Divergence in Community Participation Policy: Analysing Localism and Community Empowerment Using a Theory of Change Approach

Abstract

The last two decades have witnessed a significant turn towards community participation in public policy around the globe, raising concerns that states are resorting to 'government through community', shifting responsibilities onto communities. In order to unpack the ambiguous rhetoric of policy statements, this article employs ideas from evaluation methodology to develop a generic theory of change for community participation policy. The model is then utilised to analyse and compare the UK Coalition Government's Big Society/Localism agenda and the Scottish Government's Community Empowerment approach, demonstrating the ways in which these represent a clear example of policy divergence, and potentially significant alternatives to state-community relations in the context of austerity. The article also demonstrates the potential wider applicability of 'Theories of Change' methodology for policy analysis.

Evaluating the outcomes of co-production in local government

“…Defining a generic programme theory for co-production A programme theory is a hypothesis of how interventions can contribute to generate an outcome, not as a universal law but depending on how the context triggers the generative mechanism (Chen 1990). Therefore, the definition of a generic co-production programme theory can enable the translation from current research to local contexts, with the aim of providing an analytical framework that can be used to define, develop, and evaluate local co-production initiatives (Funnell and Rogers 2011;Rolfe 2016). The generic programme theory developed here is based on the theoretical assumptions related to co-production and, as such, represents a framework of guiding principles for the evaluator responsible for local operationalisation.…”

Governance and Governmentality in Community Participation: The Shifting Sands of Power, Responsibility and Risk

“…Rather, the constraints of austerity may mean that Localism and Community Empowerment are in danger not merely of 'empowering the powerful' (Hastings and Matthews, 2014), but also disempowering the powerless. Indeed, even though the rhetoric of Community Empowerment takes much more cognisance of inequalities, the apparent policy divergence between Localism and Community Empowerment (Keating, 2005, Rolfe, 2016, may be evened out in practice by the fiscal bulldozer of austerity.…”

“…Whilst there are substantial similarities, a more detailed analysis (Rolfe, 2016) highlights significant differences in these areas.…”

Combining Theories of Change and Realist Evaluation in practice: Lessons from a research on evaluation study

“…Six detailed case studies of community organisations were used to explore the implementation of different policy elements in varied contexts. A brief outline of the cases is provided in Table 2, while the process through which ToC and RE methodologies were employed in five phases of the project is set out in Table 3 (more details including findings from phases 1, 3 and 4 have been published elsewhere -see Rolfe, 2016bRolfe, , 2018.…”