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Twenty-Two - Re-imagining contested communities: implications for policy research
- Edited by Elizabeth Campbell, Marshall University, West Virginia, Kate Pahl, Manchester Metropolitan University, Elizabeth Pente, University of Huddersfield, Zanib Rasool
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- Book:
- Re-imagining Contested Communities
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 12 April 2022
- Print publication:
- 21 March 2018, pp 201-204
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Summary
We write this contribution as social researchers in the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG), the part of government responsible for housing, planning, local government, integration and communities policy for England. It is our role, as analysts, to bring evidence into the policy-making process.
This whole book has a wealth of insights and perspectives, which can contribute to a better understanding of communities and policy challenges at a local level. The content demonstrates the value of close and collaborative engagement with communities in a particular place to elicit, consider, negotiate and authentically represent the life worlds of people, using their own words and perspectives.
The mission of collaborative ethnography is to bring the academic research endeavour closer to communities, and to generate knowledge together, which is more authentic, representative and negotiated with communities. The questions of ‘Whose knowledge?’ and ‘Who speaks for whom?’ is an issue that should be asked of all research – and indeed all knowledge claims. In this book, we can see an emerging parity in the status of the different voices and knowledge presented.
We suggest that this example of collaborative ethnography could have even more impact if it were generated in collaboration with policy contributors, and it is notable that the local authority has worked in partnership with the ‘Imagine’ project in Rotherham. This points to other opportunities to bring together communities, local policy makers and academics in generating knowledge for future policy making.
Academic researchers play the key role in this collaborative enquiry process. They are strengthened by virtue of their institutional independence, methodological resources, and their theoretical frameworks and research tools. These can therefore provide partners with the means to sort and organise their personal experiences and accounts. The collective impact of such engagement is that people from different backgrounds may begin to find a common platform, take steps to challenge common understandings and misunderstandings, and even build a more shared future. This can contribute to the goals of supporting more integrated communities and of reducing community tensions – goals supported by many residents and by politicians of most political orientations.
How policy might fit into this more collaborative research endeavour is not clear-cut.
Eight - Translation across borders: connecting the academic and policy communities
- Edited by Keri Facer, University of Bristol, Kate Pahl, Manchester Metropolitan University
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- Book:
- Valuing Interdisciplinary Collaborative Research
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 05 April 2022
- Print publication:
- 05 April 2017, pp 173-190
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Summary
Introduction
In this chapter we look at the legacy of a set of Connected Communities (CC) projects which made connections between the ‘research community’ of academics and the ‘policy community’ of civil servants based at the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG), UK. They had the potential to leave behind something which might have significant effects at a national scale, – ‘impact’ in the current policy jargon. We make a distinction here between ‘legacy’ in a very broad, everyday sense of ‘anything handed down by … a predecessor’ (OED, online edition) and ‘impact’ with its specific policy meaning of ‘an effect on, change or benefit to the economy, society, culture, public policy or services, health, the environment or quality of life, beyond academia’ (HEFCE, 2015). Colloquially, the ‘impact agenda’ refers to the increasingly insistent pressures on the academy to achieve demonstrable impact; in this sense it is an external pressure which may reinforce or conflict with academics’ own commitments to achieving social change through their research.
The three interdisciplinary projects created ‘policy briefs’ for the DCLG, the UK government department responsible for localism, local government, housing, planning and related functions in England. As a central government policy-making body, DCLG is continually in search of robust, research-based evidence to support its work. The policy briefs were to be short and accessible reviews of research relevant to policy on localism. In particular they were intended to identify novel insights from the Arts and Humanities in order to broaden the range of ideas available to policy makers.
Projects in focus in this chapter
The legacy explored here is that of three CC projects, commissioned to create ‘policy briefs’ to inform policy making in DCLG. Their topics, agreed between the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and DCLG, were local representation, co-production of local services, and accountability in the context of decentralisation and fiscal austerity. In this chapter we refer to these as ‘the representation brief’, ‘the co-production brief’ and ‘the accountability brief’.
The principal written outputs were Connelly et al, 2013 (representation), Durose et al, 2013 (co-production), and Richardson and Durose, 2013 (accountability). The latter two project teams overlapped in membership, while the representation brief project was entirely separate.
The project through which this legacy was explored was called Translation across Borders.
Twelve - Translation across borders: exploring the use, relevance and impact of academic research in the policy process
- Edited by Dave O'Brien, University of Edinburgh, Peter Matthews, University of Stirling
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- Book:
- After Urban Regeneration
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 01 September 2022
- Print publication:
- 11 November 2015, pp 181-198
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Introduction
Complex social and governance problems have engaged academic researchers ever since the closely linked emergence of public welfare policy and associated academic disciplines in the post-Second World War era (Lindblom and Cohen, 1979; Fischer, 2003). In the UK's recent past, governments’ demand for research rose as both New Labour and the post-2010 Conservative–Liberal Democrat Coalition sought to portray their policies as being based on objective analysis, rather than ideology (Nutley et al, 2007; HMG, 2013). In parallel, pressure rose on academia to demonstrate the utility of its research, constructed as having ‘demonstrable economic and social impacts’ (HEFCE, 2009: 7) and requiring the planning of ‘pathways to impact’ (RCUK, 2011). The 2007 economic crisis, and ensuing public sector austerity measures, further increased the pressure on academia to justify its cost to the public purse through its contribution to solving society's problems. As discussed in Chapters One and Three, this prompted new relationships between academics and policymakers: programmes such as ‘Connected Communities’ were devised with government priorities in mind, and cuts in government research budgets reinforced other trends promoting the co-production of policy-relevant knowledge.
This chapter draws on four ‘Connected Communities’ projects: three that produced ‘policy briefings’ (Connelly et al, 2013; Durose et al, 2013; Richardson and Durose, 2013) for the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) and the ‘Translation Across Borders’ ‘legacy’ project (2014–15). All reflected the DCLG's desire for new knowledge to guide post-regeneration policy development and delivery. The move away from area-based initiatives towards the decentralisation of budgeting and planning, as part of a fundamental rescaling and reimagining of the relationships between citizens and the central and local state, has heightened the importance of grappling with some very old political theory problems of how to understand and reinforce accountability and representation. This has provided fertile ground for new relationships with the academy, and some researchers – ourselves included – have stepped into this arena, aiming not only to help solve problems, but also to shape agendas by influencing how key issues are understood.
However, the emphasis on evidence-based policy and impact has brought to the fore long-standing mutual frustrations over academics’ perceived inability to produce usable outputs, and policymakers’ perceived inability to use academic research in appropriate and responsible ways (Lindblom and Cohen, 1979; Owens, 2005; Smith and Joyce, 2012).
Designing policy for localism
- Catherine Durose, University of Birmingham, Liz Richardson, University of Manchester
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- Book:
- Designing Public Policy for Co-production
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 01 September 2022
- Print publication:
- 11 November 2015, pp 81-90
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Both of the writers of this contribution are social researchers in the UK civil service, working alongside civil service colleagues developing policy proposals. They are based in the central government department that works with local government, planning, neighbourhoods and housing, as well as encouraging decentralisation, community rights and devolved decision making. As social scientists operating within a politically oriented policy-making organisation, they are well placed to trial new ways to bring multiple forms of expertise into policy. These contributors present an overview of the Neighbourhood Community Budgets pilot programme that aimed to devolve decision making about local public spending down to neighbourhood level. The programme can be seen as striving towards integrating some elements of co-productive policy making, such as the emphasis on community intelligence and co-design of policy, into institutions. Its programme was also shaped by what happened in local areas in a series of iterative processes from which central government learned as the programme developed. Ambitious in scope, the programme showed how there was enthusiasm for a change at a local level, which was tempered but not diminished by all too familiar barriers. It also illuminates how policy researchers and evaluators are attempting to live out some key principles of more iterative and incomplete policy design.
This contribution gives an account of the Neighbourhood Community Budget (NCB) pilot programme. NCBs were introduced by central government in England to stimulate and support innovation in local communities and play a role in the transfer of power to neighbourhoods. Government aimed to transfer more power for decision making over services, community assets and planning.
The UK coalition government of 2010 embarked on a programme of decentralisation, which reduced the control that central government has over local delivery and embodied the principle of localism and community action. The principles of this were set out in HM Government's 2010 Decentralisation and the Localism Bill: An Essential Guide (HM Government, 2010). The Localism Bill (now Localism Act) therefore embodied the principles of a particular form of decentralisation aiming to transfer power to the lowest appropriate level, putting communities in control through the introduction of a set of community rights – the Community Right to Bid, Community Right to Challenge and Community Right to Build.
Small Business and the Environment in the UK and the Netherlands: Toward Stakeholder Cooperation
- Laura J. Spence, Ronald Jeurissen, Robert Rutherfoord
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- Journal:
- Business Ethics Quarterly / Volume 10 / Issue 4 / October 2000
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 23 January 2015, pp. 945-965
- Print publication:
- October 2000
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In this paper, the approaches of a sample of small firms to environmental issues in the UK and the Netherlands are compared. The study makes a contribution by addressing the lack of research on small firms and the environment, as well as offering insights into the influence that cultural, institutional, and political frameworks can have on small firm owner-managers’ attitudes to external issues. The environment is considered here as an ethical issue, drawing on work on the environmental responsibility of business by both Bowie (1990) and Hoffman (1991). It is argued that the approaches to the environment identified in this study by Dutch and UK small firm owner-managers do not fit in with the positions of either Bowie or Hoffman. The concept of stakeholder cooperation is proposed as a more realistic alternative.