Building a civic statecraft
To support civic renewal, government needs new capabilities
I wrote recently about the renaissance in communitarian thought, and the development of an accompanying statecraft. Across Britain and beyond, a movement for civic renewal has been growing for the last 15 years, and its methods are far more mature than most people realise.
This movement is now entering a new phase, which brings opportunities and risks. After years working largely out of the limelight, the methods of civic renewal are moving to the heart of politics and government. This is in part because this work is seen as a defence against populism, but also because vibrant communities are seen increasingly as a response to complex problems that don’t have bureaucratic solutions. In the UK, this is prompting investment via Pride in Place, a new push on devolution, and an agenda for neighbourhood healthcare.
To anyone who backs the civic movement, this must be a good thing. Only the state has the power to raise this work to the next level, investing the billions that are needed to reverse decades of decline in community life and rebuild civic infrastructure, but also the power to legislate where necessary (e.g. for community rights, or to limit the atomising and extractive effect of markets).
At the same time, the state’s involvement could just as well hinder this work as help it. Large sums of money — what Jane Jacobs called “cataclysmic money” (as opposed to “gradual money”) — can distort local work, worsen competitive dynamics, crowd out good practice, drown practitioners in pointless process, and lead to ‘community-washing’ — adopting the movement’s language, without embracing its methods.
This all raises an important question as we move into the next phase of the work: how should the state show up?
Earlier this month we held a discussion in Whitehall which helped answer this question. We met to discuss a recent report from Kinship Works, Civic Rewilding, in which we synthesised the evidence from Big Local, one of the biggest ever experiments in reviving local civic capacity.
Overall, the discussion was hopeful: thanks to programmes like Big Local, and the wider movement, we know how to do this work, and how to create the conditions it requires. But I was also struck by three insights that feel especially important, and that will be a stretch for government — central departments, Local Authorities, and especially the NHS. These are new capabilities and mentalities that government will need to learn.
1. This work doesn’t scale, it spreads
For a long time, communitarian thinkers have been met by a standard response from policy people in Whitehall: ‘the work you’re describing sounds nice, but does it scale?’
Behind this question lies a bureaucratic conception of what it means to scale something, in which scaling essentially means replicating. In this worldview, we scale impact by rolling out a policy intervention via a government programme. Or we test an intervention to see if it works in a pilot, and then mandate it via regulation, professional guidance, or funding requirements.
For a long time, communitarians had a rather unsatisfactory response to the scaling question, arguing, in essence, that it was the wrong question to ask. The message to politicians and senior officials was: ‘Stop thinking you have to come up with solutions to problems.’ Instead, create the right enabling conditions.
In one sense, communitarians were clearly right about this. The Whitehall culture of ‘announceables’ — in which policy-making is built around ‘things a politician can announce in a speech’ — is daft and outmoded. At the same time, communitarians did not take seriously enough the motivation behind the scaling question. Namely a legitimate desire, from senior officials and elected politicians, to make a difference, and a lack of understanding about how to have an impact at scale, if not via the traditional machinery of roll-outs and mandation.
In Civic Rewilding, we shared a better answer to the scaling question: this work doesn’t scale, it spreads.
What this means is that civic renewal — like all truly complex work — does not scale through replication; it spreads organically. And these organic processes can be supported, as in rewilding.
Sometimes civic work self-seeds, such as when a project is so inspiring that people visit, and it sticks with them, and they go home and grow their own. Sometimes civic work spreads via networks of disciplines and practitioners, which function like mycelial systems, spreading tacit knowledge. And sometimes the work spreads through structures and processes that grow around it — common patterns, risk-pooling institutions, disciplines, or node-like centres of excellence.
The takeaway for government is simple: get beyond the business of scaling, and into spreading. This means complementing the traditional toolkit (pilots, rollouts, legislation) with techniques like movement-building; celebrating and platforming pioneers to inspire others; funding networks of practitioners; helping to codify and mature disciplines (e.g. by funding Centres of Excellence); investing in relationships (e.g. via convenings, study visits, open days); and supporting new institutions.
2. Don’t go for speed, go for traction
If you talk to senior people in government at the moment, you can almost see the smoke coming off them. There is a sense of urgency, even crisis, attached to everything. People feel they are running out of time to save the system, with radical political alternatives not just waiting in the wings, but striding onto the stage. This creates a culture in which people — senior officials, politicians, advisors — are rushing everything, busting a gut to hit administrative deadlines: submissions, White Papers, procurement processes.
In civic work, rushing is a problem, but not in the way people often think. People often talk about community-led work as if it’s nice, but slow. ‘Yes, we should involve communities, but we don’t have time.’ But this doesn’t chime with the work that has happened in Britain and internationally over the last 15 years.
If you study Big Local and other pioneering civic initiatives, from Grimsby to Hastings to Plymouth, you’ll learn that some of the best community work shows itself quickly. Indeed a common feature of successful civic renewal is moving with confidence, and building momentum with small but visible early wins. Indeed I would go so far as to say that a defining feature of the best work is a willingness to take risks — to ‘just say yes’ to things, and crack on, while bigger institutions prevaricate. You see this again and again when people renovate buildings as civic spaces: once you get ownership, you open the building up, get people’s views, ask for donations of materials, even hold events, and create a note of hope by painting the front in neon.
What this is not, however, is rushing. The trick civic work pulls off is working to multiple time horizons. There is quick work (clearing fly-tipping, painting a building, opening up an alley so that footfall drives away local drug dealers). And there is slow work (building shared purpose, healing community divisions). Civic work does both at once. And, at its best, civic work does the quick work in a way that contributes to the slow work; the quick wins start to build trust and heal wounds.
So, how should we think about this? Is civic work fast, or slow? Maybe the answer is to stop thinking in terms of pace — doing everything fast — and more in terms of traction.
What is happening in Whitehall is wheel-spinning. A lot of activity, and smoke, and not much movement. But what we see in the best civic work is traction. It might take time to pick up speed, but from the start there is movement. This is why, at its best, great community work can give people a sense, relatively quickly, that at last something is happening.
So the second capability for government to learn is how to gain traction, and avoid wheel-spinning. And again there is a science to this. Traction is not one phenomenon — it emerges from interactions at multiple scales; molecular, microscopic, macroscopic, like those multiple time horizons. Traction also needs adaptation. Rubber tyres grip the road because they deform, and thereby conform to local irregularities in the surface. So systems with traction tend to have widely distributed intelligence and delivery capacity, all making contact with their own local environment. And so again we need to go beyond the traditional toolkit — big programmes, perpetual short-term deadlines — and learn how to work to multiple time horizons, celebrate local differences, and support adaptation.
3. Use your power to hold space open
In the 2010s, the work of community-led renewal was often framed, rather foolishly, as a trade-off between the size of society and the size of government. What this betrayed, really, was a lack of imagination. People could not imagine government acting in ways that were not overbearing and bureaucratic, and that crowded out community, so withdrawing was the only option. This led to the ridiculous situation of extolling a Big Society while shuttering hundreds of libraries and youth clubs.
At the same time, there is a kernel of truth to the Big Society narrative: the state can be over-bearing. Plus, I think we could say that overbearingness has become more of a problem over time. This is because many of today’s biggest societal challenges are complex and intrinsically human, meaning that the state’s bureaucratic instincts actually get in the way of better outcomes. To support people with complex mental health conditions, or help people into work after they have lost confidence, or provide high quality care, for example, we need to be less bureaucratic.
This creates an interesting paradox. In the early days of modern government, institutional capacity was measured as the state’s ability to extend its reach and fidelity; to enact bureaucracy. Today, one of the most important capacities we need in government is the ability to protect space from bureaucracy. Indeed much of the best work that now happens in and around government — on complex mental health conditions, or activating citizens, and contemporary leadership generally — is all about protecting space from bureaucracy.
Nowhere is this more relevant than in the work of community-led renewal. In Civic Rewilding, we described how programmes like Big Local succeeded because they used their power to create and then hold space open, for local communities to step into. And when communities stepped into that space, they were able to follow what we called a ‘community instinct’. Faced with challenges like chronic ill-health, or loneliness, communities responded in a way that was holistic, positive, preventative, and relational — precisely the kind of approach that is needed, and very different from the bureaucratic instinct (siloed, hierarchical, remedial, etc).
So this is the third capability that government needs to build: using power — funding, political leadership, legislation — to hold space open.
Again, there are many mature methods we can use to do this, learning from work that has already happened. One central aspect of this work is non-anxious leadership, which can feel rather lacking in the public sector at the moment. I wrote recently about methods leaders can use to create space and support innovation. But perhaps the most powerful and long-term method is to create institutions owned and led by the community itself — a way to hold space permanently open.
Conclusion
It’s always challenging when a long-running movement goes mainstream. It’s easy to watch the state getting deeper into the work of civic renewal and see nothing but risk. At the same time, however, there is huge opportunity from programmes like Pride in Place and — perhaps more of a stretch — in agendas like neighbourhood healthcare. In order to seize these opportunities, we will need to learn the lessons from the last 15 years. How do we spread this work, rather than scaling it? How do we calm down and get traction? How do we use the power of leadership and big institutions to hold space open? At Kinship Works we’re collaborating with a range of organisations to help government and the wider sector answer these questions.
For more detail on these methods, see the report, Civic Rewilding: Applying the Lessons from Big Local. To stay in touch with Kinship Works on a more regular basis, you can sign-up to our newsletter via our website or follow us on Blue Sky or LinkedIn.