Local knowledge for local solutions

Engaging the community in the process of neighbourhood renewal is central to the National Strategy for Neighbourhood Renewal. Ben Gidley reflects on how it is being done in practice.

Based on the assumption that local people know best about the problems they face and the solutions that will work in their neighbourhoods, the Local Knowledge for Local Solutions project set out to give residents of three London communities the research skills to develop solutions to problems in their areas. It involved recruiting residents in three socially deprived neighbourhoods to be trained to carry out research in order to identify priorities for neighbourhood renewal and mainstream spending.

The chief outcomes envisaged from the project were two-fold. Not only would there be better knowledge of the neighbourhoods and their needs, but members of the communities would also experience personal and professional development, increasing their employability and their capacity to participate in the democratic life of the area. A number of important lessons that had not been envisaged were also learnt.

The research

The Neighbourhood Renewal Fund (NRF) aims to enable the 88 most deprived authorities, in collaboration with their Local Strategic Partnership (LSP), to improve services and narrow the gap between deprived areas and the rest of England. Southwark is the 9th most deprived borough in the country and in September 2003 Southwark Alliance, the borough’s LSP, commissioned a consortium made up of two community sector organisations and an academic institution to undertake the Local Knowledge for Local Solutions project. The project was part of Southwark Alliance's Neighbourhood Renewal programme and targeted three priority neighbourhoods within the borough: South Bermondsey and North Livesey; East Camberwell; and West Bermondsey.

The two community sector organisations, GAP Research and Magpie Resource Library, and the Centre for Urban and Community Research at Goldsmiths College, were charged with delivering Stage One of the project. This included producing neighbourhood profiles through interviewing key people in the local neighbourhoods, desk research to collate existing data on the neighbourhoods and ‘reality check’ events to take the findings back to the neighbourhoods. It also involved developing an action research toolkit.

The toolkit provided a step-by-step guide for residents to conduct research in neighbourhoods. Its emphasis was on participative research methods, through recruitment and training of residents in research and outreach skills using a variety of participatory tools, many adapted from Developing World contexts, to run engaging forums that involved local people in decision-making. It was clear from previous projects that these sorts of participatory appraisal tools can engage many different sorts of residents who would not normally turn up to public meeting type events.

The toolkit was used in Stage Two of the project. A total of 42 residents from the three neighbourhoods were trained by a local consultant, who also supported the trainees through street survey and one-to-one interview research. Towards the end of this stage, the consortium were brought back in to deliver training in focus groups and participatory research. They also supported the trainees with a series of focus groups with specific sections of the communities and large events involving diverse cross-sections of the communities.

Both the trainees and the residents with whom they consulted seemed to respond most positively to participatory methods rather than interview, questionnaire or conventional focus group methods. ‘Process mapping’ visually goes through a process like reporting a dumped car or trying to get a housing repair done, revealing glitches. The ‘problem wall and solution tree’, a method drawn from participatory rural appraisal, vividly enables residents to highlight local priorities. The ‘roots of the problem’ method tries to get to the heart of local issues, getting residents to think more deeply about their assumptions. Various sorts of maps (including ‘mobility maps’ and ‘future maps’) provide rich visual data about an area that might not come out using purely verbal methods. All of these methods are very visual, and therefore appropriate for using with people from diverse backgrounds, with people of limited literacy and people who are less confident about speaking up in public.

Trainees began the research with great enthusiasm and energy. It was clear that both they and the residents who participated felt empowered. Contrary to the ‘consultation fatigue’ we had been led by community development workers to expect, participants said again and again how positive they felt voicing their issues, meeting other residents, being listened to. At our reality checks, residents said that they had never been asked these sorts of questions before – indeed, we were asked if we were coming back next week because they had more to tell us. There was a palpable increase in confidence, skills and aspirations of the trainees, many of whom continued to engage in their communities. There were, however, less positive sides, which point to important lessons to learn from the process.

Lessons

In one neighbourhood, some of the trainees and some of the residents they consulted had a very prescriptive view of who had the right to speak for the community. The area is relatively unsafe, and this has informed a whole local discourse around crime and anti-social behaviour. There was emphasis on substance abusers, aggressive beggars, junkies, street drinkers, squeegee-merchants. This discourse was linked to local campaigns, through a newly set-up NRF funded community forum, to close various local treatment facilities associated with this category of anti-social behaviour, and for a more zero-tolerance approach to such behaviour. At times, this campaign threatened to over-determine the findings of our action research project. People categorised as ‘anti-social’ were not always seen as part of ‘the community’.Through the community forum and through the research, a particular narrative of community was being established; one which was exclusive rather than inclusive. The term ‘anti-social’ is used to legitimate the exclusion of residents seen as deviant from the category of ‘community’. This illustrates an authoritarian dimension in the communitarian or participatory democracy agenda, which has traditionally been associated with the voluntary and community sector and with participatory research, which privileges the voices of local people in the name of community, but is open to narrow and exclusive definitions of who counts as ‘the community’.

A second issue, which runs right through the neighbourhood renewal process, is the conflict between ‘product’ (delivering projects, spending money) and ‘process’ (engaging diverse and hard to reach communities, meaningful partnership, new forms of democracy). Genuine community development, cross-sector working and local participation take time to embed, while annual funding cycles, bidding and allocation machinery and project delivery milestones can undermine this. The research had to be delivered by deadline in order to inform decisions around spending. Achieving this deadline meant that the trainees could not be involved as fully as we would have liked in analysing the data and writing the report. This undermined the participatory ethos to some extent.

A further issue was the perception of ‘the council’ held by many of our trainees and many of the residents that they consulted. Citizens of deprived communities and consumers of services provided by the local state have often had a raft of bad experiences of various arms of the council. This leads to cynicism at any attempts to work in a different way, and anger if things go wrong. Inevitably, within the context of tight deadlines and the experimental nature of the research, many things did go wrong and there were some tense moments to navigate over the year.

Finally, during the research process, we heard two apparently contradictory messages from the people we spoke to about whether they had been consulted. Doing key informant interviews and meeting community workers and resident activists at meetings, we heard that people felt over-researched, whereas when we went out on to the streets people were desperate to tell us their views.

From the key informants who were tired of being interviewed, the lesson is that people are consulted, but that they don’t feel listened to. They do not see the reports of the consultation nor what has changed as a result. This either means the agencies that consult are engaging in the exercise without a meaningful commitment to it and not actually listening to the residents they interview, or, more likely, there is a simple failure to report back on the results of consultations. The residents who participated in workshops and events wanted to be told the results. Many felt that, when they had been consulted before, they had not had any feedback. The positive feeling generated by engaging people via participatory methods can heighten expectations, alienating people further if you don’t feed back to them.

From the residents who felt they had never been asked, the lesson is that different forms of research engage people differently, and some people respond more to ‘fun’ and accessible forms of research (e.g. participative methods) rather than traditional clipboard surveys. In many cases, these residents undoubtedly had been asked questions – e.g. as part of MORI polls, or in questionnaires in council magazines – but not in the most appropriate way.

Despite the evident failures, there are numerous positive lessons that can be taken from the project. It is clear that local people really do know best about what does and does not work in their neighbourhoods. With ethical commitment and engaging tools, this knowledge can be built on to develop real solutions to poverty.

Dr Ben Gidley is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Urban and Community Research, Goldsmiths College, University of London. Reports on each of the three neighbourhoods are available from b.gidley@gold.ac.uk.top