Social Infrastructure & Community Power

In my last post, I got ‘under the hood’ of community power by looking at the role of belonging. In this post, I am staying there to talk about ‘social infrastructure’, an idea that is gaining traction in UK policy circles. 

Infrastructure gives the sense of something physical and, indeed, most quick descriptions of social infrastructure have been reduced to something like ‘places in neighborhoods where people can meet’. However, one of the best early descriptions of the idea was far deeper. It included the relationships between people in the neighborhood, the social norms that prevail, and the sense that people have control over their lives. It also included the presence of organizations and services to meet people’s needs, whether in the public, private or voluntary sector. Even the idea of ‘places’ was deeper – it was not just about buildings, open spaces, playgrounds and sports facilities but about having fun, being taken care of and being able to worship. 

My interest in social infrastructure is how it relates to community power. It is broadly accepted that for grassroots communities to have power, people need to be in organizations, whether formal or informal, that represent their interests. These organizations need to come together to form a network that then links to other organizations that have the specialist skills needed for structural change – such as communications, policy drafting, legal services, and, more broadly, advocacy. This ‘network plus specialist organizations’ is often called an ecosystem. 

It’s not hard to see how social infrastructure overlaps, perhaps underpins, the ecosystem needed for communities to have and wield power. The places, relationships, norms, organizations and volunteers that are part of social infrastructure will also be part of what it takes to build power. 

Recent work by the Oxford Consultants for Social Inclusion (OCSI) has taken the idea of social infrastructure, atomized it, and then turned into an index – the Community Needs Index (CNI). The index contains 19 indicators. The indicators cover the same terrain as what’s above but they’re grouped differently – into civic assets, connectedness, and active/engaged community. I don’t think the grouping matters because the basic idea of social infrastructure remains and the Index provides a helpful score for how much social infrastructure a neighborhood has and/or ‘needs’. 

OCSI’s work was commissioned by Local Trust, a funder. Local Trust’s flagship program was Big Local, an attempt to give 150 places in England £1m each for the people there to do whatever they wanted to improve their neighborhoods. A number of these places were economically deprived but Local Trust found that some used the money well while others struggled. They wanted to understand why, both for their own work and to inform the contemporary political debate about so-called ‘left behind’ places. In a follow-up report, what OCSI and Local Trust found was that places that were both economically deprived and had a low CNI score faced “a range of complex and related socio-economic challenges…and are falling further behind other deprived areas”. 

So, social infrastructure matters. But how much does it matter? 

Cambridge University’s Bennett Institute has tried to answer that. They analyzed the value of social infrastructure as part of their project on towns. Many people living in towns in the UK voted for Brexit and the Bennett folks felt that politicians and policymakers didn’t really understand them, relying instead on lazy generalizations and dogmas. They wanted to improve that understanding, part of which involved a robust analysis of social infrastructure. What they found was that it had economic, social and civic value. 

For instance, in terms of economic value, 2.3 million people are employed in social infrastructure-related industries in Great Britain, and in towns they provide almost half of all jobs. Not only does this provide income it also boosts skills and employability. In terms of social value, places with better social infrastructure find it easier to respond to, withstand and recover from crises, have lower rates of depression, anxiety, loneliness and obesity, and have greater levels of trust and cohesion between diverse communities. And in terms of civic value, social infrastructure can instill a sense of pride in one’s hometown and a sense of optimism. 

What all of this does for me is make clear something that I have always believed but could never quite make concrete – the fundamental, rather than instrumental, value of community power. The claim, made in this otherwise excellent article, is that community power is valuable not just because it can be used (instrumentalized) to change structures but because “it builds community confidence, capacity, and efficacy, all of which contribute directly and indirectly to health”. The article cites this report to back that assertion but I’ve never found it a particularly compelling citation (it’s very good on other things, just not the idea of the ‘fundamental’ value of community power). By contrast, the work on social infrastructure is compelling. 

All in all, building community power is not only good for how it can be used (instrumentalized) it also has economic, social and civic value. Given the growing consensus that communities need more control over their lives – ie power – it’s hard to see why policymakers should stop at social infrastructure. 

Pritpal S Tamber

The image below the title is by Koivo (Ikon Images).