With so much discussion about the roles of citizens in shaping places as the U.K. Government rolls-out plans for local devolution, community empowerment and pride in place, it’s essential as partners in your place to determine your collective approach. To help you get ahead, at People & Places we have done some of the thinking for you to help in determining your strategy for community engagement, participation and empowerment and created a proposed ‘Community Participation Wheel’ for partnerships.
Community Participation Wheel
With various well-known models already available, why have we decided to develop a proposed Community Participation Wheel for partnerships? The two main reasons are that we thought there was a need for a model that:
- can be used by place partnerships of different forms and applied equally as well by their constituent public authorities or community-based organisations and other stakeholder representative groups.
- embraces the roles of engagement, participation and empowerment, though not in a judgemental way that suggests that a progression from informing to empowering and self-determining is best practice in all instances.
Combining council and community perspectives
We wanted to add clarity on the distinction between community engagement, participation and empowerment from an authority’s and community group’s perspectivs. Community engagement is often considered as a proactive process where institutions -such as local authorities- take the lead in seeking to consult and involve community representatives in decision-making through towards co-creation. In contrast, we take community participation as more of a partnership of would-be equals that can be taken to refer to the voluntary involvement of members in co-designing and co-producing joint initiatives and activities. Community empowerment is often taken as something that is enabled at the behest of supportive authorities, though we take it equally as a move that can come from established, capable, suitably resourced and self-determining community groups.
Applications to place partnerships
Our Community Participation Wheel is proposed in the context of People & Places support for place partnerships, including evolving Neighbourhood Boards as part of the U.K. Government’s Pride in Place Programme. All Pride in Place areas, for example, are expected to “transition towards a community-led model by year three of the Programme” and so it would seem essential that this can be factored into determining the approach taken to community participation from the outset. In this and other models of place partnerships, power balances can be fluid and more complex, though in time it can be the partnership that becomes considered as the ‘authority’ enabling community participation. There are roles and relationships of ‘partners’ and other stakeholder representative groups to be considered within this, as well as the complexities of participation by many communities of place, interest, identity and different demographic groupings of citizens.
Other models are available!
That said Arnstein’s Ladder of Participation remains the original model that we and other place practitioners will reference and we are big fans of the simplicity of the “To/For/With/By” framework developed by our friends at PlacemakingEducation and based on work by Cormac Russell. Our model has many similarities to the Spectrum of Public Participation developed IAP2 that places a subtle emphasis on authorities giving consent for communities to engage.
The Wheel’s components
Our proposed Community Participation Wheel for partnerships is divided in to the three main components of engagement, participation and empowerment in a way that distinguishes, as opposed to them often being used interchangeably. Sub-categories for each distinguish different levels to help identify nuances in determining a partnership’s, including that we embrace the terms co-design and co-production as different stages of co-creation, that are often collectively used in confusing ways alongside participation.The model includes ‘informing’ as a basic or default approach, which we count outside the scope of two-way engagement.
Community engagement
- Consulting
- Involving
Community participation/Co-creation
- Co-designing
- Co-producing
Community empowerment
- Empowering
- Self-determining
Discussing & determining local strategy
Whether using our proposed Community Participation Wheel for partnerships or other models, what is important is that as a partnership seeking to improve your place, you have an informed discussion about how you want to pitch your strategy for engagement, participation and empowerment, as a general approach to address particular issues or to encourage participation of certain groups. Community organisations, other stakeholder representatives and local authorities, should all feel this is a balanced debate seeking to improve outcomes and capable of overcoming power imbalances.
Training & strategy advice
The development of this proposed Community Participation Wheel for partnerships is part of the creation of wider training courses on community engagement and place partnerships by the People & Places Partnership. We can use these to provide bespoke training to your place partnership, neighbourhood board or similar, as as directly guiding you in determining your strategy for community engagement, participation and empowerment.
