Tidying Up the Mix-Up

I left you a fortnight ago claiming that I was going to read 34 reports from think tanks purporting to support community power. I have managed to slug through 20. A few are very good (such as this one and this one) but most feel like old ideas repackaged. And many are unclear on how their proposed policies will actually create community power. 

That latter insight is not mine, it’s my collaborator’s, Oliver Smith. Although Ollie now consults in the world of artificial intelligence, he’s a policy wonk at heart having previously worked in the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit and the UK’s Department of Health. His contention is that much of what’s being proposed is mixing inputs, outputs, outcomes, and impacts. 

I have to admit that my heart first sank at this. I generally don’t have the patience for flow charts that reduce the messiness of the real world into something tidy and ‘logical’. But the process of parsing the proposed policies* has been a good one. 

We’ve essentially drafted a theory of change. It goes like this: 

1. A policy is enacted (input)
2. That policy leads to something, such as an activity, process or organisation (mechanism of change)
3. The ‘something’ changes things in communities to make them more relational and engaged (output)
4. Communities are then in a position to realise they have power and seek to use it (outcome)
5. Communities then use their power to bring about a change (impact) 

A fundamental aspect of the above theory is that power is the outcome. Some think tanks are suggesting that the outcome is an engaged community. But just because people are engaged, it doesn’t mean they have power. For us, being engaged is an output, a precursor to power. 

Other think tanks are jumping to impacts, suggesting their presence means communities have power. The classic example is of local services being better tailored to local people. There’s no doubt this is a good thing but the tailoring (ie the impact) might have been done by service providers. The presence of an impact is not necessarily a sign that communities have power. 

Being clear that the desired outcome is power also forces you to be clear as to what power is. As I cover in my overview of community power there are numerous theories. The one that has most traction with practitioners is Lukes’ ‘three faces’, which was operationalised by Healey and Hinson. 

Lukes posited that you can see power at play in decision-making, agenda-setting and worldviews. If the desired outcome is power, then, you should be able to observe communities participating in all three (participating in worldviews might be seen in people talking about how they see the world and who they aspire to be). We have not seen this kind of clarity about power in any of the reports so far except this one (although it’s a little confused in places). 

Also, my perspective is forever haunted by the insights of Jennie Popay and Paul Speer. Jennie contends that all the talk of community power is focussed on communities as opposed to the numerous ways society and systems limit their power. We’ve not seen anything on this in the reports so far. Paul always asks what the power is for, his answering being structural change. Again, we’ve not seen anything on this in the reports so far. 

Over the next couple of weeks, we’ll refine our theory of change (including further working in the ideas of Jennie and Paul) and analyse how the policies being proposed play out against it. We can already see there are gaps so we’ll then need to do the (really hard) work of proposing policies to fill those gaps. 

And at some point, we’re going to have to take the maelstrom of proposed policies – those that are out there and the ones we’ll propose – and organise them into a tidy 3×3 or something so that time-constrained wonks are able to digest them. 

I’ll leave that to Ollie. 

See you in a couple of weeks. 

Pritpal S Tamber 

* Try saying that when you’re drunk

The image behind the title is by Gary Waters / Ikon Images.