relationships are key to local economies

Well, you can wait for big juicy policy reports which speak directly to your research interests and, just like buses, two come along at once... I am talking about the flurry of media excitement about the murky corner of the big society which I inhabit ; firstly the Experian/ BBC report on resilience which came out on Thursday and today’s Connected Communities Report from the wonderful RSA project of the same name which as Matthew Taylor pointed out ‘bagged’ the front page of Society Guardian today.

There is something afoot in the local economic development – the ways in which people talk about communities and local government and the ways in which evidence is gathered and decisions are taken. New approaches combining and integrating quantitative and qualitative data and emphasising interconnections, relationships and networks are offering the chance to look afresh at place, space and governance at various scales. This, it must be said is happening outside of the policy space of the coalition government’s Big Society and is emanating from those working deep within communities like the RSA in New Cross, Bristol and Peterborough or via the resilience pilots that CLES are working on across the country with local government and their partners.[1]

Relational

“A social network perspective uniquely offers a social structure that is neither individualistic nor holistic but fundamentally relational”[2] (2010, iii)

The RSA work takes as its’ object of analysis the social capital networks that operate organically within communities, and where, dare we say the real agents of the big society are to be found.

At the CLES Summer Summit this year I shared a platform with Steve Broome from the RSA who is the project manager for the connected communities project giving an early outing of the New Cross Project Work which is now presented within the report. We share an interest in the use of the ACEnet typology devised by Valdis Krebs and June Holley. It is their contention that;

“Building sustainable communities through improving their connectivity – internally and externally- using network ties to create economic opportunities. Improved connectivity is created through an iterative process of knowing the network and knitting the network [3]

The phases that they describe networks as developing through ;

· Scattered fragments

· Hubs and spokes

· Small worlds

· Core and peripheries

The model is looked at in depth in the Connected Commuities report on pages 60-61 and we have been using a modified version at CLES for work studying the brokerage effects of various local government functions, arguing that this perspective has huge implications for the activities of brokers within and beyond local government, especially for those practitioners of local economic development in partnerships.

This work is arguably of even more importance as services seek to explore their options in an age of austerity and our work is now focussing on the potential for using a network perspective in framing decisions about resource allocation. Knowing and Knitting the Network in an Era of Make- Do and Mend. The gist was (and is) that following network effects through the phases of development can lead to changes in approach in what it is that local government DOES as a result. Hoping that such a view can create the connection between viewing the activities of local governance as forms of brokerage, seeing localities as defined by webs of relationships. In her influential DEMOS pamphlet Karen Stephenson writes, of a network theory of government

“whether the jungles are green and leafy or concrete, they are brimming with intricate webs of relationships, which when viewed from afar reveal elementary structures.”[4]

This perspective can be linked to the emerging field of “social neuroscience”[5] and such tech-enabled solutions as crowd-sourcing[6] but this very important work but must be linked into a political-economic critique addressing a wider scale which frames this neighbourhood social solidarity, not least the role of democratic local government, which while it must be reworked. One way in which this is possible is through viewing local government as inherently reticulated in character.

Reticulated

Work linking networks, not just conceptually but increasingly in terms of the methodology of SNA is contributing for the search for the elementary structures underpinning the uneven socio-spatial development of the highly centralised UK where focussing on governance complexity and a partnership architecture which is more or less reticulated (stretching between organisations rather than the preserve of only one organisation) In a totally ignored piece of work from 1996 David Prior of Birmingham City Council makes the case that the business of local government is

“developing an approach to economic policy based on an assessment of their locality's unique socioeconomic assets and institutional capacities. This assessment of advantages and opportunities provides the foundation for strategies 'to strengthen existing and potential indigenous resources';8 local economic development becomes a strategy for the institutional development of the local economy rather than a policy aimed at outbidding other localities in a contest to attract footloose national and international investment." It also, inevitably, involves the local authority in a much more developed and interactive set of relationships with the range of non-state agencies in the area in

whose control lie many of the existing and potential resources.' [7]

This is a critical insight since it situates local economic development outside of the competitive framework within which it has often trapped itself and pre-empts a contemporary concern with local economic assessment LEA and the construction of a solid (data-orientated) evidence base. CLES have been great supporters of the LEA process and welcomed the statutory duty, whilst clear that it served primarily to formalise best practice in economic development. In terms of this subject, however seeking innovative and new ways of describing and defining the critical importance of networks to local economic development has led to a natural fit with CLES’ work on the nature of locality-based resilience.

Resilient

Through our work with locailites we have sought to explore the nature of the interdependencies between the commercial, public and social sectors of the economy, our work on the model has been progressing in tandem with numerous pilot authorities and is consequently infused with a practicality and pragmatism which stems from having its’ feet on the ground. Here, we have tried to integrate the systematic look at the networks which exist across the sectors of the economy, not least the public sector’s complicated supply-chain relationships which fan out right through the economy. I am so convinced that network analysis is the key to understanding these things that I was initially taken aback by the partial and solely quantitative nature of the Experian work on reslilience, where they appear to have simply conflated the methodologies for individual credit rating systems and applied them to wider spatial scales, this is routinely done for American cities where city administration have such significant spending and borrowing power that they are credit rated in their own rights. No need for that in this country since the levers available to town halls to intervene in the markets and market failures of their patches (even where the market failure is a direct contributor to human misery on a massive scale such as in the case of housing markets) are so marginal and restricted to the functioning of the much-derided planning system. High profile though this work is, and well-resourced it is hard to see its’ usefulness to localities curtailed by the realities of spending cuts. The Experian work is necessary but not sufficient in that its quantitative focus needs to be combined with a feel for the networks in play.[8]

For example, from the Resilience pilots it is clear that localities can make big changes by viewing the activities of both chambers of commerce and CVS umbrella bodies as key brokerage sites where quite catalytic possibilities can be forged.

In summary then I will be boarding the RSA’s bus since I am keen to go along for a ride into the unknown territory that the possibilities of the social capital of neighbourhoods, and the role of SNA as nested within a locality-scaled model for networks. The Experian bus I will let pass me by (hoping that it doesn’t splash me with a puddle) since we know where it is going and we have been there before.

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[1] The CLES resilience pilots have been in partnership with Ashfield and Mansfield District Councils; Blackburn with Darwen Borough Council, Cambridgeshire County Council[1] and West Suffolk[1]; Cherwell District Council; Gloucester City Council, Cheltenham Borough Council and Tewkesbury Borough Council; Manchester City Council; Northumberland County Council; Southern Staffordshire Partnership.

[2] Connected Communities Report, pg iii

[3] Appalachian centre for Economic Networks:

http://www.supportingadvancement.com/web_sightings/community_building/community_building.pdf

[4] Demos paper http://www.supportingadvancement.com/web_sightings/community_building/community_building.pdf

[5] See the work of John Cacoippo

[6] Crowdsourcing is literally and simply empowering your community to do specific tasks without the organization, but on behalf of the organization, through active management,” says Geoff Livingston, the co-founder of social media communications agency Zoetica, which works primarily with non-profits http://mashable.com/2010/09/15/5-trends-social-good/

[7] David Prior (1996), pp94 Working The Network Local Government Studies

[8] See Neil McInroy’s on-the-day response to Experian: True economic resilience needs to look at the quality of relationships, not just data http://www.cles.org.uk/information/106230/experian/