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영국에서는 2003년부터 PB가 시작되었네.
 
Finding a voice
Friday, 20 March 2009 Holyrood magazine 
 
In these days of political disillusionment, the hunt is on for new ways to get people involved in local decision making. But will they work? Kerry Lorimer reports
 
Political disaffection is becoming one of the defining characteristics of a generation. The evidence: chronically low electoral turnouts, a collapse in party membership and plummeting levels of public trust in politics and democratic institutions.
Voter participation has plunged since 1992, with only 61 per cent turning out to vote at the last general election. Membership of political parties also appears to be in terminal decline. At one point, 3.5m people in Britain were card-carrying members; now the main parties can barely muster half a million between them.
The further away the levers of power, the greater the contempt in which they appear to be held. Polls show 43 per cent of us trust councillors to tell the truth, but only 29 per cent believe MPs; government ministers fare even worse at 23 per cent.
The relative distance between citizens and decision makers may account for at least part of that disillusionment. “This country has one of the most centralised administrations in Europe,” says Saffron Woodcraft, who leads work on neighbourhoods for the Young Foundation, a think-tank specialising in social innovation.
People don’t feel they can influence decisions, and they don’t have trust in government, nationally or locally, because they are so far from where the decision making takes place.”
In addition, she says, people struggle to understand the structures of local governance and who, in an increasingly complex public services landscape, is responsible for the decisions that affect their lives.
The answer could be to look beyond the ballot box and consultation paper to find more imaginative ways of getting people directly involved. Community empowerment, say its supporters, has the potential to completely reinvigorate the democratic process by turning the traditional notion of representation on its head. And it is catching on: governments on both sides of the border have seized on the concept as a remedy for political disengagement and a tool for getting people more engaged in local public services.
South of the border, community empowerment has so far benefited from a far greater political momentum. Last year, the Department of Communities and Local Government published a white paper setting out how power could be shifted away from traditional centres into the hands of communities and individuals. Communities in control: real people, real power placed a specific duty on councils to promote democracy and to involve local people in key decisions. Over the next three years, every local authority will be expected to include an element of public participation in the setting of their budgets.
In Scotland, by contrast, although a number of projects have sprung up around the country, the notion of community empowerment has occupied a much lower profile at a national level.
However, that could be about to change. This month, the Scottish Government has announced it will pump £2m into community empowerment as part of an action plan which will see a new code of conduct for community councils, the promotion of community ownership of assets, and a range of learning and networking opportunities. It also sets out good practice from existing projects across Scotland.
According to Minister for Communities Alex Neil, the plan will be “an invaluable resource” for any community that wants to shape its own future. “Our communities are a rich source of untapped potential, creativity, energy and talent and the process of community empowerment is how we can help to release that potential,” he said. “There is no one-size-fits-all model of community empowerment, but local people doing things for themselves can sometimes be the best way to achieve positive changes.”
One of the pilots envisaged in the plan will give local people a direct say over how money is spent on tackling anti-social behaviour. That could herald an expansion in participatory budgeting across Scotland, with residents given the chance to discuss spending priorities, make budget proposals and then vote on them, as well as being involved in monitoring and scrutinising delivery of the final project.
The concept of participatory budgeting was born two decades ago in Porto Alegre, Brazil, where a third of residents lived in slums on the city’s outskirts without access to water, sanitation or schools. Since the introduction of participatory budgeting, a growing number of citizens have taken part in annual voting rounds to determine how a budget of around $200m should be spent. According to the World Bank, the growth in resident involvement has directly improved the city’s infrastructure, public welfare and conditions for the poor.
Since then, participatory budgeting has been transported to over 200 cities round the world, with pilots beginning in this country about six years ago. Fife, as one of Scotland’s early adopters, has been something of a pioneer in the field. The council began piloting three different approaches to community budgeting in 2003, and the experiment has paid dividends in terms of more open, evidence-based decision making.
In one pilot, residents were drawn from 15 villages in the west of Fife to help decide how the community planning partnership should spend its budget at a local level, choosing to channel funding into tackling graffiti and promoting tourism.
“It’s definitely been valuable – it has transformed our ways of doing things in small and subtle ways,” says Coryn Barclay, who was project manager for the pilot work. “In 2003, we couldn’t have imagined where we are now.”
The fact that Fife chose to pilot three separate approaches is a reflection of the diversity demanded by community budgeting. “You can’t take something and expect it to work across the board,” says Barclay.
The experiment yielded useful findings, not least the need for a proper ownership of the issues, clarity of roles, external facilitation and an upfront acknowledgement of the commitment involved.
It also meant a change in the culture of the organisation and the way it responds to the communities it serves. “To work in that way generates demands and expectations and you have to service those, and if you start something you have to see it through,” says Barclay.
Not only can that transition increase the workload of staff, it requires a particular skill set which may be quite different from that demanded by traditional approaches. “It’s a different way of working from shutting yourself away and working on your own thing,” she says.
According to the Participatory Budgeting Unit, which promotes community budgeting across the UK, broader participation in budget setting is essential for effective, democratic and relevant local governance. “[Politicians] are worried about falling levels of electoral turnout and see it as a way of getting people directly involved,” says Ruth Jackson, information and research officer for the unit.
Giving people a real stake in the outcome counters the perception of local government as a “remote and closed door,” she says. It also combats the curse of consultation fatigue. “From the community’s point of view, it’s something that’s tangible they can have a direct influence on,” she says. “People are fed up with being consulted and not seeing the outcomes.”
An alternative approach chosen by some councils is to set up local committees to act as a focus for community consultation and to ensure services meet the needs of local communities. Renfrewshire Council has established five member-led local committees with a budget of £750,000 between them to allocate to local projects. Membership of the committees ranges from local pensioners’ societies to the Boys’ Brigade – although only councillors can vote on funding decisions – and projects as diverse as play areas and sheltered housing and Burns suppers have benefited.
Residents also have the opportunity to raise issues with the council’s public petitions committee, which is modelled along the lines of its Scottish Parliament counterpart.
According to Carol Puthucheary, convener of the council’s scrutiny and petitions board, the council’s approach reflects a desire to involve people more directly in the decisions that affect them. “We want to empower local people and listen to them before we make decisions,” she says. “The whole idea is trying to benefit your own backyard.”
The area committees have proved a useful opportunity for the council to communicate with the people it serves and to get feedback on its performance. But it’s the fact that the committees are not just talking shops but have money to spend that makes them attractive to potential participants. Puthucheary says that despite a slow start, the idea is beginning to take off. “It obviously takes a while for [committees] to bed in and for people to get to know about it, but I can see them developing as time goes on,” she says. “The word I hear is that it’s all very positive, [and] our local committee has been very well attended and well received.”
The council has been at pains to get beyond the usual suspects and make sure as wide as possible a canvas of views is heard. A recent meeting of Puthucheary’s committee was attended by two sixth-year pupils from a local school. “When you throw the net a bit wider it gets far more interesting,” she says.
It is by learning from existing projects that community empowerment will continue to grow. Pete Duncan is director of Social Regeneration Consultants, which helped the Scottish Government develop its action plan. His work on community empowerment, which spans 35 years, has yielded useful lessons in making it work. “To be successful takes a long time, a lot of work and a lot of voluntary input,” he says. No two communities are the same, so what works in one area won’t necessarily work elsewhere. Investment in capacity building is critical, he says, so people are equipped with the skills they need, as is a proper emphasis on community development to ensure the project draws on the widest possible range of opinions. “Community empowerment won’t work if it only involves one sector of the community,” he cautions.
Most crucially, councils, housing associations and others must be willing to play ball. “You cannot transfer power without someone being prepared to give [power] up,” he says. “It requires a big cultural shift. Giving up power is never easy. It takes a lot of courage.”
In practice, some will be vehemently opposed to giving up control – and in particular, budgetary clout – to those with no democratic mandate. “Councillors fall into two camps – those who are against it because they see it as giving up power, and others, especially who are recently elected, who are up for doing something new,” Jackson says. “Those who do it have a positive experience and see the benefits.”
One of the most compelling arguments may be the development of a less confrontational relationship between councils and the communities they serve. Residents gain an insight into the restraints within which councils operate, while local authorities learn to see the services they provide from a user’s perspective. “It’s a more mature dialogue, instead of people shouting at meetings because something’s not happening,” says Jackson.
Ultimately, the future of community empowerment will depend not only on the willingness of those in power to embrace it, but on the enthusiasm of individuals to get involved.
From her years of work in neighbourhoods, Woodcraft firmly believes the appetite is there. “People do want to get involved in things that are important to them, for example, school closures or planning issues,” she says.
The key is to recognise that there is no single means of engagement that will work for everyone. “You need to have a whole range of empowerment mechanisms to reflect the fact that some people like going to meetings, [while] other people want to use text messaging or online voting,” she says. Many people will only want to get involved for a short time, she adds, so a ‘representative’ group with a fixed membership may not be a realistic proposition.
Duncan is confident that as long as the right kind of funding, promotion and training support are in place, the enthusiasm will follow. “If you offer genuine opportunities to people, they will usually bite your hand off,” he says.
But to flourish, the initiative should ideally come from the communities in question instead of being imposed from above by well-meaning authorities. “The most successful and most sustainable [projects] grow from the bottom up over a period of years,” he says. Without that sense of community ownership, even the most innovative project is unlikely to survive.
Now that the framework is in place, then, the onus is on communities across Scotland to make it happen.