Four Ideas On Community Control To Influence Policy And Practice

Community & Health is about how communities can have greater control over their lives. I’m saying that because since starting this program work in 2013 I have veered in numerous directions. I make no apology for that; I was, after all, exploring. However, I am now clear that what matters is control and that’s what I am going to focus on as I bring this work to an end.* 

Last time, I mentioned that Demos, a think tank in the UK, is experimenting with new tools for deliberative and participatory policymaking. Those tools are one way that communities might be able to have some control over some parts of their lives. I learnt of Demos’ work through the work I am doing for the UK government on what policies might be enacted to increase community control. Part of that work involved interviewing almost 40 thought leaders and innovators and in this post I am summarizing the four things I learnt from them. 

I want to be clear that I am focusing on what was new to me. After almost 12 years of exploring the link between community and health I know a fair few things (and I say that in all humility) so I am skipping over what was, to me, fairly obvious stuff, such as: how the state interacts with people can be disempowering (this is a good report on that); part of communities having control has to be about holding public institutions to account (this makes that argument well); and not all communities have the capacity to hold power so asking them to might actually harm them (pages 77-80 of this report gets into that). 

The four things that I learnt are: 

1. It’s useful to present the work as innovation 
2. It’s useful to have an entity that endorses the process 
3. Disagreement is an opportunity for growth 
4. Talking about power might be ‘too sociology’ 

Presenting The Work As Innovation 

One of the interviewees was clear that we need to talk about community control in a different way. His sense was that people in public systems have been talked to death about the need for communities to have more control and are unclear on what’s in it for them. As a consequence, they either don’t participate or hinder the work. 

His solution is to start by asking leaders of public systems what their greatest, most intractable problems are. He then asks whether the leaders might want the community’s perspective on those problems to help find new solutions (ie innovations). When they say yes (and, in his experience, they eventually do), he designs a process that not only draws on the community’s perspective but explores how the solutions might be co-delivered by residents and the system. 

His approach reminded me of Rosa Gonzalez’s introduction to her (superb) spectrum of community engagement to ownership: “It is going to take all of us to adequately address the complex challenges our cities and regions are facing. It is time for a new wave of community-driven civic leadership.”

An Entity To Endorse The Process 

Ultimately, community control involves collaboration between residents and public systems. In my last post, I described how leaders of public systems can work with community power-building organizations (CPBOs) and movements through ‘inside-outside strategies’. However, their leaders might have different ideas about what community control looks like and what it’s valuable for. 

To overcome that, it’s useful to have an influential entity that ‘holds’ the idea of community control and ‘endorses’ the processes by which it’s created. The idea is not that the entity says the public system has to do what the community says, only that it provides ‘cover’ for the importance of control and its processes. Of course, public systems could still try to ignore communities’ demands but it’d be harder for them to do if there was a general understanding – held by the influential entity – that community control matters. 

Disagreement Is An Opportunity For Growth 

So many of the interviewees said that this is “messy” work. Part of the messiness is that there are always disagreements between neighbors, residents, groups, etc. One of the interviewees made the point that as a society we have lost the ability to disagree in a useful way. His view was that disagreement was an opportunity to see things from a different perspective. 

I want to be clear that his insight wasn’t the oh-so-tiresome idea of ‘disagreeing agreeably’. I can’t think of anything so tediously middle class. His way of operationalizing this was using his venue to hold the equivalent of a trade union hall meeting and basically forcing people to stay in the room to work things out. He described it as “exercising the muscle of collaboration”. 

Talking About Power Is ‘Too Sociology’

This is my favorite, not least because I blather on about power all the time (like here and here).

This interviewee felt that power was too theoretical an idea, too abstract for politicians and civil servants to get behind (and too threatening too). His contention was that the disconnect between governments and residents is grittier than that. People feel ignored, disrespected, looked down upon, sneered at even. Yeah, we might be trying to get to control, power and co-governance of public institutions but the basic building block is respect. 

For me, these were four powerful ideas. What do you think? 

Pritpal S Tamber

* My plan is to wrap up this program of work and take the knowledge I have gained from it into an institution somewhere. I’m in a bunch of discussions but if you know of somewhere that might be interested, please let me know. 

The image under the title is by Ricky Archambault.