One does not use sledgehammers to crack nuts. The Community Empowerment (Scotland) Act 2015 potentially provides communities with two civic 'sledgehammers', one of which is the Local Place Plan (LPP) mechanism that I've posted about here several times, mostly back in April; the other sledgehammer is the Asset Transfer mechanism (ie taking ownership of land and buildings), a very serious commitment and probably quite beyond the reach of most community bodies short of full-on Community Interest Companies, Development Trusts and the like. I've probably said quite enough about LPPs here already, at least in the abstract, and I don't intend to say anything very much about Asset Transfers either but, happily, the Act provides us all with a 'nutcracker' too, by means of its Participation Request mechanism. If all goes to plan at my end then that will be the subject of next week's Wed-Head but this week, by way of introduction, I want to drive home a fundamental point about the whole notion of community empowerment - which I am absolutely committed to, by the way: my localism is thoroughgoing and even radical, I suppose.
The Participation Request guidance** published in 2017 reiterated that 2015's Community Empowerment Act is intended to support "an increase in the pace and scale of public service reform" by "cementing the focus on achieving outcomes" as well as "improving the process of community planning." The legislation also aims to empower community bodies "through ownership of land and buildings and through strengthening their voices in the decisions that matter to them." The Act is based on three policy principles, viz:-
* subsidiarity (that social and political decisions are taken at as local a level as possible)
* community empowerment (as defined below)
* outcome improvement (in particular, reducing "disadvantage" and inequality)
[[ **source: <https://www.gov.scot/binaries/content/documents/govscot/publications/advice-and-guidance/2017/05/community-empowerment-participation-request-guidance/documents/participation-requests-guidance-pdf/participation-requests-guidance-pdf/govscot%3Adocument/Participation%2Brequests%2B-%2Bguidance.pdf>. ]]
According to Audit Scotland (in their 'awareness-raising' 25-page** briefing paper 'Principles for Community Empowerment' of July 2019, available online at <https://www.audit-scotland.gov.uk/uploads/docs/report/2019/briefing_190725_community_empowerment.pdf>), there is no single standard definition of community empowerment. Internationally, the World Health Organisation (WHO) describes community empowerment as "the process of enabling communities to increase control over their lives" which, whatever its grammatical or other demerits, is at least concise. It's also both interesting and pleasing that the WHO does recognise the importance of empowerment for people's health - most especially their mental health where, to judge by suicide rates across the UK, Scotland generally (and, sadly, Highland in particular) has a real and serious problem. Bluntly, empowered people don't take their own lives - which is a damn good reason to care greatly about it.
[[ **of which pages 6, 9, and 11 are particularly informative and well worth examining; page 15 isn't bad either - and page 23 has some useful links. ]]
In March 2009 ScotGov and COSLA, experiencing a (somewhat rare) 'absolute' necessity to be "as clear as we could," thrashed-out a slightly wordier definition of community empowerment, that it's "a process where people work together to make change happen in their communities by having more power and influence over what matters to them." Noting that empowered communities "feel a sense of control" over what happens at a local level, they elaborated with admirable toughness that 'fundamentally' community empowerment amounts to "people taking collective action to make change happen on their own terms," which sounds great, no? Unfortunately, they followed-up this fine start with an utterly dismal qualifying paragraph that thoroughly deserves (and not in a good way) to be quoted in its entirety:-
"Community empowerment is a highly complex process to achieve and requires the active understanding and commitment from a wide number of stakeholders to achieve it. Community empowerment can be a slow, gradual process which involves continual learning and the constant building of a community's capacity to take on more - there is no finite end point in the process of community empowerment."
This makes community empowerment sound like so much hard work and I think it's worth noting, too, the sharp contrast between the nuanced 'can' of "can be a slow, gradual process" and the categorical 'is' of "is a highly complex process." Worse still, the 'requires' of "requires the active [..] commitment" is similarly categorical: since the commitment of "a wide number of stakeholders" is, we learn, always required then every stakeholder holds a veto of sorts. You hardly need me to tell you that this is a perfect recipe for delay, inaction, deadlock and disillusion - and disempowerment.
Before I unveil my own personal (albeit fairly obvious) answer to the problem of how to empower communities to "make change happen on their own terms" instead of becoming completely bogged-down in this 'COSLA quagmire'**, I should probably make clear that under the Community Empowerment Act the communities themselves can be quite various: Audit Scotland explain that communities may be "geographically located, or they may share common interests, concerns or identities."
[[ **this irresistible coinage makes the none-too-heroic assumption that what We Are Snook Ltd identified last year as "cultures of opposition" exist primarily in our local authorities rather than in the Scottish Government, whose commitment to empowerment is unquestionably sincere (at least at policy-making level). Specifically, the vivid and telling phrase just quoted featured with some prominence in last summer's independent report for ScotGov's Minister for Business, Fair Work and Skills by We Are Snook Limited (11 Sept 2020, final): 'Improving access to accountability of public services - engagement' (ISBN: 9781800040632, Format: 57 page PDF (452.9 kB), Contact: <ConsumerandCompetition@gov.scot>), which some alert and loyal readers might vaguely recall was also the subject of my Wed-Head of 21st April. ]]
I will have plenty more to say in the next couple of weeks or so about different kinds of communities and, in particular, how they can go about making the crucial move from being 'mere' communities to forming the all-important 'community bodies' with which much of the Act is primarily concerned. For the time being, though, I had better at least clarify that in this context, what Audit Scotland mean by 'identities' are features and characteristics such as, for good example, the 'protected' characteristics of the (UK) Equality Act 2010, viz:
* age
* disability
* gender reassignment
* marriage or civil partnership (in employment only)
* pregnancy and maternity
* race
* religion or belief
* sex
* sexual orientation
As this subject has come up, I may as well remark in passing that I find it quite useful to separate (i) age, sex, and marital status (which everyone has) from the others, which potentially identify minority characteristics that might represent barriers to inclusion; I go on to group those out further like this:-
* (ii) disability, pregnancy and maternity
* (iii) race and religion (or belief)
* (iv) sexual orientation and/or gender reassignment
With (I hope) pardonable inexactitude I call these four characteristic-groups the Universal, Physical, Cultural, and Sexual. Then I sort of bundle infirmity, dementia and age-related problems etc in with (ii), and language barriers in with (iii). Pleasingly, communitarians can for the most part afford to be significantly less preoccupied by group (iv) characteristics in these days of increasing toleration of the diverse proclivities of our various self-identifying sexual minorities (although, admittedly, that could quite easily change if transgender athletes start to undermine exclusively biological-female participation in women's sport - which is what is happening in the United States, unfortunately). A possible fifth category, increasingly important, is (v) Technological because, although there are plenty of highly-skilled 'silver surfers' out there, there's little doubt that huge generation gaps are opening up when it comes to ICT-literacy (which oldies like me once called IT-literacy, rather illustrating my point).
Anyway, so much (for now) for the communities. To return at last (as promised) to the empowerment side of the equation, in last month's submission to ScotGov's LPP consultation I contributed, as it happens, a couple of paragraphs laying out the principle of 'Deontic Empowerment' (Gk 'deon': duty), which I described there as "very logical, almost definitional." I nevertheless felt the need to state it explicitly because, frankly, it has far too often been 'fudged' - I am personally convinced that neglect of it has seriously and repeatedly hamstrung public service reform north of the border**. The 'Deontic Empowerment' principle insists that parties are empowered by being endowed with rights, and that parties acquire such rights exactly when corresponding duties are imposed on some appropriate counterparty (eg a local authority). The key phrase there is "exactly when" - ie imposing the duty creates the right, so the empowerment is deontic. This applies both to individuals ("I have that right") and community bodies ("We have that right"). In other words, your right is always someone's (or everyone's!) duty: even a very general right like freedom of speech (for those happy individuals who possess it) is equivalent to a general duty to abstain from censorship.
[[ **in a future Wed-Head I intend (very summarily) to compare the Scottish and English/Welsh approaches to the twin goals both of greater localism and of the reform of UK public services. Interestingly, and perhaps revealingly, "public service reform" has become "public sector reform" in Audit Scotland's 'awareness-raiser' of July 2019 cited above. A Freudian slip, perhaps? ;-) ]]
It would, of course, be quite wrong of me to suggest that the only way to empower people is by giving them rights. You could give them guns instead, for a start. However, a Scottish second-amendment is (fortunately?) not on the cards and, in any case, a close reading of what I submitted does leave the door open to alternatives. Nevertheless, deontic empowerment is, in my considered opinion, where the rubber hits the road when it comes to public service reform. Realistically, if "a wide number of stakeholders" are actively to commit in earnest to "a highly complex process," then it's the only game in town folks, because (as Chuck Colson so memorably put it), it's only "once you have them by the balls, [that] their hearts and minds will follow."