A few years after I started to work (in institutional development) in central Europe, I got the chance of a short sabbatical at the Urban Studies journal of Glasgow University which allowed me to produce a more definitive statement of the lessons which I felt had emerged from the Social Strategy work. I remember presenting this in 1995 to a Human Rights conference in Bratislava – but it was 1999 before it was incorporated into a book I used as my calling card for my 8 years in Central Asia - In Transit – some notes on good governance
But the model of change it contains was perhaps not as clearly presented as it might have been - with a brief references to Kurt Lewin's freezing/refreezing approach and only the briefest of references to a more relevant 1977 article entitled Community Development – its administrative and political challenge which I had published in a Social Work journal This actually gave a much better sense of the thinking which drove some of us in our thinking about conditions in the West of Scotland - arguing that
Our society is hardly what one would call a participatory democracy. The term that is used - "representative" democracy - recognises that "the people" do not take political decisions but have rather surrender that power to one tor several) small elites - subject to infrequent checks. Such checks are, of course, a rather weak base on which to rest claims for democracy4 and more emphasis is therefore given to the freedom of expression and organisation whereby pressure groups articulate a variety of interests. Those who defend the consequent operation of the political process argue that we have, in effect a political market place in which valid or strongly supported ideas survive and are absorbed into new policies. They further argue that every viewpoint or interest has a more or less equal chance of finding expression and recognition. This is the political theory of pluralism.
Community development disputes this view of the operation of the policy process. At its most extreme - in some theories of community action - it argues that the whole process is a gigantic confidence trick. In its more liberal version it merely wants to strengthen the voice of certain inarticulate members of society.
There is, I would suggest, a relatively simple way to test the claims of those who argue that there is little scope for improvement in the operation of our democratic process and that any deficiencies are attributable to the faults of individuals rather than to the system. It involves looking at how new policies emerge.
The policy process
A key question is: How does government hear and act upon the signals from below? How do "problems" get on the political "agenda"? The assumption of our society, good "liberals" that most of us essentially are, is that
the channels relating governors to governed are neutral and
the opportunity to articulate grievances and have these defined (if they are significant enough) as "problems" requiring action from authority is evenly distributed throughout society.
"Problems" emerge because individuals or groups feel dissatisfied and articulate and organise that dissatisfaction in an influential way which makes it difficult for government to resist. "Grievance" or "dissatisfaction" is not. however, a simple concept - it arises when a judgement is made that events fall short of what one has reason to expect. Grievance reflects the relationship between “expectations” and “perceived performance” – with working-class people being bludgeoned to expect mere crumbs and to be grateful.
Community development staff were, in a sense, the shock-troops to help make the pluralist system work again.
As we were drafting our first slim attempt at a strategy in 1975, the Labour government was winding down what had become an increasingly critical Community Development Programme – reflected in John Bennington’s Local Government Becomes Big Business; (CDP 1976); and Gilding the Ghetto – the state and the poverty experiments (CDP 1977) Little wonder the Labour government regretted opening the Pandora's box of community development! By then, the country was being increasingly assailed with economic problems which are usefully outlined in this article
And then, in 1979, that Labour government came to an ignominious end – brought down by a combination of industrial action and Scottish nationalist insouciance, allowing Margaret Thatcher her 11 year reign. So we no longer had a government sympathetic to our endeavours. But Strathclyde Region was not one of the overtly leftist councils which aggressively flaunted its opposition to government policies. We played a very different game and were assisted by a sympathetic Scottish Office and “wet” Ministers such as George Younger, Malcolm Rifkind and Lynda Chalker. It is, however, still noticeable that my 1977 article is sympathetic to Ralph Miliband’s critique of parliamentary democracy!
At this point in the story, I should perhaps be more open about where exactly I stood on the left. I was seen as right-wing but had taken part on a fair number of ant-nuclear demonstrations and was an avid reader of New Left Review. But my university reading of Popper’s “The Open Society and its Enemies” had built in me a suspicion of left-wing rhetoric - although I was more than happy once to share a platform with Tony Benn and attended a Conference in Sicily in the late 1970s with Stuart Holland of Socialist Challenge fame. That critique of his had been published the same year, 1975, that Gordon Brown’s Red Paper on Scotland came out. And there were many similarities. But I was now in power – with all the constraints that involves – although still burning with a deep sense of the injustices deeply inherent in UK society of the 1970s.
Our focus at the time was thoroughly pragmatic – what precise steps were available to us as a Council to show that the strategy of urban deprivation Strathclyde Region had approved in 1976 was to be taken seriously. Our audience was clear – mainly the teachers, policemen, engineers, social workers who formed our 100,000 strong staff. These were the people we had to convince – both that we were deadly serious and with the message the document contains about the need for change. Many of them were members of the Labour party and holding a mental model which actually blamed the victims,
Shortly after the launching of the Strategy - and combining my academic and political roles - I brought together a diverse collection of officials and councillors of different councils in the West of Scotland, academics and others to explore how we could extend our understanding of what we were dealing with – and how our policies might make more impact. It was a regular monthly forum called “the urban change network” and it was probably the single most effective thing I ever did. I still have the tapes of some of the discussions – one, for example, led by Professor Lewis Gunn on issues of implementation!
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