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, Copenhagen May 2001See paper in pdf
AREA BASED INITIATIVES AND URBAN POLICY
Paper presented at the Conference
Area-based Initiatives in contemporary Urban Policy, Danish Building and Urban Research and European Urban Research association
Professor Murray Stewart
The Cities Research Centre
University of the West of England, BRISTOL
The Cities Research Centre
Faculty of the Built Environment
University of the West of England
Coldharbour Lane
BRISTOL BS16 1QY
TEL 00 44 117 3443379
FAX 00 44 117 344
e-mail murray.stewart@uwe.ac.uk
AREA-BASED INITIATIVES AND URBAN POLICY
Introduction
Discussion of the role and function of area-based initiatives comes at an interesting time for both UK researchers and policy makers. Area Based Initiatives (hereafter ABIs), have a long tradition in England and Scotland but have been subject to stringent review in the last year. On the one hand there has been a strong emphasis on area-based urban policy over the last quarter of a century, with a succession of initiatives, many of them area-based, pursued by one government after another regardless of political colour. (Lawless 1988; Stewart 2000). Since 1997 this wave of ABIs has grown and a characteristic of the last four years has been the establishment of a series of ABIs across many policy areas (DETR 2000, 2001a). At the same time there has been severe questioning of the logic and impact of ABI policy and the emphasis in the most recent policy thinking has been to revive the ‘main programmes’ debate and to point to the marginality of ABIs in addressing the most severe manifestations of poverty and disadvantage. Similar if not so intense debates have surrounded thinking about area initiatives in many countries and the time is thus ripe for a debate on the role and function of ABIs in urban policy.
This paper makes a start on this task. It falls into four parts. In Section 2 which follows there is a discussion, especially important for the Copenhagen conference, of Area Based Initiatives in context – a recognition (albeit brief and inevitably UK biased) of the comparative context in which ABIs can be viewed. This is accompanied by a resume of the current shifts in English (not UK) thinking, and a mention of the research work on which the thinking behind this paper is based
1. Section 3 addresses the role and function of ABIs – what exactly are they for and what focus do they have, what functions do they perform, what form do they take. Section 4 provides a brief picture of intiatives and partnerships in Bristol and points to the spatial and administrative complexity of the ABI scene in the UK, whilst Section 5 looks at the issues surrounding integration, collaboration and co-ordination of initiatives within the framework of urban policy.1) The paper draws in part on research on ‘The Co-ordination of Area-based Initiatives’, undertaken by the University of the West of England, Bristol, jointly with the University of Newcastle and the Office for Public Management, and supported by the Department of the Environment Transport and the Regions (DETR 2000, 2001a), and in part from the Bristol Integrated City Project which is part of the ESRC Cities: Competitiveness and Cohesion Programme (Grant L 13030100116). The views expressed in the paper are solely those of the author.
Area based initiatives in context
The Comparative Context
It is almost twenty years since issues of urban spatial segregation, of marginalisation (in the inner city or the peripheral estate), of urban exclusion, and of area-based disadvantage were placed in a European Union policy context (Burton et al 1986). They have continued to be researched at the European scale (e.g. Mangen and Hantrais 1993; Preteceille 1995; Room (ed) 1997; Parkinson 1998; Madanipour et al 1998) and have been given practical, if marginal, policy attention through successive poverty programmes and through the European Community URBAN programme. It has been argued that relative to other European countries the UK experience of urban area-based initiatives has been longer in terms of experience, more weighty in terms of explicit resources devoted to urban initiatives, more sophisticated in terms of the nature and working of partnerships, and more researched in terms of the volume of policy relevant research commissioned, than elsewhere. Thus,
‘Despite the outstanding challenges it faces, Britain is in the lead, rather than lagging, in terms of designing area-based initiatives......Many countries are imitating the essential principles of the recent British experience with area-based initiatives. The experience of the countries in this study do not suggest that there are many radically different approaches that Britain should adopt’ (Parkinson 1998)
This judgement may well be accurate in terms of formal partnership working where there appears to be general agreement that England and Ireland led the way in institutionalising partnerships as the machinery for engaging multi-sectoral partners in area-based working.
Parkinson’s review, however, illustrated the importance of recognising nation-specific administrative and political cultures, and the dangers of identifying apparently easily transferable lessons. Despite the continuing debate at European level about exclusion, the literature tends to identify a varying range of interpretations of, and approaches to, disadvantage and exclusion which reflect nationally specific characteristics (e.g. Evans et al. 1995; Berghman 1997; Cousins 1998; Blanc 1998; Clasen at al 1997).
hus the Scandinavian perspective on exclusion is coloured by a long history of strong welfare state provision allied - especially in Denmark - by strong moral values about inclusion and citizenship. In the Netherlands also, where a strong tradition of rational land use planning and of consensus building dominates urban management, efforts to counter exclusion (and the position of immigrant minorities) have focussed strongly on adherence to principles of community consultation and engagement. In Ireland a weak local government system resulted in EU funded area-based initiatives being focussed strongly on community based organisation with local politicians largely excluded from partnership membership. Only latterly, at the end of the years of heavy European funding, but with the continuing visibility of poverty, did the Irish government move towards area-based integration with the establishment of the Integrated Services Project ‘to develop new procedures to ensure a more focussed and better co-ordinated response by the statutory authorities to the needs of communities’.
In France area-based initiatives were kick-started in the early 1980s by a series of disturbances on the peripheral housing estates of the Paris and Lyons suburbs. Applying the contrat mechanism (linking national planning to local implementation through formal agreements) French initiatives drew heavily on a new application of the established state/departement/commune network which has served France well for centuries (le Gales and Mawson ). Here again, however, the ‘contrats de ville’ and the quartiers policy need to be understood in the context of the role of the family in French welfare, the weak legal position of immigrants, and the relatively minor role of voluntary organisations (associations) in French community life. The major French contribution, however, was to identify ‘quartiers’; as a European issue and to encourage the Quartiers en Crise initiatives which were themselves the precursor of URBAN and placed area-based urban policies on the edge of, if not at the top of, the European agenda (Jacquier 1990; Dawson et al 1993)
A different perspective on European experience (Burton et al 1987; Ball 1994; Geddes 1998). reflects the view that whilst the UK may be ahead on the formalisation of joint arrangements through partnership, elsewhere more emphasis is given to the strength of local communities with social networks, mutual support, and community solidarity given weight. The role of social capital emerges as crucial with implications for redrawing the boundaries between state and civil society. A similar conclusion was drawn by the NATO Challenges of Modern Society group on Deprived Urban Areas (Donzelot and Jaillet 1997) when it identified the weakening of social solidarity as a key factor in explaining the nature of contemporary urban life. Other work on exclusion throughout Europe (Madanipour et al 1998) draws attention to the concept of moral community highlighting the significance of cultural diversity, ethnicity, and racial stigmatisation as factors explaining the nature of exclusion.
Additionally in relation to comparative European lessons there is the North American experience. Over the years there has been extensive Anglo-American comparison of urban policy problems and solutions (Hambleton and Taylor 1994; Judd and Parkinson 1990; Norman and Modares 1999). Experiments have crossed the Atlantic in both directions (Urban Development Action Grant, Enterprise Zones), but it is not clear precisely which lessons for good practice in integrated working can be learned from US experience. The particular nature of ethnicity in the US debate makes comparison difficult, but the most recent experience of CDCs (Community Development Corporations), of Empowerment Zones, and of the latest Comprehensive Community Initiatives (Coulton 1998) suggests some of the same messages about area-based initiatives - flexible use of welfare and benefit resources, strong community involvement and ownership, for example, but again the importance of social capital and of community asset building through Development Trusts or the like.
A UK Perspective
There is a long history of spatial intervention in the UK (Holtermann 1975). Sometimes involving larger areas, sometime smaller; sometimes focussing on regional disadvantage, sometimes city wide, sometimes neighbourhood based, policy has move through successive phases – the regional assistance areas of the 1930s, the post-war New Towns policies, the earlier selective ‘traditional’ Urban programme, Inner Area experiments, the partnership and programme authority initiatives of the late 1970s, the Urban Development Corporations and Task Forces of the 1980s, and on to City Challenge, and Single Regeneration Budget schemes. There has been growing recognition both of the modest success of these initiatives (Robson 1994) and of the absence of a firm evidence base upon which to judge new policies (Lawless 2001). In the last two years, however, the work of the Social Exclusion Unit (1998), of the Government Initiatives in Disadvantaged Areas (GIDA) review as part of the 2001 Comprehensive Spending Review (Treasury 2001), and of the Cabinet Office (2000) there has been a reappraisal of the nature of urban policies resulting in the Urban White Paper (DETR 2001c) and a national Strategy for Neighbourhood Renewal (Social Exclusion Unit 2001).
One element of this latest strand of thinking has been to respond to the proliferation of ABIs under the Labour Government, and to attempt to rationalise the structures for the planning and implementation of small area initiatives. A Neighbourhood Renewal Unit has been established to oversee the national neighbourhood Renewal Strategy, and to manage the new Neighbourhood Renewal Fund. Local Strategic Partnerships will be established to set the context within which ABIs will operate, a new Regional Co-ordination Unit under the Deputy Prime Minister will support the better integration of government within Whitehall and in the regions.
One – minor – element in the move towards the co-ordination of initiatives has been the establishment of an action oriented research project to examine issues surrounding collaboration and co-ordination. That research, nearing completion in mid 2001, has examined the range of initiatives established by the government over the past four years and has assessed the role and function of ABIs and the need for further co-ordination at national regional and local levels. Key questions which have arisen in the work at research reinforce the observation that there is much loose discussion of ABIs, a lack of understanding of their different purposes, conflicting expectations of what they might achieve, a range of organisational cultures which inhibit/encourage joint working between ABIs, and differing approaches to their evaluation. It is against that background that this paper looks at the focus, function and form of ABIs in England in general and Bristol in particular.
THE ROLE AND FUNCTION OF ABIs
Focus
There is a continuing dilemma as to whether ABIs are about people or areas. The evidence as to geographical concentration of deprivation seems inconclusive. Most deprived people do not live in spatially concentrated areas. Nevertheless many do, and the work of the social exclusion supports a conclusion about the existence of neighbourhood based concentrations of exclusion (Social Exclusion Unit 1999). But whilst spatial concentration may compound exclusion and disadvantage the evidence about policy impact is mixed; programmes targetted on the most disadvantaged seem to work best when focussed on specific groups – older people, people with disabilities, for example (Lawless 2001). What is not clear from English experience, however, is how far area-based initiatives are in fact area-based and whether this means they are initiatives designed to assist the areas themselves or the people – currently - within them. Much of the renewal of past decades has been aimed at physical renewal predominantly of the housing stock, but also of obsolescent industrial building stock, derelict land, and some infrastructure. This has brought improvement to the areas concerned, which have in turn in some localities brought investment in economic activity, the return of retailing, and the emergence of in some cases of previously non–existent land, housing and property markets.
There is thus an important distinction to be made between initiatives in areas and initiatives for areas. There are ABIs which are nationally conceived and address problems of low income and deprivation and happen to impact on people in particular places. Generalised fiscal policies and universal social security benefits are the obvious cases. By supporting people in need, and to the extent that some/many of these people are concentrated in specific places, areas benefit – more income circulating with some spent locally, more material consumption in households some improving the quality of community as well as family life. On the other hand other national initiatives are rolled out selectively with attention focussed on those most at risk in the particular policy or suffering the worst experiences (low educational attainment, crime hot spots, areas of high unemployment. The Indices of Local Deprivation identify where the concentrations of disadvantage lie and initiatives are focussed on these areas. As one government department pointed out to us ‘everything we do is area-based – it has to happen somewhere’. But for these initiatives there is little connection with other initiatives close by, no sense that synergy between activities in a locality can be beneficial or that added value might come by making a concentrated and integrated attack on deprivation and disadvantage within a neighbourhood or small area.
Thus only a few of what are widely known as Area Based Initiatives in England are in practice area-based. Some, however, are – many of the eight hundred or so schemes supported under the Single Regeneration Budget and most notably the more recent New Deal for Communities initiatives. Neighbourhood – area-based – Renewal is one plank of the Government’s urban policies but it is only one, and it would be quite wrong to assume that the neighbourhoods policy is synonymous with urban policy. The recent White Paper on Urban Policy makes this clear. What is perhaps more interesting is whether the neighbourhood renewal policy is synonymous with policies for social inclusion. Again Ministers point to fiscal and generalised welfare policies but there is no doubt that area –based policies – programmes in areas and for areas are at the forefront of the government’s selling points in the anti-exclusion fight.
There remains therefore the broad if over simplified distinction to be made between policies and programmes which aim to assist people wherever they live (universalist policies), those which aim to assist people in particular disadvantaged areas (targetted policies which by coincidence assist area regeneration), and those which aim specifically to assist places (and hopefully the people in those places). Area-based policy is certainly about the third of these categories, and probably about the second, but the question remains as to whether area improvement is an end in itself or whether it is a means to an end.
The question may be better exemplified by thinking about impact. Does it matter for example, whether improvements in an area – to housing, to schools, to the local environment, to the availability of jobs – result in benefits to non-residents. Does it matter if crime rates fall in one area but rise elsewhere? Does it matter if residential property values rise and a new wave of housing investment allows local people to sell up to incomers and move elsewhere? Does it matter if the local leisure facilities attract users from across the city and the area becomes gentrified. If indicators such as confidence, image, investment potential, long term economic sustainability are central to regeneration then improvement to the area is beneficial. If however the emphasis is upon those residents at a disadvantage, then clearly improvement to the area and the displacement of local people has a negative impact. In terms of overall urban policy it is not clear within many of the policies for and in areas, whether ABIs are intended to loosen up the socio-economic spatial structure of cities and encourage mobility, enhance the working of housing and labour markets, and support movement and choice, or whether they are intended to enhance stability, and the maintenance of community, and hence slow down the trends which have damaged local communities – the movement out of many young and aspirant people, the disappearance of local jobs.
Function
Against this continuing uncertainty about focus comes variety in function – what do area-based initiatives attempt to achieve in terms of outcomes and change. Here again there is often uncertainty and mixed objectives. Often outcomes are specified in terms of shifts in objective indicators – reductions in crime, increased numbers of small business, reduced unemployment, improved health standards, increased educational achievement and so on. The particular function adopted for interventions at any specific time is a function of the combination of intellectual, ideological and political considerations. But four main functional directions can be identified – stimulation of economy and employment, renewal of the physical environment, enhancement of social conditions and social relations, and political engagement. Whilst it is increasingly acknowledged that a holistic integration is appropriate one or more of these functional directions can often be seen as the leading edge of area-based working.
Economy and Employment
The disadvantage experienced in particular areas can be attributed to lack of work, which in turn leads to lack of earned income and reliance on an inadequate social wage. Whether induced by the disappearance of traditional jobs (coal, steel, and manufacturing) or by the perceived inadequacies of labour supply (educational shortcomings, lack of skills, lack of work experience), economically driven initiatives have in general sought to improve the quality of labour supply and to ease access to the labour market. Demand is less susceptible to policy intervention but area-based initiatives have tried to create more local jobs – historically by attracting investment into or close to disadvantaged areas and/or by stimulating the creation and growth of small business. Stimulation of the social economy, of community business, and of small business support address this latter issue, the creation of wider opportunities in larger firms the former. A range of labour supply mechanisms – education, work experience, mentoring, job shops, intermediate labour markets, targetted recruitment, and initiatives which attempt to ‘bridge the gap’ or create ’pathways to work’ attempt to identify the most vulnerable in the labour market. In the UK historically the Task Forces of the late 1980s and the New Deal for Unemployed of the late 1990s were/are initiatives of this kind whilst currently the New Start initiatives and Employment Zones fulfil the same function.
The Physical Environment
If the improvement of labour supply represents the primary favoured approach to economy and employment, then renewal of the physical stock has come close behind, and indeed the bulk of the criticism of past area-based initiatives has been that they have concentrated too much on physical improvements rather than on economic and social improvement. Thus the clearance of derelict land, the improvement of infrastructure and transport access, renewal of obsolescent housing, provision of advance factories or small industrial units has characterised many initiatives and indeed transformed the appearance – though less so the function – of many areas. An architectural/physical determinism has dominated many of the British area based initiatives from the post-war New Towns to the Urban Development Corporations of the 1980s. Many of the housing initiatives – Housing Action Areas, Estate Action, Renewal Areas – were characterised by heavy expenditure on the external residential fabric of areas at the expense of other functions. If we think that this physical approach is outdated however the latest proposals in the UK for Urban Regeneration Companies (Robson et al 2001) or the demolition and renewal of older housing in some New Deal for Communities areas demonstrate that physical renewal is alive and well.
Social Conditions and Social Relations
The function of supporting enhanced social interaction and community organisation is rooted in the assumption that it is a decline in the quality of social relations which has brought the reversal of the fortunes of some neighbourhoods. It is argued that the rebuilding of social capital based on trust and mutual interdependence can achieve neighbourhood turn-around if only the traditional habits of neighbouring and caring could be re-created. There is extensive new evidence about the nature of local social networks from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation research on neighbourhood images (Silburn at al 1999; Cattell and Evans 1999; Andersen et al 1999; Wood and Vamplwew 1999), on the strengths of and pressurs on family life - the Bristol based study by Gill, Tanner and Bland (2000) for example - and on the nature of social cohesion in disadvantaged neighbourhoods (Forrest and Kearns 1999; Page 2000). Much of the evidence focusses on the role of children as a pivotal element with networks mobilising around issues of childcare and schooling. Women play a crucial role. It is important, however, to remember some of the negative aspects of neighbourhood life – relations of trust and dependence built around drugs, crime, abuse and the function of illicit and often illegal power structures in maintaining oppressive systems of social relations (Hoggett 1997). Again there is evidence of the isolation of particular groups – another Bristol study (Razzaque 2000) demonstrates the marginality of black and mixed race people on a predominantly white outer estate as well as the isolation experienced by older people and people with disabilities in the same neighbourhood. Theoretically this echoes the strong ties/weak ties debate (Granovetter 1973) and invites discussion of the nature of social capital in building relationships within communties and between communities and the formal organisations of state and society (Woolcock 1998; Taylor 2000). In practice we see a huge range of area-based community capacity building initiatives involving community centres, organisational skills development, leadership support designed to invest in social capital and create a new social solidarity
Political Engagement
Political engagement rests on the assumption that the area/neighbourhood is disenfranchised and/or disconnected from the mechanisms which normally fulfil rights and offer equality in access to goods and services. A lack of information, the absence of aid and advice services in deprived neighbourhoods, the vulnerability of excluded communities in the face of bureaucratic administrative systems combine to deprive some communities of ‘voice’ with the political system offering little redress and the choice of ‘exit’ seldom open to the most disadvantaged groups. This interpretation of disadvantage challenges the processes of traditional representative democracy and argues that local elected councils and councillors have failed the disadvantaged neighbourhood. Initiatives which seek to respond to this challenge on the one hand seek to enhance representative processes. In England this means the modernisation of local government (DETR 2000a) through a range of measures which seek to ensure political responsiveness, to revitalise electoral procedures, to provide mechanisms for scrutiny, and to enhance leadership. The role of the ward councillor can be supported.
In Bristol the independent Democracy Commission has published its report on democratic involvement in the city (Bristol Democracy Commission 2001). Its analysis covers representation and the number, selection, role, and public perception of councillors. Most relevant to the area initiatives theme, however, is coverage of neighbourhood and democracy. The report examines arguments for looking more closely at what constitute relevant areas below city wide level and recommends a 'local boundary commission' set up with the task of dividing the city into a number of areas. These areas would be multiples of two or three existing wards and would therefore number from a dozen to eighteen. The outcome of working on such an area basis would be to encourage the development of neighbourhood forums which might in turn be built around existing organisations - development trusts, community partnerships, resident groups and a wide range of voluntary and community groups. Neighbourhood Forums might in turn develop into Area Committees with more extensive powers of decision making and spending, with or without the support of local ward councillors.
Proposals of the kind discussed by the Democracy Commission build on the limited autonomy which has been gained by some localities and which is now built into democratic structures. Both the Hartcliffe and Withywood Community Partnership and the Community at Heart New Deal Partnership have embarked on electoral procedures for their respective Boards. This gives legitimacy to community ownership of regeneration and enhances the role which local people may play in regeneration partnership structures. Other initiatives - Sure Start, Education Action Zone for example - offer similar openings for local people.
At the same time the Democracy Commission recognises the lack of direct accountability of the many partnerships which now exist across and beyond the city and argues for much clearer codes of conduct and procedures in order to ensure that joint working does not impede accountability (see Section 5 below).
Public Services
The failure of public service delivery in disadvantaged neighbourhoods represents one of the major challenges to public policy. Whilst failure is not confined to the public sector (financial services, retailing, leisure are equally absent), it is the shortcomings in housing management, health, education, environmental management – street cleaning, rubbish collection for example – that are pronounced. The Government’s Modernisation looks to best value and Local Public Service Agreements to underpin improvements in standards of public service delivery and meeting LPSA targets will be a condition of the new Neighbourhood Fund. Local government is addressing these issue at neighbourhood level already – decentralisation schemes, neighbourhood offices, one stop shops, realigned front line working, for example. There are further proposals to extend this public service improvement programme into disadvantaged areas – neighbourhood management pilots are in progress in order to make services more responsive to local needs, more user focussed, more immediate in delivery. One purpose of the New Deal for Communities pathfinders is to test out new approaches to local service delivery.
Form
Given the uncertainty about focus and function it is not surprising that there is difference in form. One way of looking at this is to recognise that there are different types of initiative. There are Exploratory initiatives - pathfinders, pioneers, trailblazers - concerned with finding new ways to approach social inclusion, to challenge existing procedures, to innovate, and to try out new ways of integrated working. As a variation there are Experimental initiatives which aim to test new approaches and measure the extent to which changes in approach, resources, responsibilities, and accountabilities bring about measurable change in outcomes. There are Targetted initiatives which are designed to focus resources onto the worst areas, to support the most disadvantaged and thus to achieve positive and measurable outcomes against a number of ever more tightly drawn targets. There are Pilot initiatives which are designed to lead other organisations along a safe route, and to assess issues of transferability prior to the replication of initiatives elsewhere and eventually perhaps to their application across all localities. Exploration, experimentation, targetting and piloting are often complementary, but can be mutually exclusive and there is widespread uncertainty in localities about precisely what government policies entail and therefore what kinds of evaluation might be appropriate.
Often initiatives pass from one phase to another, sometimes knowingly, sometimes accidentally, sometimes seamlessly, sometimes in an unconnected way. In England the Community Legal Service Partnership Pioneers (and the lesser Associate Pioneers) passed swiftly on to become mainstream activity within a period of no more than a year. Employment Zones Phase 1 preceded a quite different Employment Zone 2 phase which manifestly rejected the evaluation outcomes of Phase 1 and imposed a new regime. The first nineteen New Deal for Communities schemes are pathfinders the next twenty are not. Sure Start, moving from an initial thirty schemes towards a state of major roll out with several hundred projects and some cities having three or four projects, has shifted close to being a main programme.
The form in which initiatives appear, however, is also influenced both by the external environment of national government and regional agencies as well as by the by the micro-politics local inter-organisational working. Central government determines the way in which many initiatives must be implemented and denies local flexibility in implementation. The consequences are that the structures, processes, activities and outcomes are heavily centrally determined and the possibilities of locally sensitive solutions are reduced. Thus area-based initiatives become much more the manifestation of central policies in areas than a reflection of local community based solutions. The specificity of the area becomes diluted, place becomes a less important variable in initiative design, and initiatives become homogenised as programme guidelines determine the form in which initiatives will emerge.
Central prescription can also determine the shape of local arrangements and in particular establish the rules under which initiative partnerships operate. Thus membership of initiative partnerships may be more or less closed according to the national and regional guidance. In addition procedures may at least tire the smaller initiatives many of whose active members ail come from local voluntary or community organisations, or at most kill off risk as initiative fatigue sets in. The experience of community leaders in area based regeneration (Purdue et al 2000) is a salutary lesson to those who see community oriented area-based initiatives as the source for a new participative democracy (see above). The evidence from a wide range of studies (Hastings 1996a, 1996b; Purdue 2000; Skelcher et al 1996) is that community interests can become marginalised and that power shifts slowly if at all. Procedures of project appraisal, monitoring, and implementation delay progress and disempower communities with the consequence that community leaders opt out and/or that professionals step in. there is also only modest evidence that local people are benefiting from the creation of these opportunities to shape their areas. In initiatives which are even more strongly dominated by central government priorities (e.g. in schools) the role of parents is a weak one in the face of performance targets.
The Bristol example
Area-Based Initiatives
The proliferation of initiatives can be illustrated by the experience of Bristol. The following list identifies some of the ABIs in operation in mid 2001.
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– Eight Single Regeneration Budget Schemes across the city; Bristol 2020 (city wide) Inner City Lifeline Filwood and Inns Court Revitalisation Northern Arc Bridging the Gap (thematic) Youth Owning Urban Regeneration (thematic) Working Together for Change (Hartcliffe and Withywood) Bringing Bristol Together (thematic) – New Deal for Communities - Barton Hill Community at Heart is one of the 39 national pathfinders. – URBAN I (targeted on the eastern inner city) – A European Union Objective 2 programme for the South West Region includes parts of Bristol with five wards from Ashley to Filwood benefiting) – Two Sure Starts in Hartcliffe and Knowle, – An Education Action Zone (based on 21 Inner City schools), and a further Small Education Action Zone in Withywood – Excellence in Cities, – A Home Office Crime Reduction Anti-Burglary Programme – A Youth Inclusion scheme in Barton Hill. – The Children’s Fund supporting work with families and young children – Creative Partnership – arts activity with schools to be funded by the Department of Culture, Media and Sports in 2002. – The Neighbourhood Support Fund – support from DfEE to support community organisations develop their work with local young people. |
Map 1 illustrates that these initiatives are found on a crescent of disadvantage stretching north/south across Bristol. The bulk of disadvantage, however, is concentrated in a swathe of neighbourhoods from the centre, through the inner eastern part of the city into the southern estates. It is indeed in the southern periphery that the longest experience of disadvantage has been documented (Holmes 1992; Razzaque 2000; Grimshaw and Razzaque 2000; Gill et al 2000) with the Hartcliffe and Withywood area having been the focus for two unsuccessful City Challenge bids, but now benefitting from an SRB % scheme (Working Together for Change) managed by a local Community Partnership.
These initiatives are managed by a variety of area-based or initiative based partnerships, made up of members from central government, local authoirty, statutory agencies, voluntary organisations and community. Amongst these are:
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This set of initiative partnerships, however, needs to be seen in the context of the shifting regional and sub-regional institutional map. Partnerships have been established at regional, sub-regional (the former Avon area now defined as the West of England), city and neighbourhood level. With the responsibility for regeneration and renewal now shared by, but split between, the Government Office of the South West (GOSW) and the South West of England Regional Development Agency (SWRDA), there now exists a jigsaw of partnerships across the region. There is a complex system of governance which addresses on the one hand the decentralisation of power from Whitehall and the enhancement of local democracy, and on the other the integration of multiple programmes through joined up working. The consequence has been that the city-region has become institutionally crowded with both regional/sub-regional and neighbourhood/area-based structures pressing in on the more long-standing mechanisms for the government of the city.
In terms of organisational hierarchy, at the top, and largely external to the region, are the departments of central government ; below them come a range of regional institutions, notably the Government Office for the South West (GOSW), SWRDA (the regional development agency) and the Regional Chamber – the ‘shadow’ regional government with members delegated from local government and other organisations. There is a set of sub-regional structures and below, at the city level, a number of ‘umbrella’ organisations – Bristol City Council most obviously but also the Bristol Chamber of Commerce and Initiative (BCCI) the private sector umbrella, and the Voluntary Organisations Standing Conference on Urban Regeneration (VOSCUR. Finally come the smaller area-based initiatives described above.
Amongst the city-wide partnership (or similar joint working) arrangements most relevant to regeneration are in alphabetical order):
(BCDP) Bristol Education Forum Bristol Health and Social Care Partnership Bristol Housing Partnership Bristol Regeneration Partnership (BRP) Bristol and South Gloucestershire Lifelong Learning Partnership Bristol Sports Partnership Broadmead Board Limited Community Legal Services Partnership Community Safety Partnership Connexions Early Years and Childcare Partnership Learning Works New Deal Strategic Partnership Rough Sleepers Initiative Consortium West of England Strategic Partnership Western Partnership for Sustainable Development |
The Bristol city-region has been characterised, therefore, in the last decade by the emergence of a web of partnership working. Partnerships in the Bristol city-region are now widespread, sprawling across the city in a variety of shapes and sizes. These partnerships undertake a wide range of tasks and are not static; partnerships are formed, others are disbanded, and some merge into each other. Membership of partnerships changes. New government initiatives - Sure Start, New Deal for Communities, Education Action Zones - all demand new partnerships for programme delivery. One principal feature of the new map, however, is its fluidity. Partnerships overlap and interact in an unstructured, informal manner. Membership and cross-membership is equally fluid as new partnerships form and the ‘usual suspects’ (often individuals rather than organisations) are invited to become members. Leadership roles are unclear.
In the face of this complexity the research question – to which both our DETR Co-ordination work and the ESRC Bristol Integrated City research study are addressed – is there any reason to regard the uncertainty about focus, function and form of ABIs and/or the institutio9nal complexity of the city region as matters of concern? Is there a need for the co-ordination of activity and if so who should do it and how?
Area-based Initiatives and urban policy
There is a significant literature on co-ordination. Webb (1991) identified three broad drivers for co-ordinated action - rational/altruistic drivers, mandated, imperative drivers, and bureaucratic political drivers. Rationality and altruism produce voluntary collaboration and the conditions under which such collaboration can emerge have increasingly been researched in the context of partnerships, coalition and strategic alliances (de Groot 1993; Mackintosh 1993; Hastings 1996; Skelcher et al 1996; Skelcher and Lowndes 1998; Huxham 1998). Where trust does not exist (as it often barely does between central and local levels of government, or between community and government) more formal methods to ensure collaboration and co-ordination need to be employed. Thus there has been a strong culture of contractualisation and contract compliance as the method of enforcing conformance in the past twenty years, an approach to co-ordination which reflects the mandated mode identified by Webb. But the fragmentation of institutional form and the proliferation of initiatives both as illustrate in Bristol demands a culture of co-ordination which is heavily reliant on interorganisational bargaining, negotiation, and the operation of consensual multi-sectoral governance.
The research undertaken for DETR identified three ideal types of co-ordinating machinery – strategy, delivery and networks. Strategy and vision can act as integrative and co-ordinating mechanism and call on the arenas of civic partnership and inter-sectoral leadership as drivers of a co-ordinated approach. This approach is now incorporated into the proposals for Local Strategic Partnerships in England (DETR 2001b). An alternative perspective takes service delivery as the corner-stone of integrated co-ordination and argues that it is the detail of front line staff working, neighbourhood management, and the specifics of on the ground services to individuals and families that effective co-ordination must be grounded. This is analogous to Webb's focus on operational requirements. A third networks perspective sees co-ordination as less driven from top or bottom but more as a function of informal communication and information exchange between key actors (Grimshaw 2001)2. Thus an unstructured network model of co-ordination may be appropriate as the most effective vehicle for linking initiatives (and the evidence is that this is what is occurring at present).
2) The paper to this conference by Lucy Grimshaw discusses this issue.
Currently co-ordinating machinery can be either of the mandated form since partnership working is a requirement of all new governmental initiatives or bureaucratic, since most initiatives involve a complex system of bidding, preparation of strategy and delivery plan, implementation and monitoring arrangements and a working management partnership. Indeed much of the co-ordination of ABIs at present is both mandated and bureaucratic with little apparent trust between state and civil society. There is a lack of the social capital which supports the weak ties between community based individuals and organisations (Granovetter 1973) and the larger institutions of the formal state (Woolcock 1998; Taylor 2000; Stewart 2001 forthcoming). This combination of mandated bureaucratic co-ordination stifles the altruism identified by Webb
The conclusions from Bristol are clear. There is a fragmented and complex system of partnerships without the protocols which might make joined up working more practicable. There is an absence of strategic leadership which could give shape to the direction of such partnerships, and there is no integrating civic leadership to offer direction to the variety of programmes in the city across the city. Hence there is little integration between area-based initiatives and main programmes of local authority and other public organisations. ABIs – scattered geographically from north to south possess no structure which allows them to relate one to the other and still less a structure which encourages lessons from area-based experience to feed into main programmes. ABIs are thus isolated from the urban policies which seek to shape the urban future of Bristol as a whole. Some work is in hand to address the issue and the Bristol Regeneration partnership 9which manages seven of the eight SRB schemes) is preparing a Regeneration Framework setting out the principles and objectives of regeneration working. This will complement the Neighbourhood Strategy also under preparation and the Community Plan which the City Council is also preparing. All three must be endorsed by the new Local Strategic Partnership. Should this integration be achieved the linkage between ABIs and urban policy will be established; should there be failure to make the necessary connections the fragmentation of area-based work will continue. Focus, function and form will fit uneasily one with the other; confusion and uncertainty about the contribution of ABIs to wider urban policy will continue.
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