Introduction

Participants in the research that informs this chapter were recruited at a number of levels, and comprise representatives from national community network organisations and from regional and local infrastructure agencies, staff in small community-based voluntary organisations, and unpaid activists in volunteer-led organisations. Care was taken to involve a wide range of groups and perspectives, those active in communities of interest as well as at a neighbourhood level, ‘single-cause’ groups, such as black and minority ethnic (BME) and women's organisations, and advocacy organisations as well as service providers.

Resource constraints meant that interviews were undertaken in three regions in England – West Midlands (35), London and the South East (30) and the North West (20) – rather than offering national coverage. The relative decline in the number of organisations involved between 2010 and 2015 reflects a wider trend of groups either closing or lacking the capacity to participate (for example, because of losing paid workers and being staffed only by volunteers).

At each stage of the research, reference groups consisting of practitioners, policymakers, activists and academics reviewed the findings to reflect on their accuracy in terms of lived experience below the radar and their applicability. All those organisations and individuals involved have been anonymised to comply with ethical requirements.

Background: austerity in policy context

For all the talk of ‘community engagement’ over the past decade or so, in practice, it has tended to mean little more than consultation with the community. The term ‘community’ has tended to be adopted in an uncritical fashion and assumed to relate to a coherent set of individuals or groups who share common goals, interests or geographies. Community activists in the study who had previous experience of Area Based Initiatives reported that far too often ‘engagement’ has felt like a tick-box exercise, a gesture towards dialogue rather than a genuine attempt to listen and change.