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.

Montreal is renowned for its social and cultural dynamism. It is an important point to underscore as the city continues to struggle to improve its performance in terms of job creation and support for innovation in a variety of sectors, renewing hope in the improvement of working and living conditions for all citizens. It is necessary to remember that structural problems remain at the scale of the city-region. For example, the system of post-secondary education is less successful than elsewhere in turning out university graduates and Montreal’s labour market continues to struggle to integrate immigrants more than in comparable North American cities, as noted in a report released by the ‘Institut du Québec’ (IQ) in November 2015.

In some respect, a discrepancy has always prevailed within Montreal’s neighbourhoods, at least if we go back to the beginning of the 1960s, between, on the one hand, the dynamism of civil society – and more specifically community and voluntary sector organisations – and, on the other hand, the difficulty of the economy to offer well-paying jobs, especially for retaining new immigrants. Furthermore, this situation is no longer exclusively a major concern for new immigrants. Precarious working conditions have been rising almost in all sectors of activity since the beginning of the new Millennium. Nonetheless, among Canadian metropolitan regions, Montreal remains characterized by the quality of overall living standards due to the low social polarization and reasonable housing affordability.

In that respect, the city is demonstrating a dual character. This is due to a tension between social innovation and efficient economic activity. This challenge is anything but new. To some extent, all metropolitan regions are torn between, on the one hand, favoring adjustments to the international market place through, for example, promoting competitive clusters, and on the other, sustaining social solidarity. While those two strategies do not necessarily need to be incompatible, in capitalist economies they mostly are. What can a city do to overcome those contradictions? The answer can be found in local culture and political choices made by the local state and civil society alike.

Like in other urban jurisdictions in this research project and beyond, austerity has been on the agenda in Montreal. But, as we noted in our earlier blog post hard austerity policies have traditionally not been favoured by governments of the city, the province of Quebec and the recent federal government of Canada. Still there is repeated reference to rigeur in the policy landscape, the French term most often used when referring to austerity measures at all levels of government. The overall social consequences of austerity policies remain difficult to assess. But a large consensus prevails among the respondents to our investigation that those policies have been affecting the most vulnerable population groups.  In this respect, an ambiguity exists regarding the time period of reference.

Since their return to power at the provincial level, the Liberals adopted a series of austerity measures in order to reduce the Quebec public debt, the most significant one among Canadian provinces after Newfoundland and Labrador. This has been used as a the main rationale by Quebec Premier Philippe Couillard, elected in April 2014, to go forward with drastic measures: cutting expenses in health care and education systems, welfare programs and salaries of government employees. Severe damages in service provision in those areas for some specific social groups have resulted from that. The children living in deprived areas and/or in need of specific educational support, poor people waiting for access to social housing, or recipients of social assistance are among the groups who have been the most affected by those measures.

This said, austerity policies are not an invention created by Premier Couillard in 2014. As a number of our respondents mentioned, this goes back to the Fordist crisis of the 1970s and its repercussion on welfare policies. From this moment onwards, the social compromise between economic elites and workers as managed by the state was put aside. In its place, social policies were managed increasingly through contracts with the private sector and/or community-based groups.

In that respect, above all, austerity has become a public issue that necessarily involves a rebalancing of relations between the various internal components of the state, and new relations between state and society. From a sociological perspective, the question of social cohesion is expressed in different terms compared to the Fordist era.  As public action gains legitimacy from expertise, and proposes diverse partnership mechanisms for managing public services, the democratic deficit is growing.  Henceforth, solidarity among citizens cannot rely exclusively on a blind faith in state capacity to manage solidarity and reduce inequalities. Democratic crisis and the legitimacy deficit of the state (at all levels) are necessarily on the agenda again.

This is why the coalition ‘Main rouge’ – opposed to pricing and privatisation of public services – supported by several groups active in the community sector but also by some trade unions, student and women movements, organized rallies to oppose the Couillard’s government austerity policies.  In November 2016, 1200 community groups even organized a two day strike in order to contest the chronic underfunding of their activities while serving a continuously increasing clientele..

Building a coalition against policies and programs managed by the state has proved to be a difficult task in Montreal for two reasons. First, the vast majority of community groups continue to rely mainly on the state for financing their internal operations. For that matter, mobilization against the state cannot be taken for granted. In addition, when governmental specific resources are available for dedicated projects, a competition over subsidies can occur among groups.  Second, the collaboration between the community sector and the trade union world is not self evident. This is not new, of course. The objectives of those two categories of actors are not always on the same page. Sometimes, it can be the case – one can recall, for example, the political project of the trade union left in the 1960s and 1970s in Quebec when, among other things, political action around urban and municipal issues was encouraged and supported by major labour federations in the Montreal region. But divergent interests also exist. In the past, as it is still the case nowadays, the community sector is concerned about the most vulnerable populations that are confronted with social exclusion, which is normally not the case for the members of trade unions. Constructing a politics of solidarity is difficult under these circumstances.

In regards to the crisis of democracy and the definition of new paths for overcoming this crisis, fighting against poverty and exclusion remains a central issue in OECD countries. For that matter, initiatives coming from civil society provided a source of innovation and a played a forerunner role in coping with a lack of social cohesion. The case of Community Development Corporations (CDCs) is a good example. At the beginning of the 1980s, these corporations were introduced by community-based groups in Montreal’s old working class neighborhoods in response to de-industrialising processes underway since the 1970s. Not only did these actors promote a social vision of economic and urban development, they also defended an integrated vision of the urban, so to speak, a vision that can be associated with the idea of a just city or with the spirit of the urban as conceived by Henri Lefebvre. On the terrain of Montreal neighborhoods, what they have achieved has paved the way for the project of social economy (Chantier de l’économie sociale) launched by the Quebec government through the Chantier de l’économie et de l’emploi in 1995. The activities underway with the Neighborhood Tables as well as the experiments with local programs of urban revitalisation (Revitalisation Urbaine Intégrée) initiated by the municipal administration in cooperation with community groups are also indebted to their action.

However, if these initiatives are welcome for overcoming sectoral biases ingrained in traditional governmental programs, their visibility and the support received by the state remain very weak. They are lacking resources and institutional support to cope with the contradictions underneath social and economic exclusion.

In Montreal, the picture of socioeonomic poverty is far from the key element when we are trying to grasp the city image. Nonetheless, social movements and community actors cannot forget that dimension. As they mobilised against the neo-liberal vision of social policies management, or struggled over economic and social issues, they explored new avenues for building social solidarity. Without all the answers to improve the living conditions of the general population, they revealed however being essential stakeholders. In many ways, fighting against austerity measures was also an occasion for exploring a new approach in defining social solidarity.

Pierre Hamel is Professor of Sociology at the Université de Montréal; Roger Keil is Professor and York Chair in Global Sub/Urban Studies at York University, Toronto; and Gregoire Autin is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology at the Université de Montréal.

 

Austerity and grassroots mobilization in Athens: The emergence of an urban governance divide?

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GIF RGB 150 Pixels with BorderIoannis Chorianopoulos and Nayia Tselepi 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.

In our last posting we discussed the collaborative governance shift noted in the government of the City of Athens by reason of funding cutbacks and reduced revenue raising capacities.  In this light, the City administration turned to the private sector and NGOs, creating a wide range of joined up schemes that exist by virtue of their ability to generate or attract resources.  Our focus here is ‘civil society’, and its responses to austerity and municipal collaboration.  Civil society is the sum total of a wide range of social actors that operate outside the realm of the state apparatus and the private market.  In order to align and position our research in relation to this heterogeneous domain of associations, we drew from the Gramscian standpoint.  Civil society was explored in respect of its role in urban governance and its stances on the changing matrices of Athenian urban politics.

The proliferation of grassroots initiatives

Economic crisis, whether in the form of a cyclical contraction or a severe long lasting recession, is seen as triggering particular civil society responses, driven by welfare need. Such mobilisation, in turn, is perceived as an incipient ‘social movement’ to the extent that it involves a campaign that extends beyond any single event, and a collective effort that frames key issues and claims alternative world views.

According to various research accounts, more than 2.500 grassroots schemes have emerged in Greek cities during the crisis, signifying a discernable social movement with a prominent presence in Athens.  For “Omikron Project”, an informal group of 40 volunteers mapping grassroots initiatives in an attempt to address the stereotypes of ‘idleness’ and ‘helplessness’ projected to the country:

“During the last three years [2013-2016], grassroots initiatives in Athens more than doubled, while a total of 70 per cent of the networks that existed prior to 2013, do remain active.  These are groups that operate informally on principle, and only a few turn into NGOs. They don’t want to have any dealings with the state or with handling funds. They just want to offer a way out to the crisis.  That means a lot as we see a different civil society emerging; different from the one that surfaced in the 1990s because of EU funds”.

Informality in practice

The sheer diversity of goals and practices that characterize Athenian grassroots initiatives renders their classification an unfruitful exercise.  However, a number of key common traits were noted, referring primarily to their informal features and their contrariety to prescribed structures and institutions associated with austerity.  Informality is underscored by the absence of any legal status in the majority of cases, and by the voluntary nature of their activities.   Even groups that decided to acquire a legal form in order to participate in a wider range of formal fundraising bids, they also operate along self-organised and voluntary-based lines.  Voluntarism is facilitated by the social media and the presence of dedicated web platforms, such as “volunteer4Greece” and “solidarity4all”, which communicate grassroots activities and needs to an increasingly receptive public.  More than that, however, ‘volunteerism’ complements ‘informality’ as a key trait of grassroots’ mobilization, shaping a contentious political stance that draws from a growing frustration with formal structures and institutions.

“Volunteerism is a form of resistance. It’s a statement, exposing the absence of the authorities from where they are needed; it’s a way to show and deal with the problems the city is facing”.

The second common trait that grassroots initiatives share is their opposition to austerity, the socio-economic impacts of which is the key reason behind their mobilization.  In this light, agents, practices and institutions associated with austerity are purposefully avoided, even by the less radical sides of this movement.

Relations with the City

‘Collaboration’ in the Athenian civil society realm refers to a markedly different process than the one observed in the City administration.  Voluntarism suggests a firm attempt to create ‘self-managed’ spaces of encounters amongst citizens, forming collective solidarity efforts that avoid hierarchies.  It doesn’t come as a surprise, therefore, that relations between the grassroots and the City of Athens are virtually nonexistent.

The views of civil society networks regarding the collaborative governance policies launched by the City range from the guarded to the outright contentious.  In the first case we see groups that use municipal resources in order to promote their goals.  The example of the “One Stop” initiative sheds light on this standpoint.  Two NGOs together with two informal social solidarity networks and a number of individuals, gather twice a week in a municipal building offering food and a variety of services (legal advice, first aid, laundry, haircut, showers, etc.) to the homeless population.  “One stop” is also using a municipal web platform, called “synAthina”, that’s facilitating unofficial groups and individual initiatives to make its actions and events known. None of the groups involved in this scheme, however, is willing to invest further in any type of relations with the City administration.

“No, we don’t collaborate with any state institutions.  Yes, we’re an NGO, but we don’t want to be seen as yet another organization that’s funded by the state to return a fraction of what it gets to the people in need.  This view might not do justice to many NGOs, but it’s a strong one and we hear it all the time;  “…ah, you’re there, so you get a piece of the pie as well”, so to speak”.

The more outspoken and drastic viewpoints reject outright any association with the City, accusing the current municipal administration for endorsing the framework of austerity policies.  The culmination of an already thorny relation, however, appears to be the 2015 national referendum.  Voters were asked on whether to approve of the austerity-laden bailout conditions in the country’s government-debt crisis proposed jointly by the EC, the IMF and the ECB.  The Mayor’s leading role in the national campaign for accepting the proposal, broke any remaining links with the more radical of grassroots’ networks.  As stated:

“The referendum wasn’t about the Euro or Grexit. It was about austerity. You can’t stand out as the main proponent of the “yes” vote, as the mayor did, knowing that what we stand for is negated by the “yes” vote.  That’s why very many solidarity networks have pulled out from synAthina ever since.  The networks don’t trust the City any more”.

At first hand, the apparent distance between the City and the grassroots reflects the decades’ long trajectories of hierarchical municipal administration, restricting the emergence of avenues of communication.   Institutional legacies aside, the City’s current compliant role in administering austerity policies fuzzed local relations further.  As municipal collaborative policies didn’t allow any room for contesting austerity, a series of counter-hegemonic voices surfaced and asserted their presence in the civil society realm, primarily in the form of social solidarity networks.   The anti-austerity origins of this movement shaped its political orientation, arresting relations with the City.  What is unfolding in Athenian politics, is an austerity-driven governance divide.

Ioannis Chorianopoulos is an Associate Professor at the Dept. of Geography, University of the Aegean.

Naya Tselepi is Ph.D. holder in Geography.  Naya is currently a Research Fellow at the Dept. of Geography, University of the Aegean.

Cultural Diversity and Collaboration in Dandenong, Melbourne.

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GIF RGB 150 Pixels with BorderHelen 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

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GIF RGB 150 Pixels with BorderThis 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

Austerity Leicester: Between Revitalisation, Retrenchment and Resistance

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GIF RGB 150 Pixels with BorderProfessor 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’

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GIF RGB 150 Pixels with BorderMadeleine 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

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GIF RGB 150 Pixels with BorderIn 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

Governing Austerity in Montreal

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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

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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

Governing Perma-Austerity in Baltimore

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Our colleague Madeleine Pill reports on the findings from the exploratory 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.

The City of Baltimore has 621,000 residents, a quarter of whom are below the poverty line (US Census 2010).  An extract from the outgoing Mayor’s 2013 State of the City speech helps set the scene – ‘for over 50 years, Baltimore’s story has been dominated by a narrative of post-industrial decline. From 1950 to 2000, the city lost a third of its population. Jobs disappeared, crime rates rose, schools deteriorated, and many neighbourhoods destabilised. City government itself was left with a legacy of high taxes, growing liabilities, and crumbling infrastructure’.

Initial research interviews confirmed that Baltimore ‘is used to austerity and functions like that all the time’.   The city’s longstanding ‘culture of scarcity’ is linked more to the ‘de facto devolution’ of Reaganomics than the 2008 crisis, which is not regarded as a significant turning point for the city.  Its ‘fiscal squeeze’ had already resulted in deployment of the standard repertoire of measures (such as a city hiring freeze and pension and health benefit reform for city agency workers).  Only a minority of those interviewed saw these as political choices, the majority seeing them as part and parcel of the ‘muddling through’ required out of perceived necessity.

The City of Baltimore’s approach to its ongoing challenges has been to find ways to increase revenue and reduce public spending; partner with key local institutions to try to integrate systems and approaches; focus on economic development; and seek to attract and retain people to live in the City through a focus on neighbourhoods.  The latter policy realm of neighbourhood revitalisation/ community development formed the focus for exploratory research in the city.  Here the city’s ‘ed and med’ anchor institutions and its philanthropic foundations are key players, along with city government.

The strategies and tactics with neighbourhood implications include:

  • A Housing Typology was adopted by the City of Baltimore in the early 2000s as an asset- (rather than need) based way of prescribing policies and prioritising city resources for its neighbourhoods. The typology prioritises neighbourhoods ‘in the middle’ (where interventions are perceived as being able to help the market).  However, at the time of research the emphasis on the city’s ‘stressed’ neighbourhoods (with the policy prescription of demolition for site assembly) was boosted by significant funding for a 4,000 property demolition and redevelopment initiative from the State of Maryland.
  • “Change to Grow” is the title of the city’s fiscal plan (adopted in 2013), which seeks to address the city’s deficit and shows that city strategies are predicated on the need to deconcentrate poverty by (both retaining and) attracting the middle class to the city through better services, a better quality of life and less ‘fiscal stress’ . Achievement of this ‘meta-goal’ is linked to what a Community Development Corporation director described as Baltimore’s ‘niche’ providing a ‘low-cost [housing] alternative in a high-cost region [which] goes from Washington to Boston’.   This approach sustains the focus on neighbourhoods in ‘the middle’.
  • “OutcomeStat” is an emergent strategy, based on the principles of Results-Based Accountability, presented by city officials as a way of seeking to align non-profit and philanthropic initiatives and resources with those of city government by combining them in an outcomes-based methodology, using indicators grouped under (Mayoral) priority outcomes. Such approaches may herald the upscaling and rationalisation of the city’s non-profit organisations.
  • Self-help and self-provisioning of services in those neighbourhoods containing the necessary voluntary associative capacity is longstanding practice in Baltimore, where city government is challenged to provide ‘the basics’.
  • Urban boosterism of the downtown, waterfront area continues the pattern set in the 1950s and most famously realised in the 1980s Inner Harbor redevelopment. New downtown investment includes the current $1.8 billion Harbor Point waterfront development, which has received significant public subsidy via tax credits, which are also being sought for another significant development at planning stage, Port Covington.

Funding scarcity was linked by everyone interviewed to the need to work together.  The notion of ‘integration’ was widely used, linked to the rising policy realm of workforce development.  This has been championed by the city’s philanthropic and anchor institutions (acting through and assisted by the Baltimore Integration Partnership), and spurred by Johns Hopkins University and Medical System with its HopkinsLocal initiative.  City government adoption of the Baltimore City Anchor Plan (2014), through which anchor institutions regularly meet by geographic sector, underlines this joint working, though it was stressed by some that the anchors set the direction, ‘we do our own thing and the City kind of follows along with us’.

But where’s the citizen? In discussing working together, citizens/ service users/ community representatives were not generally mentioned, partnership interpreted as being between the city’s key institutions and its non-profit organisations. A government official critiqued the ‘whole infrastructure… [that] co-opts community voice and says, this is what the community wants’.  The absence of the citizen in these informal governing arrangements belies a European-style ‘collaborative moment’ in the city.

However, the riots which took place in the city in April 2015 in response to police brutality and misconduct proved to be a key focusing moment which was emphasised by all those interviewed.  A community activist explained that ‘the unrest awakened many people’ who are ‘talking about things they’ve never talked about before’.  Another commented, ‘it’s going to take courage…because these are systematic, inequitable things that are so entrenched in this city that we really have to blow this thing up and do it the right way’.

A proposition arising from the exploratory research is that Baltimore, as a result of the unrest in the city, seems to be at a critical juncture which has heightened collaboration in discourse and to an extent in practices and institutions.  For example, State funding support for the demolition/ site assembly strategy for ‘stressed’ neighbourhoods points to a partnership between the (Democratic) Mayor and (Republican) State Governor, despite their clashes regarding State funding cuts (to public transit and education).   Changes in practices and institutions, such as progress with OutcomeStat and workforce development, will be explored further in the major round of interviews currently underway.

Another priority for the current interviews is to talk to citizen activists and informal community leaders.  In the exploratory phase we found that the social movements and civil society activism obvious in the city are motivated by a deep sense of injustice – especially with regard to policing and housing.  We will explore what people mean by social justice in the city, and the similarities and differences between current protests against injustice and those of the 1960s.  Are the injustices the same or are there new spatial and economic inequalities?  We will explore whether a socially just Baltimore is possible and what local actors are seeking to and can achieve in this regard.  For example, one convening body explained that it had discussed structural racism and the challenge of ‘how it translates, how it gets funded or how more youth get engaged’.  Also, what is the potential for local political change?  For example, a national voice in Black Lives Matter, DeRay McKesson, sought (unsuccessfully) to gain the Democratic nomination for Mayor of Baltimore this April, but his candidature does indicate a ‘grassroots, community-driven, young, energetic constituency that is starting to gain momentum and have a voice’.

The research coincides with a particularly turbulent period of change in political leadership at federal as well as city level, ‘the Governor is still going to be here next year.  Our Mayor is not…  we also don’t know who’s going to be president next year’.  What happens at Federal level remains to be seen.   However, the bounded and devolved nature of city governance in the US means that Baltimore provides a rich case in which to explore the local particularities and responses to challenges experienced to a greater or lesser degree across all eight of the cities in this project.

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