Introduction

Successive government documents have highlighted the role of the local authority in providing community leadership (HM Treasury, 2002; Home Office, 2004; CLG, 2006). This is particularly important in the context of the move to governance, which depends on collaboration between sectors, on the establishment of institutional arrangements for partnership and on the engagement of all sectors including local communities. Indeed, theories of collaboration emphasise the importance of new approaches to leadership that can articulate and resolve the tensions between sectors (Stewart, 2003). But equally significant at the neighbourhood level is the quality of leadership from within the local community itself. Few members of the ‘community’ will come and sit at the partnership table but these leaders from within the community will play a pivotal role in linking citizens into governance both at the neighbourhood level and potentially beyond. Theirs can be an uncomfortable role, squeezed between incorporation into the structures of the state on the one hand and representation of the interests of their neighbours on the other.

This chapter explores the concept and experience of community leadership as it applies to local residents who take up leading roles in neighbourhood governance. It draws on research carried out by the author and colleagues on community leaders in area regeneration (Purdue et al, 2000; Purdue, 2005), to explore issues of leadership succession – how community leaders emerge yet later fade away to be replaced by new faces, which in their turn come and go through leadership cycles – using Hirschman's (1970) concepts of exit, voice and loyalty, as developed by Lowery et al (1992). The chapter concludes by applying Gamson's (1975) schema for evaluating the impact of community action to the question of how effective community leaders have actually been in gaining access to and influencing ‘leadership coalitions’ (Miller, 1999) in their neighbourhood.

Concepts of leadership and succession

One of the aims of regeneration partnerships at the city and neighbourhood level has been to expand participation in local governance to include civil society, by including partners from the voluntary and community sectors (Miller, 1999). The inclusion of leaders (or representatives) from the local community is supposed to embed the actions of the regeneration partnership within its neighbourhood as well as building a bridge between local residents in poor neighbourhoods and local political and business leaders and thereby strengthening the legitimacy of neighbourhood governance.