Robina Goodlad

Civic Culture, Community and Citizen Participation in Contrasting Neighbourhoods

This paper uses survey and qualitative evidence from four neighbourhoods in two cities to explore the hypothesis that citizen participation in urban governance is fostered by political structures and public policy as well as by a civic culture supportive of citizen involvement. The analysis shows that although the prospects for citizen participation are likely to be least propitious in poor neighbourhoods demonstrating lower educational attainment levels, for example, such factors may be mitigated by political mobilisation and the approaches to urban governance, including citizen participation, adopted by local institutions. Citizen participation may be fostered as much by the creation of opportunity structures that build confidence in the efficacy of participation as by the intrinsic levels of civic culture. The key policy lesson is that the effort devoted to creating greater institutional thickness and participatory structures is not wasted.

The Housing Challenge in South Africa

This paper considers the housing conditions inherited by the new government in South Africa and the challenge they present. It draws on primary and secondary sources, and on interviews with some of the key actors involved in housing policy. It examines contemporary housing conditions, and the colonial and apartheid legacy which largely created them. It goes on to consider the implications of the struggle under apartheid for improvements in living conditions, and to review developments in housing policy in the 1980s and early 1990s. The policies emerging from the first year of the new government are described, and the implementation of policy in the first two years is reviewed. Issues that arise are discussed, and the conditions required for the state, market and civil society to play their part in achieving the objectives of housing policy are considered.

How would we know what works? Context and complexity in the evaluation of community involvement

In 2002 the UK Home Office commissioned a review of research on community involvement in area-based initiatives. This found comparatively few studies that set out to measure the impact rather than the extent and nature of involvement and hence few answers to the question of what works. This article takes that finding as its starting point and sets out to develop a more robust framework for evaluating the impact of community involvement. It notes the difficulties inherent in using a classic experimental design to evaluate processes as complex as community involvement and proposes a theory-based approach. To this end, it critically reviews the underlying theoretical claims of both community involvement and of area-based initiatives. An evaluation framework is then developed in which the potential benefits of greater involvement are considered for each stage of the process of developing an area-based initiative and positive and negative contextual factors are identified.

Housing Management, Consumers and Citizens

Preface. Part 1. The Context 1. Introduction: The Changing Face of Housing and Local Government 2. Consumers of Citizens? Part 2. The Actors 3. Housing Managers 4. Councillors 5. Tenants 6. Tenants Associations Part 3. The Outcomes 7. Tenants, Housing Managers and Councillors 8. Conclusion: Tenant-Landlord Relationships and the Future of Coouncil Housing

Responsible Participation and Housing: Restoring Democratic Theory to the Scene

Tensions between individual liberty and collective social justice characterise many advanced liberal societies. These tensions are reflected in the challenges posed for representative democracy both by participatory democratic practices and by the current emphasis on (so-called) responsible participation. Based on the example of ‘community’ housing associations in Scotland, this paper explores these tensions. It is argued that the critique of responsibility may have been over-stated, that, in particular, ‘community’ housing associations offer the basis for relatively more inclusive and effective processes of decision making than council housing, which relies on the traditional processes and institutions of representative local government for its legitimacy.

Social justice and disabled people: principles and challenges

Social justice is a policy aim of the UK Labour government. This paper considers the applicability of the concept to disability, seeking to establish principles for conceptualising social justice and disability and considering the nature of the challenges for public policy and society posed by this conceptualisation. The paper considers how disability is implicated in two types of claims about the source of social injustice: those concerned with socially constructed differences between people; and those arising from material inequalities. Appropriate values underpinning alternative conceptions of social justice are discussed and tensions in policymaking considered.

Citizenship in the New Welfare Market: the Purposes of Housing Advice Services

In current debates about citizenship, three approaches to social rights can be detected. Three models of access to social rights mirror these accounts. The institutionalised rights model, based on the post-war welfare state, stresses education and information. The market efficiency model, stressing the need for consumer information, stems from contemporary neo-liberal, consumerist approaches to welfare provision. The radical model challenges the assumption of a level playing field for all citizens. As the states role in housing has been transformed and governments have stressed the market efficiency model, housing advice services have expanded in both state and voluntary sectors. The objectives and work of these services is examined and shown as providing a close fit with the institutionalised rights model in the local authority sector, while in the voluntary sector the radical rights model dominates. In addition, the campaigning work of voluntary organisations is shown to promote a radical view of citizenship rights.

Sacred cows, rational debates and the politics of the right to buy after devolution

The introduction of policy instruments such as the Right to Buy (RTB) led to prophecies of the demise of the welfare state in Western Europe. Yet it is increasingly apparent that a welfare state will survive, albeit in a restructured form. This paper examines the place of RTB in the restructuring of social rented housing in the UK and accounts for recent changes to it. A new politics of RTB has arisen from the restructuring of social housing. As the politics of welfare shifted its focus from the scale of welfare provision to reorganising, adjusting and ‘modernising’ what remained, RTB came into question. This, along with political devolution, has created a new set of conditions that have called RTB into question in different parts of the UK while paradoxically it continues to be widely perceived as inviolable. RTB now occupies an ambiguous and slightly troublesome position as a feature of a residualised social rented sector that is more secure in its role of meeting social needs, as well as being seen to provide a route to owner occupation.

Introduction: Disabled People and Social Justice

In the 1970s and early 1980s, discussions of social justice in the social science literature focused largely on social class. The implicit assumption of much of the literature was that a more just society would be achieved through the reduction of inequalities in the distribution of economic and social resources. Since then, there has been a growing focus on plural aspects of social justice. Many writers now distinguish between distributive, cultural and associational aspects of social justice. However, the different implications of these facets of social justice for different groups, and potential tensions between them, have rarely been adequately recognised. Given New Labours focus on social justice, and its belief that attaining greater social justice is compatible with achieving greater efficiency in the public sector, there is a need to examine more closely the understandings of social justice underpinning a range of policy initiatives.

Housing management matters: Citizenship and managerialism in the new welfare market

This paper addresses three neglected issues in the restructuring of housing policy and provision in the UK in the 1980s and 1990s: first, the relationship between welfare restructuring and management regimes; second, the nature of local variations in the impact of welfare restructuring; and third, the significance of human agency interpretations of change. The paper starts by summarizing the main features of welfare state restructuring and then considers recent manifestations of citizenship and managerialism in housing. Three competing conceptions of citizenship rights are used to examine changing notions of welfare: “market efficiency”, “institutionalized rights” and the “radical challenge” provided by social movements. A four-part typology of the main concepts and themes in the “new public management”—“efficiency”, “downsizing and decentralization”, “excellence” and “public service”—is used to present the main components of change in management regimes. The paper draws on literatures on housing management, citizenship and “the new public management” and on recent research into tenant participation, housing rights and housing advice services. Conclusions are drawn about how tensions between different conceptions of citizenship and public management are implicated with national and global influences at the local level to create particular welfare outcomes.