Better governance, bigger society? Lessons from the New Deal for Communities
regeneration initiative: a comparative case study of community social networks and
social capital in east Manchester
Beth Carley
Centre for Census and Survey Research
University of Manchester
Please note: this is a draft document, and not intended to for citation. For further information
about this study please contact the author: [email protected]
Abstract
The current Conservative-led coalition government’s Big Society agenda has much in
common with the rhetoric of previous Labour governments with respect to issues of civil
society, localism, community action and personal responsibility. For this reason the
community-driven regeneration initiatives of recent Labour administrations, such as the
flagship New Deal for Communities (NDC) scheme, provide a useful source of learning for
current policy-makers (NEF, 2010). The outcomes of this central-government mandated, areabased regeneration scheme, which was ‘supposed to be a bottom-up community-led initiative’
(Weaver, 2005 in Wright et Al, 2006) speak directly to the ambitions of the Big Society
agenda ‘to empower communities to come together to address local issues’ (Conservative
Party, 2010: 38) and which explicitly references neighbourhood groups as a key vehicle for
this (Op. Cit: 37-38). This paper reports preliminary findings from a study of the social capital
of neighbourhood groups engaged with the post-NDC intervention governance structures put
in place in an urban regeneration area in east Manchester, within which one of the 39 NDC
partnerships was sited between 1999 and 2010. Using new quantitative data on different types
of quantitative social capital indicators including social networks measures, activity profiles
of groups and empowerment perceptions of group members, the ‘community infrastructure’
(CLG, 2010a) within what was the NDC area, and an adjacent area which did not receive any
significant level of regeneration funding or support, is compared and contrasted. Analysis
explores the overall structure of networks as a measure of the potential for collective
mobilisation of residents’ groups, and for coproduction with agencies of the local state. It also
examines the role of political opportunity structures of NDC/ post-NDC governance in
fomenting network capital, as well as reporting on measures of perceptions of empowerment
and community building through top-down regeneration. Findings reflect positively on what
can be achieved by such means, but finds lessons in the similarities between the two areas on
1
the reality of the confined scale of community activism compared to the Big Society rhetoric
of ‘mass engagement’ (Cameron, 2009). It is argued that the political appeal of the ‘big
society/small government’ formula proves practically unhelpful, and that a middle way,
which recognises the limits of both government and community action and which reasserts
the absolute interdependence of the two in the delivery of meaningful policy outcomes, is
required, along with a recognition of the impact of wider government agendas and economic
barriers on society at large, above all in the most deprived neighbourhoods.
Introduction
A flagship element of New Labour’s regeneration strategy, the New Deal for Communities
(NDC) scheme was a central government-driven, area-based urban renewal initiative, which
has been much cited in the literature on citizen involvement in governance and active
citizenship more generally, for the emphasis which the scheme placed on involving
community members in its design and delivery. In line with Labour’s wider local government
reforms and its ‘new social policy’ approach (Cochrane, 2003: 224), the community
partnership model of NDC was built on a belief in the possibility of redefining and
reconfiguring the roles and relationships which exist between local government, governing
agencies and local residents (MacLeavy, 2009: 850), in a way which echoes elements of the
Big Society rhetoric. Firstly residents of deprived communities were to be engaged in
relations of governance, so that they were empowered to make more audible demands of the
state machinery (NRU, 2002a in Wright et al., 2006). Linked to this was the ambition to
foster cooperation within those communities, so that they might mobilise existing skills and
resources on the ground through ‘collective action’ to improve their neighbourhoods
(MacLeavy, Ibid: 851). Whilst arguably affording a more generous role for government in
this mix than the current policy incarnation, it was based fundamentally on a philosophy of
civil society self-help which was articulated quite explicitly as a response to the ‘limits of
government in the social sphere’ (Blair, 1998 in Hodgson, 2004: 141) within the late 20th
century neo-liberal governance context.
New Deal for Communities: bottom-up, top-down community-building
In recognition of the long-term commitment required to address entrenched poverty, the NDC
programme was designed to run for ten years, and to target multiple indicators of deprivation
identified as poor job prospects, high crime rates, educational-underachievement, poor health,
and poor quality housing and physical environment in order ‘to reduce the gaps between some
of the poorest neighbourhoods and the rest of the country’ (DETR, 2001a in Lawless, 2006).
As was the case in other policy areas, the emphasis was on a joined-up, partnership approach
2
which engaged the community, and which was based on evidence of ‘what works’. Compared
to earlier area-based initiatives (ABIs) the NDC areas were small in size, attempting to
conform to local perceptions of community boundaries (Mathers et al., 2008), as well as being
much fewer in number than previous initiatives such as the Single Regeneration Budget
(SRB) areas (Lawless, 2006). They also sought to overcome other barriers to community
involvement identified in earlier schemes, such as the requirement to compete for funding via
submission of bids to tight deadlines, by eliminating the competitive element, and allowing
longer lead-times and funding for bid development (Foley and Martin, 2000: 483), so that
communities could play a part in defining the terms and substance of the regeneration of their
area. Indeed NDC partnerships had to demonstrate that communities were involved in both
the selection of target areas and the development of programmes (Ibid). The community was
then expected to be involved in the ongoing delivery and governance of the programme, so
that all partnership boards included community representation. In fact Lawless (2006) notes
that the 24 of the NDC area boards had a resident member majority in the early years of the
programme; this had risen to 31 by 2008 (CLG, 2010a: 15). Resident involvement in the NDC
initiative was not been pursued just at the level of governance, but was practiced in many and
various ways, from the formal to the informal, often supported by a dedicated team of
outreach staff within the NDC with a particular focus on engaging ‘hard to reach’ groups
(Mathers et al., 2008: 594).
However, conclusions on the community-level social capital outcomes of NDC reached by
central government evaluators on the basis of national NDC evaluation data struck a
pessimistic note about the extent to which the scheme had had an impact at this level and
indicated much uncertainty about the prospects of sustaining what had been achieved (CLG,
2010a). Whilst community engagement and partnership working were held to be key factors
in the successful operation of area-based initiatives (Lawless, 2006: 1991) during their
lifetimes, previous experience suggests that it is unrealistic to expect to sustain community
activity at any substantial level, post-initiative (Gardner, 2007). Indeed, the literature on
empowerment and urban regimes provides some clear and intuitive reasons for this, such as
the difficulty in mobilizing people to the goal of social change, particularly in the absence of
immediate material incentives (Stone, 1993), and the added challenge of fomenting action in
deprived communities, resulting from the demoralizing and demobilizing psychological
effects of long-term poverty (Stone, Ibid; Barr, 1995), which the NDC scheme pitted itself
against. Meanwhile published academic research on the NDC highlights many ways in which
the complex poly-vocality of multiple communities within deprived neighbourhoods, and the
pressure to deliver to the targets of what was, after all, a central government scheme, caused
3
it to fall short in its ambitions to be truly ‘bottom up’ and empowering (e.g. Wright et Al.,
2006; Perrons and Skyer, 2003;
Davies, 2005; Dinham, 2005; Imrie and Raco, 2003;
MacLeavy, 2008; Wallace, 2007; Goodlad et. Al., 2005; Mathers el. Al, 2008; Foley and
Martin, 2000).
Community engagement in east Manchester: NDC and after
The NDC partnership in east Manchester, named Beacons for a Brighter Future, was set up in
1999 covering two neighbourhoods in the east of the city, Beswick and Openshaw which
were ranked 17th and 22nd most deprived in the country on the 2000 Indices of Multiple
Deprivation (IMD) (CLG, 2008). The NDC area was located within the area covered by
monies from Round Five of the Single Regeneration Budget (SRB), and the two streams were
combined under the umbrella of the Beacons Partnership, extending into the neighbouring
area of Clayton covered by SRB (Russell, 2006: 4) and those parts of Beswick and Openshaw
excluded from the NDC programme. The NDC area was located within the boundary of the
New East Manchester urban regeneration area which was to receive strategic regeneration
oversight and input from the new urban regeneration company (URC) of the same name
which was set up in the month prior to the announcement of the success of east Manchester’s
NDC bit to restructure the economic based and housing market in the area. East Manchester’s
NDC was much larger than most of the others with approximately 9,000 properties and
20,000 residents compared to the NDC average of 4,000 properties and 10,000 residents
(McGonigle, S. in Grant, 2010: 16; Lawless, 2006: 1992). Residents in the Beacons area were
involved in an extensive consultation process prior to securing NDC funding which was used
as a case study example of good practice in the Department for Communities and Local
Government’s (CLG) report on community engagement lessons from NDC (CLG, 2008).
In her 2006 case study on community engagement in Beacons NDC, Hilary Russell reports
that the voluntary and community sector in the area was not strong at the time of the initial
NDC bid (Russell, 2006: 4), however the efforts of the sort described above to support and
develop capacity for participation in the community saw the number of residents’ groups in
the area grow from 13 groups, across three neighbourhoods which had very few links despite
their geographical contiguity, to 60 across the area at its peak (Russell, 2006: 6) with the help
of a dedicated resident liaison team. An East Manchester Residents’ Forum was established in
1998 to bring together existing local residents’ associations prior to the start of the NDC
programme, and which continued to provide an opportunity for residents to meet with groups
from across the area to discuss and monitor progress of the programme, call officers to
account, and which provided community membership to the NDC partnership board, with
4
50% of board membership held by residents throughout the life of the partnership (Ekosgen,
2010: 86). Thus, despite the initial internal disconnect, one senior NDC officer observed that
from three distinct neighbourhoods an east Manchester identity has gradually grown up over
time.
The urban regeneration company boundary of NEM was expanded in 2004 to incorporate
Miles Platting and Newton Heath to the north and Gorton to the south. The new boundary is
shown on the map at Figure 1 below.
Figure 1. NEM boundary, including Beacons and Gorton
Manchester
city cent re
1.5 miles
Gorton
Since the Beacons NDC Partnership was merged with NEM administratively in 2007 in
preparation for the URC’s role as the succession body to NDC at the termination of funding in
2010, resident liaison activity was extended to residents groups in these other areas, and
residents’ groups in those areas were invited to attend meetings of the Residents’ Forum. As
part of the succession planning for NDC a review of community engagement was undertaken
in early 2009 to decide a model for resident involvement in NEM in the future. The chosen
model was based on the Residents’ Forum structure, with a community partnership for each
of the three areas- north, central (Beacons) and south- to be established, which residents’
5
group representatives would chair but which would be serviced by officers of NEM. These
bodies would also nominate resident candidates for election to the NEM board of directors,
one from each of the three areas. One senior NEM officer described the community
partnership as a ‘platforms for information and influence’ and, in theory at least1, the
partnerships were provided with a channel of input into the decisions of the board of the
regeneration company through their resident representative.
Community engagement in Gorton
The comparator area for this study of community social capital-building through NDC,
Gorton (as defined by the URC boundary) spans two whole council wards, of Gorton North
and Gorton South, as well West Gorton, which covers part of Ardwick ward, bordering
Manchester city centre. The Gorton neighbourhoods have similar history to those of the
Beacons area in terms of economic and social decline, with slum clearance, council estate
building and de-industrialisation, and latterly similar levels of deprivation, a fact that made its
exclusion from the benefits of NDC a sore point for the area’s residents. On the Indices of
Multiple Deprivation national measure for 2007 (based on data collected in 2005, so within a
year of Gorton’s absorption into NEM) the most deprived lower super output area (LSOA)2
within the Gorton boundary was the 25th most deprived out the 259 in the City of Manchester
LSOAs and ranked 691 out of a 32,482 in England, compared to the most deprived in the
Beacons area which was 23rd most deprived in the city and ranked 651st nationally.3 Indeed
one senior officer at NEM commented on the potential difficulties of selling participation in
the new community partnership structure to residents in Gorton, since, in the absence of any
of the funding which Beacons had had, the benefits of such involvement are not obvious. In
fact the officer in question expressed the view that Gorton was effectively ‘ten years’ behind’
Beacons in terms of community activism.
Gorton’s community partnership was established in 2008, ahead of Beacons, in the
recognition that, whatever the outcome of subsequent community consultation, Gorton was in
need of its own structures, and residents seemed willing to support it at an early stage, despite
the aforementioned officer’s predictions. Residents of the Gorton North and South wards
were disadvantaged compared to Beacons in terms of the city council’s community
engagement, since Gorton councillors refused access for residents to ward coordination
1
NEM’s board of directors is a business board, so in practice it is not the place where the primary concerns of
the community partnerships- around issues of crime and grime and council service delivery- are most usefully
addressed. However, following concerns expressed by community partnership members that they were having
insufficient input into and from the director level of NEM, an intermediary structure was put in place, sitting
between the partnerships and the board- a community partnership committee- which is attended by the chief
executive of NEM and the resident chairs of the community partnerships.
2
LSOAs (Lower Layer Super Output Areas) are small areas with a population of around 1500.
3
Source: Manchester City Council monitoring data
6
meetings, which brought together multi-agency partners and elected members to discuss and
monitor service provision across the ward, and which residents in the Beacons wards were
encouraged to attend. Community activity received a boost in 2009 through the decision of
two key activists to establish a committee, the ‘100 Committee’, to organize a series of largescale events to celebrate the centenary of Gorton joining the boundary of Manchester City in
1909, which New East Manchester and other local partners helped to fund and support.
Building blocks of the Big Society: social capital, social networks, and political
opportunity structure
In this next section we move on to consider the theoretical underpinnings of this study of
community infrastructure in the Beacons and Gorton areas in theories of social capital, its
operationalisation in social networks measures, and the impact of political opportunity
structures upon community level social capital.
In one of the CLG’s reports on lessons from the NDC programme for community engagement
the author, Hilary Russell, suggests that a preliminary step in developing a strategy for
community engagement is to:
develop a baseline of community capacity in terms of estimating the number and strengths
of organisations and the extent of networking and identifying key community leaders and
the range of roles undertaken by activists. (CLG, 2008: 15)
In the case of NDC a significant investment was made into ongoing evaluation of the scheme
in order to try to understand its impact on community, both through qualitative case studies
and local- and national-level surveys, however, in line with much of the scholarly work on
political engagement to date, it focussed on individual-level measures (Lelieveldt, 2009), such
as percentages of residents involved in NDC governance structures, raw counts of community
groups operating at different time-points, or measures of individual perceptions of community
and community empowerment, some of which are included in this study.
As indicators of social capital such measures are not without value, and are consistent with
those proposed by some of the key figures in the literature on social capital such as Robert
Putnam himself (e.g. see review in Kadushin, 2004) whose declining social capital thesis was
built on a conception of social capital as constituted of ‘networks, norms and trust’ (Putnam,
1993: 36). However the limited operationalisation of the networks aspect of the social capital
in the literature (Putnam uses membership or organization as a measure of social networks as
Prell (2006) points out) has led to increasing calls to focus more rigorously on an explicitly
7
networks approach (e.g. Blokland and Savage, 2008; Prell, 2006), not least given its
increasing evocation with respect to the structure of civil society (Baldassarri and Diani,
2007). It is also an argument which makes sense in light of the purported shift from a
hierarchical, unitary Westminster model of government to a dispersed, horizontal structure of
governance through networks in the last 20 years (Durose, Greasley and Richardson, 2009: 4;
Rhodes, 1996) which is therefore relevant to any study examining how civil society engages
the institutions of public governance.
This relational focus on social capital takes the researcher on a journey which begins with the
now familiar distinction between social capital to ‘get by’ and social capital to ‘get ahead’
(Blokland and Noordhoff, 2008: 107) and competing theories about the value of strong
‘bonding’ ties and weak ‘bridging’ ties heralded as so useful a source of job-seeking
opportunities by Granovetter in his seminal 1973 paper. Both Kearns (2003: 43) and Gilchrist
(2004: 6) present the extension of this by Woolcock (2001) to three forms of social capital: a
bonding capital of strong ties of social support, between family members or similar people
with strong mutual commitments; bridging capital, more akin to a weak tie between
heterogeneous individuals and which may horizontally connect different groups; and finally,
linking capital, considered to be inherent in vertical connections between the powerful and the
less powerful, enabling people to exert influence and reach resources outside their normal
circles, as Gilchrist (Ibid) puts it.
Such distinctions have formed the basis of theorising about social capital as an urban policy
‘fix’ for struggling inner city neighbourhoods, but which has been criticised in a number of
ways in the literature: firstly for largely failing to recognise the complex issues of power and
inequality inherent in the functioning of social capital (DeFilippis, 2001; Evers, 2003;
Blokland and Savage, 2008), which has, relatedly, disconnected it from questions of access to
economic capital, so fundamental to a meaningful response to deprivation (DeFilippis, Op.
Cit); secondly for under-theorising the impact of the privations and indignities of poverty on
sociability in terms of engendering ‘defensive privatism’ (Evers, 2003: 16, evidence in
Blokland and Noordhoff, 2008); and finally for taking insufficient account of the role of
government, politics and political culture (such as the neo-liberal ‘citizen as consumer’
discourse) in shaping social capital in society at large, a criticism which Evers (2003) uses as
an argument for reversing the direction of Putnam’s now classic model of the relationship
between democratic governance and civil society (on Putnam, 1993 in Op. Cit.: 19-20). This
brings us to the theoretical underpinnings of this study based on the investigation of the
8
relationship between the political opportunity structure presented by the NDC initiative/NEM
and the social capital of community activists in east Manchester.
Political opportunity structure (POS), like social capital, has been criticized for being
something of a ‘catch-all’ concept (Maloney, Smith and Stoker, 2000: 809) and indeed there
appear to be many indicators of it in the literature (Stevenson and Greenberg, 2000: 656),
however Stevenson and Greenberg (Ibid) describe the basic principle as based on the idea that
‘political context produces opportunities for actions and openness to change’. They point out
that it is used in the social movement literature to refer to the political and institutional
resources necessary for organizational success, (Ibid), whilst Maloney, Smith and Stoker
(Op.Cit.: Ibid) use it similarly to facilitate understanding of the relationship between
community social capital and governance. In a similar vein the literature on coproduction,
which the New Economics Foundation posits as the ‘cornerstone of the Big Society’ (Boyle,
2010) emphasises institutional arrangements for the involvement of citizens as critical to
realizing coproductive relationships (Marschall, 2004: 233).
Consistent with this argument, a key focus of the operationalisation of POS in the literature is
on institutional design. For instance Lowndes, Pratchett and Stoker (2006) use the level of
democratic innovation, as the salient measure of institutional design in their study of the
relationship between local authority practices and participation, focussing on three aspects:
local authority initiatives to enhance participation, activities to increase voter registration and
turnout, and reforms to political leadership (Ibid: 543). However their primary interest is in
the differential impact of different types of ‘rules-in-use’ or ‘how things are done around
here’ in the face of similar ‘rules in form’ (Lowndes, Pratchett and Stoker, 2006: 545). It is in
this vein that Lowndes and Wilson (2001: 645) assert that ‘prospects for the creation and
mobilization of social capital may depend as much upon the process as upon the content of
institutional redesign in local governance’. And indeed Lowndes, Pratchett and Stoker (Ibid),
comparing two local authority areas with socio-economically comparable populations and the
same official institutional structures, find higher rates of participation in the local authority
where rules are used to promote and incentivize participation than in another where this was
not the case. This may seem obvious and as such unworthy of much attention, but the very
important point it demonstrates is the power and potential for local discretion to promote
community engagement.
Building on this point, the thinking underpinning this study follows along the line of
Maloney, Smith and Stoker’s (Op. Cit: 803) argument, namely that in order to understand the
9
social capital value which relationships within a community hold, or the extent to which these
may provide routes to influence the powers that be in any given locality, it is not enough to
understand the relations and structural positions of actors in networks of relations, nor the
nature of the governance landscape and the opportunities for participation and power which
exist. Rather one must understand the effects of the ‘interpenetration of the state and civil
society’ as Maloney, Smith and Stoker (Op.Cit: Ibid) assert, recognizing the reciprocity
between civil society and state in terms of social capital maintenance and generation (Ibid:
817).
Data and method
The data presented in this paper were collected in the period March 2010 to January 2011
from 57 residents’ groups and two cross-boundary fora, relating to a total of 61 residents’
groups4 and 129 local public sector agencies. The network of groups was defined as those
eligible to participate in the community partnership in each of the two NEM boundaries and
which were known to officers of NEM, who held contact details for them in a central
database. The database contained details of 60 groups in the Beacons area and 45 in Gorton.
Based on this information a response rate of 91% was achieved in the Beacons area, and an
estimate 100% rate5 in Gorton, following the elimination of a good number of the 60 Beacons
groups and 45 Gorton groups in the database based on them no longer being active. The three
non-responding Beacons groups are included in the one-mode networks data, since other
groups indicated their connectivity to them.
The groups interviewed included tenants and/or residents’ groups/ homewatch groups/ friends
of parks (or combination of these), 1 faith group, and 3 allotment societies. Networks data
was collected in one sitting in a structured face-to-face interview with up to three key
representatives of each residents’ group. A group-level self-completion questionnaire was
used to gather information on the characteristics of groups, whilst individual respondents
completed a short self-completion questionnaire on their demographics and their perceptions
of regeneration, community-building and empowerment through regeneration. Adding these
attribute and perceptions questions to the networks approach allows the study to encapsulate
the multiple conceptualisations of social capital used in the literature: networks, aggregate
4
Contact was made with almost all of these groups, either via telephone or on the doorstep, a process which eliminated
nearly half of the Beacons groups and nearly two-thirds of the Gorton groups, on the basis that they were no longer active, or
in a handful of cases, on the basis of reports from neighbours that there was no group operating from the address in question.
5
.In Gorton a response rate of 100% is estimated although difficulty in making direct contact with a small number of contacts
in the database meant reliance on second-hand reports such that in reality the response rate could be around 10% less than
this, though this is considered unlikely, given the lack of reference to them by those residents who did participate in the
study.
10
quantifications of the levels of associational activity, and individual level perceptions of
community (e.g see Kadushin, 2004 on Putnam’s (2000) social capital indicators).
The networks questionnaire was intended to operationalise social capital as resources
accessed through networks (Lin, 1999; Foley and Edwards, 1999) and focussed on a hierarchy
of relations of value in the context of community engagement in regeneration and, consistent
with those examined in relevant studies (e.g. Baldissarri and Diani, 2007/ Diani and Bison,
2004/ Purdue et. Al, 2004; Cotterill, 2007; Lelieveldt et. al., 2009/ Dekker et al., 2008; Poole,
2008), progressing from basic communication or information sharing, to collaborating, a
higher risk relation requiring some trust and greater resource commitment (Kenis and Knoke,
2002: 276). To this was added the sharing of members across groups, in line with Laumann et
al.’s assertion that ‘relations involving boundary interpenetration often have an additional
component of solidarity maintenance’ (Laumann et al.,1978 in Baldissarri and Diani, 2007:
743). In the examination of vertical ties between civil society actors and the state such a
hierarchy is reminiscent of Sherry Arnstein’s (in)famous (1969) ‘Ladder of participation’ and
indeed Dekker et al., (Ibid) operationalise the ladder into three networks measures of the
involvement of civic organizations in local governance ‘informed’, ‘co-decided’, ‘coproduced’. In these data the ‘higher levels’ of relation- working together and formal ties, such
as involvement in policy panels/ board membership (see Table 1 below)- are conceived of as
indicators of co-productive relationships.
The networks questionnaire collected data on so-called one-mode relationships, so
relationships between one set of actors of the same type, in this case residents’ groups, and
two-mode relationships, that is, between two different types of actors, in this case residents’
groups on the one hand, and local public and third sector agencies on the other.
Representatives of residents’ groups were given a discrete list of all those groups eligible to
participate in the NEM community partnership in their area and asked to identify which their
group had had direct personal contact with, thinking back over the past two years. This
question was used to eliminate those groups with which they had had no contact, with
subsequent questions focused on information-sharing and so-on (see Table 1, below) only
applied to those groups identified in the first question.
Two-mode questioning was also based on a discrete list of approximately 50 key public sector
agencies which residents’ groups might have contact with in the course of their business,
including obvious partners in regeneration within the city council, as well as others such as
the police, housing providers and schools. Respondents were also invited to add additional
11
contacts which they had had to the list, which extended the total asked about to 129 in
Beacons and 128 in Gorton. Interviews often included ‘talk’ around the subject of
regeneration and were voice recorded.
Table 1. Relationships examined in networks element of study
Relation 1-mode
Data type Measure
Categories
1.Direct personal contact
Valued
Strength of relationship
1=Weak; 2=Medium; 3=Strong
2. Receive information
Valued
Frequency
3. Give information
Valued
Frequency
1=Weekly, 2=Monthly
3= Every 2-6 months
4= Less than once every 6 months
4. Work together
Binary
Whether or not to date
0=No, 1=Yes
5. Work together future
Valued
Whether envisaged
0=No, 1=Maybe, 2=Yes
6. Share members
Valued
Count of cross-members
Relation 2-mode
Data type Measure
Categories
6. Policy panel
Valued
7. Board/ governor
Valued
8. Employment
Valued
9. Volunteer
Valued
10. Other
Valued
Count of members on alter policy
panel
Count of members on in board/
governor role
Count of members employed by
alter
Count of members in ongoing
volunteer role
Count of members in any other
formal role
1-5 same as above
Data were subsequently analysed using Ucinet 6 (Borgatti et al. 2002) a software package
designed specifically for the analysis of networks data, as well as the Statistical Package for
Social Scientists (SPSS) v. 16, which was used to process attributes data collected in the selfcompletion questionnaires or generated by analysis in Ucinet.
The next section of this paper begins the presentation of preliminary exploration of these data
which examine the overall structure of networks as a measure of the potential for mobilisation
(as Baldassarri and Diani, 2007 suggest) of residents’ groups and also the potential for
coproduction and influence in the two-mode network, influence being thought of as an
outcome of having ties which bear other resources such as information or knowledge (eg
Monge and Contractor, 2003: 143; Christopoulos, 2008: 477), though it also conceived of as a
resource flowing in network relations in the literature (eg Lin, 1999). As Baldasserri and
Diani (Op.Cit: 741) explain, different network structures have different implications in terms
12
of mobilizing capacity and long-term sustainability of a network. They provide ideal-type
network structure diagrams, reproduced here at Figure 2, showing a centralized, hierarchical
network on the left, which has higher potential for large-scale mobilization, and a
decentralized, polycentric network which, whilst less capable of fomenting action in numbers,
is more robust to the loss of key actors (Op. Cit: Ibid).
Figure 2. Ideal-type network structures: left- hierarchical; right- polycentric
This paper also examines possible antecedents of social structure in the political opportunity
structures of NEM/NDC governance, in particular whether there is any relationship between
involvement in NEM/NDC governance structures and network relations, it looks at which
agencies are key players in the coproductive network of working together relations, and
analyses measures of perceptions of empowerment and community building through topdown regeneration.
Results: Residents’ groups in east Manchester: the grass-roots basis for regeneration in
the age of austerity
Group characteristics and accessing of political opportunity structures
The self-completion survey used in this study contained a large quantity of indicators of group
characteristics and their level of activity, some of which are shown in Table 2 below, and
which include attributes commonly used as predictors of network characteristics in other
studies (e.g. Lelieveldt et. Al., 2009; Dekker et Al., 2008; Smith, Maloney and Stoker, 2004;
Baldassarri and Diani, 2007, also see Laumann, Galaskiewicz, Marsden, 1978).
These data show that the difference between the residents groups engaged with NEM in the
two areas is much less marked than might have been anticipated, particularly in light of the
‘ten years behind’ thesis. The divergence in age and numbers participating in groups is not
13
great, with a mean group age of 8.5 in Gorton despite the area only becoming part of NEM in
2004, and only beginning to benefit from access to the Residents’ Forum and further support
from NEM in 2007.
Table 2. Profile of residents’ groups: composition and activity by area
Variable
Age of group (years)
Minimum
Mean
Maximum
No. of committee/ core members
members
Minimum
Mean
Maximum
No. people regularly involved with group
Less than 10
10-20
More than 30
Frequency of committee/ core member
meetings*
Once a month or more
Once every couple of months
Once every six months
Less than once every six months
Frequency of open meetings (anyone
can attend)
Once a month or more
Once every couple of months
Once every six months
Once a year
Less than once a year
Never
Total income of group (past two years)
No income
< £1000
£1000 - £4,999
£5000 - £9,999
£10,000 - £14,999
£15,000 - £19,999
£20,000 - £24,999
£25,000 - £29,999
£30,000 or more
Frequency of events/ activities run by
group in neighbourhood
Once a month or more
Once every couple of months
Once every six months
Once a year
Less than once a year
Never
Beacons
(N=31, %=column)
Gorton
(N=30,%=column)
2
9.3
23
2
8.5
28
1
5.6
15
2
6.3
13
15 (48.4%)
11 (35.5%)
5 (16.1%)
18 (60%)
10 (33.3%)
2 (6.7%)
6 (19.4%)
12 (38.7%)
7 (22.6%)
6 (19.4%)
11 (37.9%)
10 (34.5%)
3 (10.3%)
5 (17.2%)
3 (9.7%)
7 (22.6%)
2 (6.5%)
6 (19.4%)
1 (3.2%)
12 (38.7%)
6 (20.0%)
5 (16.7%)
3 (10.0%)
5 (16.7%)
1 (3.3%)
10 (33.3%)
8 (25.8)
10 (32.3%)
6 (19.4%)
3 (9.7%)
3 (9.7%)
0 (0.0%)
1 (3.2%)
0 (0.0%)
0 (0.0%)
2 (6.7%)
14 (46.7%)
7 (23.3%)
3 (10.0%)
3 (10.0%)
1 (3.3%)
0 (0.0%)
0 (0.0%)
0 (0.0%)
4 (12.9%)
5 (16.1%)
4 (12.9%)
6 (19.4%)
1 (3.2%)
11 (35.5%)
7 (23.3%)
5 (16.7%)
2 (6.7%)
3 (10.0%)
2 (6.7%)
11 (36.7%)
*N=29 for Gorton ‘Frequency of committee/ core member meetings, due to non-response for this item by one
group. All ‘frequency’ variables refer to activity over the past two years from the time of interview.
14
The distribution of groups across the categories of the three frequency of meetings and
activities variables (committee meetings/ open meetings/ events and activities in
neighbourhood) is weighted slightly more towards the higher frequency end of the scale in
Gorton, whilst the distribution of income is very similar, with the majority of groups having
incomes of less than £1000 in each area over the past two years.
Table 3. Measures of accessing of political opportunity structures by area
Variable
Received grant funding to set-up group
from NEM/NDC another local agency?
No
Yes
Don’t know
Received help/support to set-up group
from NEM/ NDC or another local agency?
No
Yes
Highest level of involvement in Beacons
NDC governance structures
None
Residents’ Forum/ Beacons task groups
Beacons board membership
NEM board directorship
Attended NEM Community Partnership 3
or more times*
No
Yes
Beacons
(N=31, %=column)
Gorton
(N=30,%=column)
9 (29.0 %)
22 (71.0 %)
0 (0.0%)
13 (43.3%)
16 (53.3%)
1 (3.3%)
6 (19.4%)
25 (80.6%)
13 (43.3%)
17 (56.7%)
9 (29.0%)
12 (38.7%)
6 (19.4%)
4 (12.9%)
-
20 (58.8%)
14 (41.2%)
12 (40.0%)
18 (60.0%)
*N=34 for Beacons as these figures based on actual meeting minutes which capture presence or absence of any
group, including those who did not participate in this research.
Table 3 above operationalises POS as access to funding and support from local state actors in
setting up residents’ groups and access to NEM/NDC governance through the former
structures of the Beacons NDC partnership and the current structures of the community
partnerships. The first two variables show that over three quarters of groups in the Beacons
area received set-up funding and four fifths received support (help/advice). In Gorton the
corresponding proportions are lower, however over 50% of groups received funding and
support to set up. Additional analysis, not shown in this table, reveals that the main source of
funding for Beacons groups was NEM/NDC, with 14 groups receiving funding from this
source compared to just two in Gorton. The main source of funding for Gorton groups was the
city council.
In terms of involvement in NEM governance structures, we see that 71% of groups in
Beacons were involved at some level of the NDC governance structures, compared to only
15
41.2% who have made any regular commitment to the post-NDC community partnership.
Gorton, on the other hand, calls on a larger participation base for its community partnership,
with 60% of groups having attended 3 or more meetings. It should be noted, however, that,
unlike the figures for Residents’ Forum participation, the community partnership attendances
are based on actual attendance as recorded in the minutes rather than self-reporting as is the
case with the Beacons structures variable. A document produced by NEM as part of their
community engagement review in 2009 reports that the average number of groups from the
Beacons area attending the Residents’ Forum at that point had fallen to 8, or 13.3% of the 60
groups in the database, or 23.5% of the 34 groups found/ thought still to be active during the
period of this study. Indeed this document shows that the highest ever average annual
attendance was 23 groups in 2002, the year the Commonwealth Games were held in east
Manchester, with attendance gradually falling annually since then.
Collective capacity through inter-group relationships
In order to understand something about the network of relationships between residents’
groups in each of the two areas, we begin by examining the density of the different intergroup networks. Density is a common measure of what is referred to as closure in the
networks literature, that is, networks where actors are strongly and reciprocally tied together
(Prell and Skvoretz, 2008). Prell and Skvoretz reference the work of James Coleman (1988;
1990) to make the point that closed, dense networks can provide social capital insofar as they
create feelings of mutual obligation and trust among members of the network. Density is
measured as the number of relationships present between each pair of actors in the network
divided by the total possible number of relationships (assuming every pair could have a link),
which is expressed as a proportion. Table 4 below shows the densities of each of the networks
after they have been symmetrised and binarised6, with proportions converted to percentages.
Table 4. Densities of inter-group networks by area
Network
Contact
Information exchange
Working together
Work together in the future
Share members
Beacons
(N=1122)
37.1%
29.6%
16.9%
20.5%
3.0%
Gorton
(N=870)
44.4%
28.1%
14.0%
28.5%
3.2%
6
Recall that some of the networks measures are valued, i.e they have values above 0 and 1, and that reports of
relationships, or ties, are not always reciprocated, for a number of reasons, including recall, but also perhaps
because we care using only one or two group representatives to speak for the whole group. The ties are therefore
made symmetric, based on the average value or maximum value and then converted to 0s and 1s, that is,
‘binarised’.
16
The total N shown for each area is the total possible number of ties which is calculated as the
total number of actors in each network (34 and 30 respectively) multiplied by the total minus
1, since no tie is possible between each group and itself.
The first point to note here is that the densities of the networks in the two geographical areas
do not diverge greatly. Each area has two networks out of the five which exceed the other in
density, whilst the shared membership networks have practically same density, with the
Gorton network 0.2% denser. Network densities decrease as network size increases, since any
human actor can only sustain so many relationships, therefore the greater number of actors,
and therefore potential ties in the Beacons network is non-trivial, with the Gorton network
only 78% the size of the Beacons network based on total possible ties. Nevertheless, the fact
that Gorton has comparable density in most cases, and exceeds Beacons on density by as
much as 7% on contact and 8% on working relationships envisaged for the future is
noteworthy. In the case of the ‘work together future’ network, the lesser density of the
‘working together’ network in Gorton compared to Beacons might be relevant, insofar as the
existing level of joint-working may be less close to any kind of saturation point, and therefore
still have greater potential for growth than in Beacons. On the other hand, after 10 years of
regeneration driving home community activism in the Beacons area, groups may well have
firmly established who they do and don’t want to work with, and so have a less expansive
orientation towards future contacts. This is just one possible reading, which is to some extent,
consistent with declining attendance of the Residents’ Forum.
Figures 3 and 4 below shows visualisations of networks based upon aggregating all the ties
across the five networks encompassed by the previous table to produce what is known as a
‘multiplex’ network of ties representing multiple relatons. The aggregations have been
produced by summing all five of the binary networks so that the maximum value of a tie is 5,
where all 5 types of relationships are present, and the minimum is 0, where none are present.
This gives an insight in some of the structural properties underpinning the networks. Keeping
in mind the ideal-type networks from Baldissarri and Diani’s (2007) paper shown in Figure 2,
we see that these networks are centralised, rather than polycentric, as are their constituent
networks (though the visualisations are not shown here). Given that the study is based around
those groups with a connection to a central forum, this makes sense intuitively, though polycentricity might (have) develop(ed) over time. As Baldassarri and Diani point out,
hierarchical forms of civic coordination have higher potential for large-scale mobilization, but
17
they are less robust than a polycentric civic network, insofar as they depend on core actors to
hold the network together (Op. cit: 741).
Figure 3. Beacons multiplex inter-group relations network
Note: Nodes in yellow= core groups; nodes in blue= peripheral groups
Figure 4. Gorton multiplex inter-group relations network
Note: Nodes in yellow= core groups; nodes in blue= peripheral groups
18
Further analysis of these networks reveals that, with the exception of the small shared
membership networks, which contain only 59% and 50% of all the network actors in Beacons
and Gorton respectively, the other networks have a core-periphery structure. This structure
consists of a core of actors who are well-connected to each other and a periphery of actors
with little or no connection to each other, but which are connected to the core actors. In the
network diagrams shown in Figures 3 and 4 the core actors are shown in light yellow and the
peripheral actors in dark blue. In Gorton the core tends to be smaller and denser across the
constituent networks, with a core membership ranging from 8 to 12 groups and with a withincore density ranging from 82% to 100% (i.e. all possible ties present). In Beacons the cores
tend to be larger and less dense, ranging in size from 14 to 21 groups with a density ranging
between 43% and 82%. Indeed the largest, least dense core in Beacons is on the measure of
future working, which suggests that there is a quite a large established pool of potential
collaboration, perhaps reflecting past contact through the Residents’ Forum, which it may be
recalled, was recorded to peak at 23 groups in 2002. Examining who reported attendance of
the Residents’ Forum suggests this as a possibility, however, it is not clear-cut, since most
groups report some kind of attendance over its lifetime.
Table 5. Summary network statistics for multiplex inter-group networks
Networks statistic
Beacons
(N=34)
1.08
Gorton
(N=30)
1.19
Average value of ties (existing ties)
2.92
2.68
Average degree (valued)
35.7
34.5
32.4%
37.3%
2.95
3.14
Density (valued- all ties)
Centralisation
Density of core (valued)
Looking at the other statistics in Table 5 we see that average degree (the average sum of the
value of ties each actor has) is higher in Beacons than in Gorton, and the average value of
actual ties is also higher, so on average groups in the Beacons networks have more ties of a
higher value i.e. as far as a range of discrete values from 0 to 5 can be understood in fractional
terms, the Beacons ties which are present have greater multiplexity than Gorton ties.
However, density, which is calculated as the average value of ties across all possible ties in a
network for valued data, is slightly higher in Gorton, reflecting the fact that the density based
19
on the number of ties present or absent is higher7 in Gorton (44.4% to Beacons 37.1%), as per
the values for the contact network in Table 4. In other words whilst the ties that exist are of
slightly lower value than in Beacons on average, there are more ties as a proportion of the
total possible, making the network-level average higher.
Political opportunity structures of governance and inter-group relationality
Finally with respect to inter-group relationships a preliminary examination was made of the
possible association between involvement in NEM/NDC governance structures and the level
of contact residents’ groups have with other groups in the network. This was examined by
looking at how average degree (sum of ties for each node divided by the total number of
nodes) relates to the level of participation in governance structures. Firstly involvement in
Beacons NDC structures was examined, just for groups in the Beacons area.
Table 6. Mean degree of groups in Beacons multiplex network by level of involvement in
NDC governance involvement
N groups
Highest level of involvement in Beacons NDC governance structures
=31
None
Residents’ Forum/
Beacons
NEM Board
NDC task groups
Partnership Board
Mean
degree in
26.1
36.2
51.2
52.8
multiplex
network
Here we see some association between the level of involvement in NDC governance and the
number of relationships a group has in the inter-group multiplex networks, with average
degree increasing as you go up a level of governance, so to speak. A statistically significant
difference is not found between the means, the 95% confidence intervals of which overlap,
but we are seeking merely to describe these data, since they are not randomly sampled, and
cases are not independent, meaning that they violate the assumption upon which standard tests
of statistical significance are based. Whilst this is a logical association it is not one that should
be taken for granted. Some individuals representing groups might choose to engage in
governance structures for purely self-serving reasons, or behave in a way which alienates
others. It is encouraging that in Beacons those groups involved in governance structures
appear to be well connected within the network. This might suggest that the governance
structures are providing opportunities for networking, but equally, such positions may attract
individuals who are more socially expansive. The point to make is that this association does
not establish causality or the direction of any causal relationship, merely an association.
7
The binary density of the multiplex networks k is identical to that of the binary contact networks since a tie can
only be present in the higher order networks if it was indicated to be present at the eliminatory ‘contact’ stage of
networks questions.
20
Table 7. Mean degree in multiplex network by level of attendance of community
partnership
Level of attendance of community partnership
< 3 attendances
3 or more attendances
Beacons
26.6
48.7
Gorton
27.7
39.1
N groups: Beacons= 34; Gorton=30, based on meeting minutes
Looking to the relationship between mean degree and involvement in the current structure of
the community partnership, shown in Table 7, above, we find the same association, extending
to participation in the Gorton community partnership, and to which the same caveats about
statistical significance and causality apply. Thus, whatever the mechanism producing this
relationship, it operates in the same direction in Gorton in respect of the community
partnership structure as it did in Beacons with the Beacons structures, though interestingly the
lower attendance group have a higher degree than in Beacons, and the leap in degree from one
group to the other is also smaller in Gorton.
The interpenetration of community and local state: contact and co-productive potential
Next we turn to the two-mode networks data on relationships between residents’ groups and
agencies of the local state. Again we begin by examining density in the binarised networks,
that is, the percentage of all possible ties that are present. Only three out of the five formal
links networks are included, as they are the most relevant here. The total possible number of
ties is shown as N, which for two-mode data is the number of actors in one mode multiplied
by the number of actors in the other, since a tie between every pair across modes is possible.
Table 9. Densities of networks of relations between residents’ groups and local agencies
by area
Network
Beacons
Gorton
(N=3999)
(N=3840)
Density
No. ties
Density
No. ties
Contact
21.0%
832
18.1%
696
Receive information
14.2%
563
10.8%
414
Give information
12.2%
482
10.5%
404
Working together
11.2%
443
9.3%
357
Work together in the future
12.4%
493
12.9%
496
Formal link- policy panel
1.7%
68
1.6%
60
Formal link- board member/ governor
0.4%
15
0.3%
12
Formal link- ongoing volunteer role
0.7%
26
0.8%
32
Here the size of the networks in each area is much more similar than that of the inter-groups
networks: based on total possible ties the Gorton network is 96% of the size of the Beacons
21
network. For the most part Beacons exceeds Gorton on density, though, once again, the
difference between the two areas is not great, with the largest divergence being on the
receiving of information, though Beacons actors also report giving more information to local
agencies. On working together in the future, as was the case with the inter-group data, we see
a greater expectation on the part of Gorton groups, though only by 0.5%, and Gorton exceeds
Beacons on ongoing volunteering ties by 0.1%, or 8 ties. Looking at the ties in one area as a
proportion of those in the other, it is worth pointing out, that whilst the numbers involved here
are small, as a proportion of volunteering ties in Beacons, the number of Gorton ties amounts
to 123% of Beacons ties.
Working together: coproductive relationships and key-players
For the purposes of this paper the next section of data analysis focusses in on the working
together relationships residents’ groups reported having with local public and third sector
agencies, as an indicator of something approximating coproduction at the very local
neighbourhood level.
Figure 5. Network of work together relationships between residents’ groups and
agencies in Beacons area, nodes sized by degree centrality
N=160; Blue square= agency; red circle= residents’ group; isolates not shown
Figures 5 and 6 above and below show the two-mode networks of working relationships in
each of the geographical areas. The nodes are sized according to degree centrality, i.e. groups
and agencies with more ties are larger. Isolates, that is, nodes with no ties at all, are hidden.
22
From the diagrams we can see that there are a core of agencies in each network which are
very highly connected and lots of individual organisations which are cited as collaborative
contacts for only one or two groups.
Figure 6. Network of work together relationships between residents’ groups and
agencies in Gorton area, nodes sized by degree centrality
N= 158, Blue square= agency; red circle=residents’ group; isolates not shown
Table 10 shows the mean degree for residents’ groups and agencies in each area. These
degrees are normalized so that they are based on the proportion of all possible ties a group
could have to an agency or an agency could have to a group. We see that on both resident
group degree and agency degree Beacons actors exceed Gorton on the mean value and
maximum value, though the difference is only 1% and 2% on the means. A number of
Table 10. Descriptive statistics for mean degree in work together network by area
Degree in work together
Beacons
Gorton
networks
Residents groups
Minimum
0.01
0.01
Mean
0.11
0.10
Maximum
0.28
0.20
N
31
30
Agencies
Minimum
0.00
0.00
Mean
0.11
0.90
Maximum
0.77
0.73
N
129
128
23
agencies cited as contacts have no ties at all in this network which is why the minimum
agency degree is zero in both geographies.
Next we examine who are the key players on the agency side in these networks by looking at
the top ten agencies by degree, shown in Table 11. The hierarchy of cleaning and greening,
crime, regeneration and housing is made plain here, with NEM top of the tree in the Beacons
area8 and the council’s Street Environment Team at Number 1 in Gorton.
Table 11. Top ten agencies in work together networks by degree, shown in descending
order of magnitude
Beacons
Agency
Gorton
Degree
New East ManchesterRegen Team
Neighbourhood Policing TeamGreater Manchester Police
Street Environment TeamCity Council
Ward coordinationCity Council
Manchester LeisureCity Council
Eastlands Homes
0.77
Community Safety CoordinatorsCity Council
Cllr Mike Carmody
(Ancoats & Clayton)
Park Wardens ServiceCity Council
4CT (Community-based charity)
0.42
0.71
0.68
0.65
0.55
0.45
0.42
0.35
0.35
Agency
Degree
Street Environment TeamCity Council
Neighbourhood Policing TeamGreater Manchester Policy
New East ManchesterRegen Team
Ward coordinationCity Council
Cllr Wendy Helsby
(Gorton Nth)
Gerald Kaufman MP
0.73
Manchester LeisureCity Council
Community Safety CoordinatorsCity Council
Cllr Jackie Pearcey
(Gorton Nth)
Eastlands Homes
0.37
0.73
0.70
0.57
0.47
0.43
0.37
0.37
0.23
It is interesting and encouraging to note the presence of two councillors and the MP for
Gorton so high up in the ranking of working relationships in Gorton. Wendy Helsby is a
longstanding resident and active amongst residents’ groups in Gorton, whilst Gerald
Kaufman, who has been MP for Gorton from some 40 years, is president of one of the parks
groups. Both councillors and the MP were actively involved in the Gorton 100 celebrations in
2009. Meanwhile ward coordination is an important contact for residents’ groups, as the route
8
The Street Environment Team is very much community-based, with officers who work closely on the ground
with residents to sort out issues, mostly around street and property (grounds) cleanliness. Meanwhile Manchester
City Council’s Leisure department oversee parks and green spaces, for which reason they are the main contact
with residents running friends of parks groups. Eastlands Homes is the largest registered social landlord in the
Beacons area and recently took over properties in Gorton, whilst 4CT is a community-based charity established
on the back of three residents’ groups with support from Beacons NDC. A success story of NDC, 4CT now runs
two major community spaces in the Beacons area, and a number of council and third sector services operate from
its sites.
24
through which voluntary sector grants from the council are accessed, as well as non-financial
support for groups.
Political opportunity structures of governance and the interpenetration of community
and the local state
Next we turn again to participation in governance structures of NEM/NDC as an indicator of
accessing political opportunity structures and seek an association with co-productive
relationships as measured by the work together networks discussed above. Using mean degree
of residents’ groups in these networks we first look at this measure cross-tabulated by
participation in the Beacons structures for residents’ groups in the Beacons area.
Table 12. Mean degree of groups in Beacons in two-mode work together network by
level of involvement in NDC governance involvement
N groups= 31
Highest level of involvement in Beacons NDC governance structures
Mean degree
in 2-mode
work network
None
Residents’ Forum/
NDC task groups
Beacons
Partnership
Board
NEM Board
0.0894
0.0944
0.1732
0.1211
We see that as we move from no participation to participation in the Beacons board the mean
degree increases steadily, but drops down for the few groups which have had a representative
on the Beacons board. Clearly there is some kind of relationship here, with those participating
in such structures also more actively engaged in working with local agencies in general. Once
again the differences between means are not statistically testable and the differences seen here
speak only of association, rather than causality.
Moving on to the relationship between working with local agencies and involvement in
current governance structures of NEM, shown in Table 13, below, we see the same direction
of relationship, however the difference in the mean for those with little or no attendance of the
community partnership and those who have attended 3 or more times is very small- just 1%for Gorton groups compared to a 4% difference for Beacons, quite conceivably reflecting the
longer-term impact of participation in NDC and its governance structures on the connectivity
of groups to local agencies. Indeed the mean degree for those groups that don’t participate in
the community partnership in the Beacons area is equal to those who do in Gorton. This
suggests that if the community partnership is to operate in the way Beacons structures
appeared to in terms of fomenting vertical connectivity, it may take longer for this to take
25
Table 13. Mean degree in 2-mode work together network by level of attendance of
community partnership
Level of attendance of community partnership
< 3 attendances
3 or more attendances
Beacons
0.09
0.13
Gorton
0.08
0.09
effect than three-year time frame of the Gorton community partnership. It is also possible that
Gorton groups are developing those ties through other channels. The greater density of the
‘work together future’ network for Gorton compared to that of Beacons, seen in Table 9
above, indicates that, by one means or another, Gorton groups do envisage increasing the
number of their coproductive ties with local agencies in the future9.
Social capital as beliefs: perceptions of community engagement and empowerment
Residents’ groups representatives (of which there was a total of 77) were asked a small
number of questions about their perceptions of regeneration, community and empowerment,
which shed light on how enabled residents’ groups feel by the process of regeneration.
Responses by area are shown in the three graphs below.
The distribution of response across categories of the ‘helping residents to get involved’
variable displayed in Figure 7, below, shows an inclination towards the higher categories
amongst Gorton respondents. Indeed fully 14 residents’ groups members from the Beacons
(35% of Beacons respondents) area feel that regeneration has not helped them to get involved
or has only done so a little. The relationship between area and this measure was tested using a
non-parametric test (Cramer’s V) which can be interpreted like a correlation coefficient,
which ranges from 0, indicating no relationship, to 1 indicating complete correlation. The
value of V of 0.372 was produced for the relationship between area (coded Beacons 0, Gorton
1), with a p value of 0.014, indicating a moderate strength relationship between the two
variables, which is statistically significant at the 0.05 level.
The next perceptions measure, shown in Figure 8 below examines the extent to which
residents felt that regeneration agencies help increase community spirit. Again here we see the
9
A quick examination of the relationship between mean degree in the work together future network and level of
attendance of the community partnership reveals that groups in Gorton who have attended the partnership less
than three times have a one point higher mean degree than the equivalent set of groups in Beacons (0.12
compared to 0.11 in Beacons) though again the jump in the mean from one category to the next is smaller in
Gorton: up to two points to 0.14 compared to a four point leap to 0.15 in Beacons.
26
Figure 7. Perceptions of regeneration agencies helping local residents to get involved in
improving where they live, by area
N= 77 residents
Figure 8. Perceptions of regeneration agencies’ capacity to increase community spirit
N =77 residents
distribution of responses in Gorton weighted slightly more heavily towards the positive end of
the scale, whilst, once again, 14 respondents (35% of the Beacons total) indicate the feeling
that regeneration has done little or nothing to improve community spirit in the area. Testing
27
the relationship between area and this variable produces a value of V very close to that for the
previous relationship (0.308), though this is not statistically significant (p=0.12).
Finally residents were presented with a version of what has become one of the standard
indicators of empowerment in government surveys, both national and local, namely relating to
their perception of their ability to influence decisions affecting their area. The results are
shown in Figure 9 below.
Figure 9. Perceptions of residents’ groups’ ability to influence local decision-making
N=77 residents
Once again Gorton responses are inclined slightly more towards the positive compared to
Beacons, though no-one in Beacons responded in the lowest category this time. On testing the
association between area and this measure, it was found to be statistically significant
(p=0.033) with a value of V of 0.369, again indicating a moderate strength association.
Discussion: contextualising findings
This paper has presented preliminary findings on the comparison of social capital indicators
in two adjacent geographical areas, which run somewhat contrary to initial expectations. For,
despite the comparatively more limited level of community development and regeneration
expenditure in Gorton, its community infrastructure, both in terms of horizontal connectivity
within the community, and vertical connectivity to the local state, performs very respectably
alongside that of the Beacons intervention area in a way which, at the very least, seems to
28
defy the ‘ten years behind’ characterisation. Meanwhile the governance structures of
NDC/NEM appear to be performing well (whatever the direction of this mechanism10) in both
areas insofar as residents’ groups involved in them have better-developed connections to other
groups and to local services, to foment collective action and coproduction, than those groups
who do not participate in them. However in Gorton this association is less strong and may
reflect a need for further time for coproductive relationships to develop through the
community partnership. It might also indicate that groups are forging their own connections
outside of the partnership, a possibility suggested by the higher average degree of the less
frequent attendees of the community partnership in Gorton compared to the same set of
groups in Beacons, on both the inter-group multiplex network (Table 7) and the two-mode
work together future network (footnote #9).
With a comparatively smaller, hard core of what the fieldwork undertaken for this study
indicated were very self-motivated activists, who have been in the game for some time, it may
be that the length of Gorton’s journey, in terms of years, is not much shorter than that of
Beacons, but it has simply unfolded in a more grass-roots fashion. Here some knowledge of
the history is useful, since this reveals attempts to bring Gorton together going back to the
early 2000s, with the first Gorton Festival organised by a resident, originally from outside
Gorton, who at interview observed that ‘Gorton didn’t have a very nice spirit’ at that point,
but who recounted how that has changed over time, with the festival as just one catalyst, and
the restoration of a major local landmark, Gorton Monastery, in 2005-07, as another. Indeed
the Monastery is an example of a project which NEM lent its weight to, albeit without being
able to front up the cash, whilst having a hand in the arrival of a large Tesco store in the area,
and overseeing the physical regeneration of housing currently happening in West Gorton.
Meanwhile an increased level of support has been in place since Gorton was allowed to
participate in the Residents’ Forum in 2007, with data in tables 2 and 3 showing that Gorton
groups are receiving funding and that over half had funding or support from local agencies at
the set-up stage. Furthermore Gorton appears to have the advantage of a more solid, wholearea identity, with a senior officer at NEM with responsibility for the area observing that
residents see themselves more as Gortonians, than they do Mancunians, an observation
consistent with the history. Nevertheless a key active resident in the area repeatedly speaks of
10
The point being that we cannot say that the higher average connectivity of those committed participants in
governance structures has been caused by that participation, but nevertheless, the fact that those groups are better
connected is a sign of well-functioning structures, insofar as those structures are meant to be representative of a
wider population and in as far as they are intended to promote community activism. In other words, better
connected participatory structures, are, by definition, better performing vehicles for the collective sport of
participation.
29
the ‘warring tribes of Gorton’, remarking that ‘NEM are the only people who’ve tried to bring
Gorton together and I think they’re [sic] working’.
In respect of area-level identity and mobilisation, the challenge was always going to be
greater across the Beacons neighbourhoods. The bringing together of the area was an
objective which underpinned the work of officers on the Beacons Resident Liaison Team, not
least because of the lack of an overarching, cross-neighbourhood identity at the outset, with
all the problems of suspicion and jealousies that can accompany such a disconnect, even from
street to street, as residents themselves recounted in the final evaluation of the partnership
(see Ekosgen, 2010: 86), and which, in any case, tend to be heightened by the experience of
scarcity and state neglect in deprived areas. Indeed one very active resident group
representative observed that ‘When the NDC brought all the residents’ groups together it took
almost 5 years for them to realise that we’re all in the same boat.’ However it also seems like
the attempt to forge this connect from above led to a certain degree of dependency. One
resident put it quite bluntly: ‘The Resident Liaison Team brought groups together, but that's
gone now.’ And indeed the fall in numbers of residents groups since its peak tells its own
story. One NEM officer described groups as having been ‘bullied into becoming constituted’
by NDC, only to find that they ceased to be active once their problems were solved. Contact
made with these groups in this study confirms this pattern, and highlights the difficulties
inherent in government trying to get people active and keep them that way. Nevertheless, the
one-mode data for Beacons reported on above presents a somewhat more positive picture,
suggesting that, if necessary, those groups which continue to be active across the area could
be reconnected as quite a large collaborative force.
Perhaps, therefore, the question of whether a top-down intervention creates dependency
requires a more nuanced response than a simple yes or no. There is undoubtedly a feeling
across residents’ groups in the Beacons area that, as one of their number put it ‘people in
power are more accessible than they used to be.’ However, it appears that that accessibility
has been opened up with officers more so than with politicians, through the siting of staff
locally in the NEM/NDC offices and with the much praised installation of (and subsequently
much-lamented withdrawal of) an ‘open door’ policy for residents at theses offices, allowing
them to walk in off the street, directly to an officer’s desk. This reflected an engagement
process built on overcoming a deep-seated resentment and mistrust of the city council
amongst the area’s residents, and the feeling that, in the words of one resident involved in the
final Beacons evaluation, ‘no-one was interested’ prior to NDC. Indeed the evaluation
document itself notes that, pre-NDC, elected members were the main outlet for resolving
30
issues but that they were ‘not considered to be effective’ (Ekosgen, 2010: 82). In any case, as
the principal officer in charge of the Beacons Partnership, NDC coordinator, Sean
McGonigle, points out, central government had made it clear that it did not want NDCs to be
dominated or run by local authorities (McGonigle, S., in Grant, 2010: 16). He goes on to
recount the way in which councillors were excluded from the NDC, speculating that some
conscious decision on this must have been made by the council, and suggesting that the
potential for competing Labour/Liberal Democrat party political representation in Beacons
wards could have made it ‘very messy’ (Op. Cit: Ibid). The result of what therefore became
officer-mediated engagement was that residents would go directly to officers themselves, as
residents and officers alike observed during fieldwork. Indeed one key officer suggested that
residents think if they go to councillors they will get something done, but that if they go
through NDC it will definitely get done, suggesting an element of doubt about member
commitment to residents, though this person did also suggest that councillors also act as
brokers between residents and officers. One resident group representative, in response to
being asked about the benefits of having direct personal contact with officers in local agencies
commented on how they have gone from having no contact to being friends, stating
emphatically that ‘It would be the worst thing we could lose’. This then, is what is at stake as
the functions of NDC retreat from the area.
To some extent the sense of potential loss or abandonment at the end of an intense, ten-year
scheme like NDC is inevitable, and as such, the more negative perceptions amongst Beacons
residents in comparison with Gorton residents found in this study is therefore not so
surprising. There is clearly some sense of a return to the bad old days: ‘It’s back to council
dictatorship’ as one key resident activist put it. Indeed the same individual observed that:
‘They’ve trained residents up and given them a voice and now they’ve dropped them…You
can’t have a top-down regime where you change the culture and then you change it back’.
However there is a recognition, on both the resident and the officer side that ‘the glue that
holds a lot of organisations together is being able to influence how money is spent’, as a
senior officer at NEM recently put it. Meanwhile another key resident activist expressed
concern that elected members had been angered by Beacons residents developing the courage
to challenge poor service delivery, and implied that the current cutting of services in Beacons
wards was therefore politically motivated, for which reason ‘the Beacons Community
Partnership has to be more than a talking shop’. The sense of a loss of previously bestowed
powers seems palpable here.
31
Returning to Gorton, the picture there appears less polarized. Personal accounts of residents,
confirmed by the statistics in this paper (e.g the top ten agency ‘key players’ in Table 11),
indicate that relationships between politicians and active residents in Gorton are more
harmonious and more (co)productive, with elected members better embedded in local
activism than in the Beacons area, but this seems to be in support of events and cultural
activities, rather than any kind of political lobbying over services. However Gorton has
undoubtedly also benefitted from the success of the Beacons Partnership in trying to
mainstream good practice on the community engagement side to other partners, through the
Public Services Forum run during NDC as a multi-agency forum for working on the
partnership’s regeneration goals, and through the dissemination of a specially designed Social
Inclusion Toolkit to partner agencies to provide a source of knowledge and good practice on
working with the community. And indeed the majority of groups in Gorton have received
some kind of funding and/or support from local agencies in setting up their group, though in
each case the proportions are smaller than for Beacons groups (see Table 3). In this sense one
of the wider legacies of the NDC initiative seems to be better performance of officers within
the local state in terms of responsiveness and engagement with local communities. However
in Gorton it seems, anecdotally at least, that community activism is somewhat more culturally
focussed, with Gorton Events, formally the 100 Committee, as a centrally positioned
organizational hub. Indeed a ‘Gorton Forum’ which had attempted to bring residents and local
councillors together to influence the council prior to the area’s absorption into NEM, was
described by one key resident activist as having failed partly because it was ‘too political’.
This is not a criticism which can be levelled at Gorton Events or indeed Gorton’s community
partnership, notwithstanding the level of engagement with elected members.
So, in all of this is there a meso-level solution nestling somewhere between the top-down
attempt to stimulate community empowerment in Beacons and the bottom-up, if latterly statesupported, activism in Gorton, and if so, what is it? Part of the answer appears to lie in
strengthening local democracy at the same as accepting that without finding partnership and
support in the state, civil society will struggle. The fact remains that, despite the NDC
intervention in east Manchester and all the good work done on developing community
infrastructure, the area remains deeply deprived, as is the case with the other 39 NDCs11
according to the government’s own evidence (see CLG, 2010b on limited improvement on
IMD measures, and MIER, 2009 on the inadequacy of ten-year time-frame of NDC for
11
This was to be expected, given what Paul Lawless describes as the ‘imbalance between resources and
outcomes’ for the NDC scheme. Discussing this issue in his 2006 paper on NDC’s rationale and outcomes, he
undertakes what he describes as conservatively estimated calculations, which show that in order to achieve just
one of NDC’s five outcomes, namely, job creation, across the 39 NDC areas, one-half of the total funding for the
programme would need to be spent (Lawless, 2006: 2002).
32
turning around deprived neighbourhoods in Greater Manchester), whilst at the same time
residents are faced with local authority cuts to budgets and services and the withdrawal staff.
The reality is that the residents of NDC areas (continue to) lack the power and resources
necessary to address the wider structural forces which caused decline in their area, as
Atkinson (2003: 118) points out, as a general statement about NDC. And in east Manchester
active residents are well aware of the limited influence they have going forward over
development of their area, with one Beacons community partnership attendee resignedly
expressing the view that, notwithstanding the fine talk of partnership between the city council
and Manchester City Football Club (who will be the only source of major development
investment in the area in the next few years), local residents will have little say in the sporting
developments being planned: ‘The council aren’t putting any money in. The sheikhs12 and
private enterprise will decide!’ This is a serious warning call to David Cameron on his Big
Society ambitions, particularly regarding community empowerment in the domain of
planning, and it brings us back to Ever’s (2003) observations about understanding how the
bigger picture of central government, politics and political landscape impact upon social
capital on the ground. These concerns are echoed by Atkinson (2003) who suggests that in
order for NDC to be a success there needed to be major changes to the way in which
government itself operates to ‘reorder the way in which it governs itself and its relations with
the external world’. This was not going to happen by only temporarily clearing the way for
NDC at a local level, nor by the reforms afoot in the current incarnation of localism,
particularly in the context of dramatic budget cuts, and with the prospect of increased
privatisation of services.
The reality is that, even with a respectable level of investment in community development
over a sustained period, only a small number of residents in an area are going to become and
remain very active and highly committed, as shown by the numbers of residents groups
attending the community partnerships, in areas with populations in the tens of thousands, and
by the small numbers of people involved in those groups within the neighbourhoods in which
they are located. Indeed in this respect, the similarity between the structures and extent of
engagement in these two areas provides as valuable a lesson here as do the differences
between them, in terms of highlighting what are the quite logical limits of what is undeniably
very valuable community activism in such settings. Meanwhile we see that the route to wider
of influence of grass-roots participation, through linkage with elected representation and
which might potentially stimulate larger scale participation, is constrained due to it being
12
This a reference to the Abu Dhabi family which now owns and is personally investing in Manchester City
Football Club.
33
poorly integrated with democratic structures, as was observed in east Manchester and
recognised in the wider literature (e.g. Prendergast, 2008; Howard & Sweeting, 2007). And
yet democratic governance is the only vehicle for ensuring that resources are fairly
distributed, as Anna Coote points out (NEF, 2010: 18)13. This is where government needs to
do more, not less, especially in a nation of growing, not declining, wealth inequality.
Indeed residents in deprived neighbourhoods cannot mobilise without the engagement of, and
often also, funding from, agencies of the local state, not least because fellow residents will
only be inclined to participate in a group if that group has the contacts and means to get things
done. In areas where the reality is that people are not just poor in monetary terms but also
poor in discretionary time (Burchardt, T, 2008, in NEF, 2010) this issue becomes even more
significant. Meanwhile, with respect to how far coproduction in such environments extends in
terms of filling the gaps left by state providers, whilst there are examples in the Beacons and
Gorton areas of residents running community spaces and visitor centres, this is in partnership
with, and with funding from, local government. And in practice the vast majority of activities
recounted by the residents who participated in this study are small-scale, and the number of
residents willing to take up strategic governance roles, such as board memberships and
governorships similarly limited: representatives from only 10 groups in Beacons hold such
roles, and seven in Gorton.
Therefore it seems that in respect of community empowerment, what is needed is not more
temporary, top-down schemes, nor the leaving of civil society to its own devices, especially in
deprived areas14. Rather, any serious commitment to the ambitions for a bigger society require
the adoption of new ways of working across existing governance structures of the state and
third sector, based on the now well-worn ambitions of ‘partnership’ (NEF, 2010: 23). In this
respect there is good practice developed through NDC which deserves recognition and which
should be sustained. As Coote puts it (and in identical terms to one key resident activist in
Gorton spoken to in this study), it is about ‘working with people, rather than doing things for
them’ (Op. Cit: 23). Given the frustrations of core activists in the Beacons area about what
power they will have going forward, it also seems right that such processes should recognise
the possibility of conflict and contestation; that in fact citizen anger can be justified and
13
Indeed, whilst the kinds of people interviewed in this study are undoubtedly civic-minded and sincere in their
ambitions to improve their neighbourhoods, demographically they provide poor representation of their areas as
whole, on age, gender and ethnicity. For example, in each of the geographies covered, only a single person of
BME origin was represented in the study, both of whom were women, whilst the BME populations of these areas
has steadily increased over recent years, now ranging from around 10% in Ancoats and Clayton ward (Beacons)
to nearly 50% in Ardwick ward (Gorton) (Manchester City Council, 2010a and 2010b: estimates for 2007).
14
As Goodlad et Al. (2005) point out ‘Left to itself, community involvement is likely to be dominated by the
powerful’.
34
reasonable. Indeed in DeFilippis’ (2001) critique of social capital theory and applications he
asserts that inequalities of capitalism being what they are, it is impossible for poor
communities to be empowered without confrontation (Op. Cit.: 801), for which reason he sees
community regeneration based on consensus organizing as misguided and likely to be
ineffective. This is a difficult message to sell to politicians, but it is a message grounded in the
realities of human relationships. Any policymaker serious about making society bigger must
recognize that there are costs, as well as benefits, and that it requires compromise and
contestation, from both the top-down, as well as from the bottom-up. The Big Society doesn’t
necessarily require government to grow in scale, but it most definitely demands its
development in terms of maturity and seriousness of commitment, to meet communities halfway, and with a recognition that half-measures won’t cut it in the long run, least of all in such
hard economic times.
Conclusion
The comparative findings reported in this paper show that the two deprived east Manchester
areas in this study, of which one was subject to a top-down regeneration and community
development through a time-limited central government initiative, have much in common in
terms of the structure and extent of community infrastructure, despite the lack of a fully
developed and funded intervention in the comparator area. Findings cast a positive light on
the governance structures of NDC/NEM insofar as residents’ groups involved in them have
better-developed connections to other groups and to local services than those groups who do
not participate in them. However the results also speak of the limits of what can be achieved
by attempting to engage residents through formal groups and governance structures. The
community social capital legacy of time-limited community empowerment interventions may
be short-lived where ‘mainstreaming’ is directed principally at officers, without addressing
the obstacles to ongoing empowerment in place within the functioning of local democratic
representation: the only real channel of strategic influence for residents left behind when the
intervention is gone. The gains in community activism made in the comparator area, with the
support and involvement of local and national elected members, taken with evidence that this
was facilitated by the spread of good practice from top-down community engagement taking
place in the neighbouring NDC area, suggests that the Big Society project has the best chance
of success when local government ‘ups its game’ in its responsiveness to local need, but
through partnership-working with resident activists on the ground, working ‘with us, not for
us’, as a long-standing Gorton activist put it. The message therefore, is not that smaller
government allows big society to flourish, but rather that it requires better government, in
partnership with civil society, and operating in a reflective way which shows consideration for
35
societal impact of wider policymaking, and of economic structures, on the lives of the least
powerful in society. The energies of residents who are willing to stand up and fight to
improve their lot will not be harnessed by tokenism or empty promises. They know full well
that, as Rokkan (1966 in Stone, 1993: 8) famously put it, whilst ‘votes count, resources
decide’. And social networks without access to resources are not social capital.
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