Power, Empowerment and the political system
The term "empowerment" in recent years and like all buzz phrases it has lost its original meaning. Any radical terminology that becomes everyday speech is subject to this kind of process simply because the words are finally understood in the general public in the way in which the most powerful people in society understand those words. The people who get heard the most - who are published most, who appear in the media, who write official documents, - these people are the people with the most power. One does not need a conspiracy theory to realise that as words originating among radical activists circulate then, like banknotes that get passed from hand to hand and gradually wear out, so do the radical messages in the words. At each stage they lose more of their original radical meaning. "Development from below" and "bottom upwards planning" and "empowerment" were phrases which were originally used by radicals to mean starting from the perceptions, needs and abilities of the most disempowered groups in society. In the end it simply becomes the terminology that disguises the way in which the plans of powerful governmental and commercial groups are legitimised.
Managing change processes yourself
To get the most out of project development there is a need that impoverished communities build their own capacity to manage the change processes - not just provide labour for them. This depends on the ability of communities to organise. Power in human society is not merely 'taking decisions' it involves taking and seeing through initiatives suitable to one's purposes. Whether for individuals or communities this means clarifying one's needs and defining purposes suitable to them, then planning, designing, implementing and monitoring the change process for oneself.
Only if one is involved in all aspects of the process of need clarification, purpose definition, planning and design, implimentation and monitoring/evaluation can one ensure project development process meets one's needs. This insight does not provide "the solution" to the social and other problems arising out of growing inequality. It redefines the problem. The main arena for fundamental change is not in and through the state and politics but in and through project development.
Many individuals or groups who want to challenge inequality to promote social change have the view that it is best to use their energies seeking to influence or to replace power holders. By "power holders" I mean people in senior positions in politics, in business, and in the management of organisations of the welfare state. The common assumption is that these power holders should be replaced by those with a different programme (political change) or obliged through law, taxation and social pressure to behave differently (economic policy ). .Alternatively they should be made to be more responsive to consultation and the demands of their customers (in regard to state welfare institutions).
In this chapter, I suggest that for most vulnerable people the far more effective long run strategy, in the sense of best rewards for the effort, time and energy allocated, lies in self organisation and going down the road of need clarification, purpose definition and then project development in their own projects. This is not to deny the usefulness of intervening in the political arena, nor of trying to influence economic policy or the running of social welfare institutions. But it is to suggest that the returns on the effort are greatest when one intervenes to change policy for the further development of one's own self help organisations. The policies needed are those which do this and the policies to be resisted are the ones which undermine the process of developing one's own organisations. (As so many policies do).
Consultation and participation - commenting on their plans for you
This is not the same as try ing to get power holders to provide a more appropriate service for you. It is about starting to provide the services for yourself. The first attempts at empowerment which are reactions to existing services and the demand that these existing services are changed have often been a futile waste of energy. After the initial alarm at finding that their customers have found a voice and are not at all grateful, the managers of social welfare organisations calm down. This is because they recognise that they have nothing to fear by "giving the users of their service a voice". They discover that the articulate users of their service who are always reacting to their service plans, in their language, can be ignored if they say something fundamental (with statements like "we don't have enough resources" or "that will not work") or that their most difficult customers can be co-opted by giving them jobs "to facilitate consultation" and then given concessions over cosmetic matters.
Consultation and participation are the usual ways that power centres think of involving other people - but these are usually attempts to enrol others in support of the priorities and agendas of the power centres themselves, in support of their own initiatives. Consultation and participation are usually only relevant to empowerment when they provide a vehicle for the advancement of the agendas and projects of powerless communities into the centres of power - otherwise they often do not repay the expenditure of their effort and energy. They give only a spurious sense that things are improving to 'representatives' who have been absorbed into the structures of power, grow comfortable and lose their connection to their roots.
Typically political and other institutions are unable to see things except from their own point of view. The word "empowerment" gets continually understod in the tame and toothless sense of 'involvement' and 'participation' - then these two words mean, in effect: your involvement in our organisation, on our agenda, in our council house, in our committee rooms; your say on what we think is important; you ever so slightly modifying what we intend to do whatever you say because we know what best for you because we are the experts; your legitimisation of our 'governance decisions'; your attendance at the drop of a hat in a score of 'partnership meetings' to lend credibility to the community involvement aspect of our wonderful bid for urban regeneration money. Sometimes powerholders are well intentioned in their desire to involve powerless people but, even so, in many cases, 'involvement' and 'participation' does not repay the effort. Even if you have had the seminars with councillors and officials about the bottom upwards character of empowerment you still find that their next move is to set up a machinery in which they are once again determining the agenda.
It is now well recognised that among socially vulnerable groups there is a declining interest and involvement in electoral and other political activity. The programmes of political parties and the discussions that appear on the TV are just not felt to be relevant enough. This problem cannot in fact be properly addressed until vulnerable social groups are banging on the door with their own costed proposals which they have piloted on a small scale already and which are more relevant, cheaper and work better than mainstream services run by people on huge salaries. At this point empowerment becomes a real matter of contesting priorities for rival directions in practice, not a sterile legitimisation of already existing plans.
People without power in areas of social and economic decline and deprivation mostly do not define their own purposes or set their own agendas - they are set for them. Empowerment as a process is therefore one in which the communities in these areas move from a situation where their purposes are defined for them to one where they set their own agendas and define their own purposes. The dimensions of this process are: (1) Growing clarity about one's own purposes accompanied by a widening of horizons and perceived possibilities; (2) Growing skills; (3) Growing confidence; (4) More available energy (resources).
Distal power and proximal power
The purposes that people will wish to pursue are dependent on their circumstances. Powerless people and groups have, at most, proximal power - the ability to influence that which is immediate to their lives - the lay out of the furniture in their houses, a limited scope for choice of their meagre purchasing power, what friends to spend time with and what activity in interpersonal relationships in a particular neighbourhood or social network. In contrast powerful people operate in institutions which have distal power - i.e. the ability to determine the contexts in which others operate. In relation to political power this means the ability to influence things like interest rates, public expenditure priorities, programme priorities for grant aid funding, legal frameworks, minimum standards regulations for health and safety, buildings etc. ( The terminology of proximal power and distal power I have taken from David Smail "The origins of Unhappiness" HarperCollins 1993 )
Looked at from the point of view of people becoming empowered empowerment means three things:
(1) A growing ability to work the system - i.e. find their way around and use the structures of distal power for their own purposes. and/or (2). An ability to intervene in and change the structures of distal power so that they are more amenable to their purposes. and/or (3). A growing ability to develop their own purposes independently of the structures of distal power. (Development of confidence, skills, and resources which are not dependent on anything bestowed from the structures of social authority - the development of the ability to use own unutilised energies for own purposes). These are processes which will need to be fostered, encouraged and supported.
Empowerment can therefore be understood as something that rectifies powerlessness and is not the same as a yet further accumulation of power by already powerful individuals or social institutions. Empowerment is commonly looked at from the point of view of persons or institutions that already possesses power and describes what these persons or institutions do for others - the assumed active agent in the act of empowerment is the person that already possesses power. This person or institution 'gives power away' , 'delegates power' or 'enables' others. These ways of seeing community empowerment will not get us very far in understanding its main problems and dynamics.
Community empowerment
Things look different when one is empowering oneself or different again when one is involved in a collective process that involves empowering a community of which one is a part.. (From a position of multiple disadvantage, multiple deprivation or 'exclusion'.) When looked at from this point of view empowerment can be defined as a growing ability to pursue purposes that one defines for oneself or one's community, appropriate to one's own or the community's needs, in one's own or the communities environment or circumstances. This growing ability arises out of growing skills, more available energy (resources) and matching growth of confidence.
As meant here, community empowerment is a way of redeveloping localities in crisis and it is based on a theory of power and empowerment. This can be briefly summarised by saying that power relationships between people have environmental, spatial, economic, social, interpersonal, emotional and cognitive dimensions - all need to be taken into account in a genuinely holistic concept of local development. Powerless people are people who live in limiting physical surroundings, are spatially and socially separated from the locations of distal power, are not 'well connected', have lower purchasing power as consumers and no purchasing power for entrepreneurial and investment roles, have few of the skills and resources rewarded by power structures and are often emotionally and cognitively crippled by their powerlessness - not the least in emotional displacements (scapegoating) against even weaker powerless groups (sexism, racism, child abuse etc.). Those at the very bottom are driven to destructive and self destructive behaviours because they cannot find a rewarded position serving agendas suiting the convenience of people and institutions in economic and political power centres (Such centres can be conceived of both as organisations and as places, they are both social and geographical spaces where decisions are taken which accrue advantages to power holders while the disadvantages and costs are felt in different places by different people.)
Community empowerment is a process where a relatively powerless community defines purposes for itself and then organise a process involving planning, design, implementation and monitoring of its results. After a catalyst has been brought in that starts the process of community development going, that widens people's horizon's about possibilities and that starts people working together, the community begins to be able to intervene in processes of policy formation on its own agenda The initiative passes out of the hands of the local big players into the hands of new players.
Horizon widening as an empowerment component
Widening people's horizons is vital to this process of redefining purposes. It partly involves helping people rediscover their history and therefore a sense that humans create their environments and that they can recreate theirs. It involves cultural intervention as well as demonstration projects. It must involve also arranging visits to see what has been achieved elsewhere - a locality based strategy should not be a narrow minded parochial strategy - rather the reverse. Travel does broaden the mind. Thus, although the processes described here are about tending to move towards greater self sufficiency in material needs at a local level, thus cutting travel by bulk transport and everyday travel to work trips, it is also about the very reverse tendency in regard to people's emotional and intellectual needs. In this respect we are talking about personal growth by helping people become full citizens through involvement in national and international society. This is vital not only for the inspiration of seeing exemplary projects elsewhere and to spreading best practice but also in order to break down destructive prejudices and negative pre-conceptions about others that tend to multiply in periods of social and economic crisis as people seek for scapegoats.
Community planning processes to develop common purposes and projects, while inspired by what is happening elsewhere must also be adapted to people's knowledge of their own area and needs and must take place in people's own language and orientation systems. People must be able to speak out without being frightened by the langauge and jargon of the professionals. The Neighbourhood Initiative Foundation have for example, evolved techniques using models of neighbourhoods that enable people to show what should happen and plan, rather as if they were playing a board game - so that verbal articulateness is not necessary to involvement.
Changing the distal power structures and their policies to support empowerment
Empowering the powerless as an integral aspect of redeveloping crisis localities is a historical process not a new fashionable policy option. It needs its own theory born in practice and the experience of powerless groups (not born in the heads of university academics or extrapolated from professional training manuals). The learning relationship has to be reversed.
If empowerment is to mean the empowerment of the powerless the priority should be to make the last first - that means in funding projects a move away from what is financially profitable. The needs of the most powerless are often not given priority because they are not defined as economic needs where only that which is economic is seen as important. Empowerment is easiest to start on ground people are familiar with - and the areas in which their life is most hemmed in - issues to do with their own home, child care and domestic needs and neighbourhoods. This matches the need to tend to create local jobs and local capacity around goals that are usually seen as social and environmental.
Allies in empowerment - their relationship to the political structures
Social change agents are those who help the process of social change through catalysing practical initiatives because empowerment will not usually happen without the help of allies. Different kinds of allies are needed. For some, already involved in the various political hierarchies with an interest in social policy change it may not make sense to abandon their positions but rather to change their emphasis to supporting, facilitating and enabling the change processes described here by the promotion of appropriate policy support. However, for others, perhaps starting out on a career as social change worker, it means thinking very hard before allocating time and energy to mainstream politics. Much as one would value the support of policy makers there is reason to be very sceptical about what one can achieve "at the top".
Underlying the case for empowerment in the sense described here is a scepticism about how much one can actually achieve "in power positions" without a well organised movement of practical initiatives behind you. Such a movement of projects is only embryonic at the moment so the greater priority must be to building it up on the ground. "At the top" one is hemmed in by the network of vested interests, the inertia of established institutional procedures, the disabling effect of having to get on with people and survive psychologically in social circles in which people think very differently, the logic which the competitive market tends to impose on policy. Climbing power hierarchies is so time consuming that by the time one is at the top one has abandoned all the original reasons for starting the climb except the usual illusion that one can run things better than the others.
Far better then to go for the power of influence rather than the power of position. The power of influence only arises in so far as one has something relevant to say. This only occurs when one has achieved something of significance. Indeed when you have proved an idea will work in real life, working alongside other people, the word spreads of its own accord eventually. Truly relevant ideas do not have to be pushed hard. By going for the power of influence and not the power of position it prevents the co-optive tendency of power structures to remove from powerless groups those very people who might remain allies in the process of empowerment. They become removed spatially and socially from the people whose needs they first advocate for as they enter political structures or climb institutional hierarchies. What is needed are people who refuse to join the clubs of power - always staying in 'opposition' and/or on the side of the empowerment of groups who come last in society. These groups need help to work out the kinds of theoretical and practical support to an all round approach to empowerment. Activists must learn by doing project development themselves as far as they can practically.
Back Seat Driving as active citizenship in Politics
This means influencing approaching political structures when one is advancing a tangible project or a specific cause but thinking very hard before devoting more time to them. The ability to influence is based on the degree of organisation, momentum and clout of the project organisation that one has developed with other people. It depends on the relevance of what the projects and active networks that one has helped develop have for people's day to day lives. Of course those already in political positions of influence can still be of help if they genuinely are in a position to facilitate and enable empowerment processes. The problem is that this may not often be the case. Usually they do not have any real connection to projects developed by powerless people. Usually they do not understand them or what is involved. They tend to be far more concerned with getting cosy with powerful business interests.
To get influence naturally would means you and your project becoming occaisionally, and then more systematically, as if you were back seat drivers in the political vehicles of power. Rich and powerful people have always tended to occupy the passenger seat. With politicians driving they have acted as navigators and say which directions things should take. What is proposed here is the passengers in the back seat, who have hitherto always been taken for rides without any say, gradually bring forward their plans, their chosen routes, using the vehicle of local and then national state organisation more and more for their own purposes.
In the past politicians, their chosen advisers and powerful people in the social networks and clubs of economic power have made up their minds about state policy . The claim to power and authority tends to be coupled to the claim to know better. When politicians are not seen to any longer as the main initiators of change processes it seems partly to deligitimise their very reason for being there. After all they have to be on display all the time in parliament and on the television proving that they know what should be done.
But in the modern world all new ideas are the products of collective thought processes far more than the creations of single individuals. It is quite ordinary for parties to use think-tanks and consultants. Ministers and local politicians have always relied heavily on officials to draft and suggest policies. There are increasing ideas about extending "governance" to "stake holders" which means including others, and not only politicians, in a host of decisions involving local government. The problem has tended to be that only representatives of large institutions, economic interests and articulate activists get involved in these "stakeholding" processes. What is being argued for here is of accentuating an embryonic process whereby powerless people are able to effect the drafting of policy to promote their own initiatives - though not to spend their time commenting on initiatives made for them, and over them, as this is to divert their very limit resources towards objectives which will not enhance their own position.
In comments about an earlier draft of this paper Tony Gibson wrote to me that he disagreed with my "back seat driving" approach to politics because "there is job satisfaction in taking decisions not just breathing down another person's neck". I agree. But this means the allies of empowerment are best employed supporting the building of organisations in which powerless people are able to take decisions relevant to their own lives rather than abandoning them in order to spend their time in political institutions which are chiefly focused on administering social and economic relationships for and with the people who own the economy. It is a matter of the best returns on the expenditure of time to create the spaces, places and organisations where vulnerable people can take decisions. By all means make initiatives into political institutions for defined goals if it seems it will repay the effort. If you are already in these institutions it probably makes sense to stay to do what you can. But joining these institutions is another matter. Joining them means committing most of your time to administering the status quo that you find when you arrive rather than concentrating all your valuable energies at the edges of change processes.
When empowerment extends beyond individual projects to networks and yet further to an ability to influence the local and national state to facilitate the empowering project initiatives it has made a big step forward - but there are dangers at this stage. The process gets serious when it gets to the stage of identifying parts of state budgets and procedures that can be claimed for self help and mutual aid solutions to social and environmental problems. It gets more serious still when mainstream services are re-structured to free up resources for empowering projects. This might entail being in tune with the planning and financial cycles in the state sector and intervening at the right part of the cycle with well worked out packages, snapping up money from underspent budgets at the end of the financial year, getting people seconded, tapping into budgets where money is freed up by people retiring ("natural wastage"). Although such moves are not possible to fledgling groups, a few years down the road contacts with sympathetic politicians and officials can make this happen.
Citizen self help and mutual aid projects are crucial for economic, social and environmental transformation. In place of a private sector and a paternalistic public sector the voluntary and community sectors will play a central role in the evolution of society. Such things will have to take place if we are genuinely collectively to transform our living environments on the necessary scale and it will transform how we understand democracy. As people develop their practical projects their organising ability will be transformed. But an active citizenry means new kinds of conflicts.
Some Problems of Working with 'Them'
Unfortunately among those with a top down approach to social change there is an almost relentless tendency of ideas like this to get converted into reorganisations of the institutional machinery of decision making staffed by officials who use new words to describe the same way of working as before. Alternatively officials in specialist departments are given broader responsibilities but because of their specialist training and the bureaucratic self interest of their departments they cannot cope with the new tasks and the ground level groups with whom they need to work. (As was the case in Leipzig where European resources for an ecological restructuring at neighbourhood level in the Leipzig Ostaraum project was redirected from the coalition of initiating groups to the local authority's job creation agency).
When politicians get hold of an idea like empowerment and try to turn it into policy their emphasis tends to get taken taken away from process onto structure. Whereas empowerment looked at as a bottom upward process means people devising and evolving their own initiatives and their own self organisation, looked at from above it means an institutional machinery to involve people in, that "draws them into partnership" into "active participation". For the officials given the job of organising this the task becomes, in order to retain their credibility, getting people to enough local meetings a year. The more local people attending these meetings the better the officials and politicians feel as they feel their new "model for involvement" has been validated. Regeneration teams blossom and produce management consultancy reports, market research exercises. Many of the officials are convinced that the brave new world as taught in the business schools can be transplanted with very little modification "into the community".
An area in decline finds it has office full of managers. They hold meetings and devise plans. Next year they revise the plans. The steal the best ideas from local community activists and the officials without any ideas of their own have moved on to a more senior position in another twon before anyone recognises they have achieved nothing - leaving behind cardboard boxes of undistributed PR newsheets about their pursuit of excellence in the office cupboards.
"Let them eat feasibility studies".
Sometimes it becomes necessary, even unavoidable, to be in conflict with 'Them' - i.e. power structures. This may arise out of choices by 'us' or by 'them'. One of the most common features of power is its ability to ignore powerless people. No matter how hard you work to get support for your petition or campaign, no matter how reasonably you express your viewpoint in your letter, no matter how constructive your project proposal, it goes in the bin, unread. Your ideas cannot be supported because there is not enough time or money they say (i.e. we have already made a choice of how time and money should be allocated and your agenda is less important than ours).
Sometimes to get noticed and get started you have to make a lot of noise and whip up support. This has its risks if you are not articulate enough but if you have a way with words it can pay off. Of course you have to be careful that it will pay off because it can be risky. You can be misunderstood, misrepresented or continue to be ignored. It is an emotionally painful thing to experience this if you come out the worse. If you become frustrated and angry you are denounced as being unreasonable - 'reason' is the certainty that the official agenda is right. When you become very angry indeed you are denounced as an extremist - or your emotions are taken as evidence that your point of view is unbalanced, unobjective, irrational or even psychopathological. Even worse you may be surreptitiously got at - the group of tenants with the worst housing who call so effectively for something to be done only discover years later that it was no accident that they were scheduled last for rehousing. (I know of people who have been got at like this).
So conflict may be a necessary if temporary tactic (and a risky one) for getting noticed. But there may be other reasons to embark on conflict. Local power structures, like national and international ones, can be run by some pretty paranoid people. In some circumstances signs of autonomous activity are subjected to attack, or a take-over attempt. The take over attempt may be by people who want to take over the leadership and the credit once a bandwagon has started rolling, often neutering the process as a result. Sometimes this is a very conscious and deliberate thing - sometimes the 'take over' by 'them' is just the way things work in our society. (After slogging away for years in the wilderness to start a process it becomes the subject of conferences which cost £699.13 (incl. VAT) which one cannot afford to attend - even though these conferences advertise themselves as being 'designed for all those actively involved.....' people without money not being part of the 'all'. In my youth if you wanted a conference that truly involved all you would hold it in a church hall, people would sleep on the floors of the local organisers or their friends and everyone would pool their fares. Post Thatcher every conference is an excuse for free food, an away-break in a glossy hotel with a larger than usual size mirror in the bathroom and a faint air conditioning hum all night long).
We have also to accept that 'Them' are sometimes self serving, malign, vicious and corrupt. Where there is no choice, and where it would repay the effort and not be totally futile, conflict strategies for 'Us' against 'Them' will be sometimes be an option that cannot be avoided. The 'Them' in neighbourhood and local development will in some cases be a club of power involving an assortment of: Rachmann style private landlords; local loan sharks; developers with their eyes on money making possibilities for local land use who don't give a damn about local residents; bad neighbour local factories spewing out pollution over a neighbourhood or burying their toxic waste in the back yard; police who have arrived at a modus vivendi with local drug dealers; officials who have built an empire that councillors do not really understand and therefore cannot control...or perhaps, in not such a long time, even local Labour councillors who have grown cosy in office without any effective opposition, taking back handers in return for information and help with business deals.
When conflict is inevitable
This is an all too familiar reality of local (as well as national and international) politics and in such situations 'conflict' can hardly be avoided. This does not mean that it must take place through the use of arms but through the dissemination of ideas and knowledge that radically discredits power holders where they deserve to be discredited. Virtually all power holders operate with a claim to know what is in the best interests of other people - to be in some way morally or intellectually superior to everyone else. The only way to justify a claim to moral superiority is to be prepared to accept for yourself what you would impose on others. Yet powerful people usually assume that they are somehow bigger and more important than everyone else In pursuit of their own advantage such people subject others to conditions they would not put up with themselves.
The only way to justify a claim to intellectual superiority is a preparedness to stay open minded, demonstrating an ability to change one's mind, to keep on learning, to acknowledge the limits of one's ideas, to be prepared to answer all the details of a considered alternative point of view. Malign power holders would rather censor, ignore or commission public relations consultants.
Some Complications - "For" politics and "against" politics
So there is still a need for a campaigning and defensive politics against the malicious and often malign decisions of power structures. Many organisations of and for powerless people emerge as their means for protest, their coming together for greater negotiating strength and arrangements for advocacy in or over and against private or state institutions. After a time some people recognise the limitations of always reacting against what others are doing and want to show how things could be done better. They develop pro-active projects - sometimes the campaigning activities and the new proactive projects stay together, sometimes they may develop separately. Changing the world requires both - campaigning and protesting as well as showing how it can be done differently. Unfortunately the two approaches to social change do not always fit together well. Commercial interests or state agencies under pressure like to stump up the cash for good PR causes. The multinational that has wrecked the environment in a host of countries offers itself as a major source of cash to fledgling projects who want to improve the environment at home. Meanwhile the state offers financial assistance up to 50% - with the attempt to drive new projects into deals with the private sector. The project developers with a need for cash are driven into the arms of the polluters who want to green up their image. The danger here is that the reactive campaigners are undermined by the proactive project developers.
Almost inevitably if one wants to develop projects then, at some time or another one will need to have dealings with politicians, officials and policy makers. This is no bad thing of course if one advances one's cause in the process. As one gets more experienced and more powerful then there are politicians and officials of integrity with whom it very worth while working closely. They also are looking for a way forward - the problem is that politicians and officials often have their own agendas. Often they want their approach, their policy initiative legitimised as they try to make a name for themselves up the slippery pole to the top. There are always politicians and officials who therefore want and need to make a name for themselves. They either seek to subordinate the independent projects for their own purposes or steal the ideas of project developers, neuter them and claim them as their own, making valid ideas into political footballs.
It would be wrong to dwell solely on negatives. As a group gets larger and more experienced it will find that doors do get opened to it. There are politicians and officials willing to listen and lend a hand. At the lower levels of the local state, and higher up, are people prepared to go out on a limb, to blow whistles against injustice, to give grants.There are commercial interests who give money with few if any strings. Indeed it is virtually impossible to get started if one has a solely confrontational approach. Throughout the hierarchies of power it is also true that there are managers and policy makers who recognise the potential of new approaches and/or who are aware that not all is well with how they are organised. They recognise the need for innovation and are prepared to risk supporting ginger groups or innovators.
A Local and National Policy Framework
In so far as a 'top down ladder' emerges from these officials and politicians who support the bottom upwards ladder of empowerment then this "ladder" need to be one of supportive policy frameworks, grant regimes, regulatory agreements, technical aid etc. that will enhance the empowerment process for powerless people without taking the process over. What this might mean in local political terms is discussed later. In terms of national and international politics the main problem is that policy makers are fixated on the private sector economy, the market and competition and job numbers. Giving priority to policies for forms of development that are largely outside the market will require major readjustments to the common wisdom of politics and policy. The best starting points are likely to be out of health and social services policies - giving them a much wider brief, connecting them up to environmental and community development. Put bluntly the issue is one that empowerment projects might evolve in the long term into competitors for public sector finance. When this happens the potential conflict must be managed carefully so that resources transfer occurrs in the least damaging fashion.
At the beginning small projects can be developed very cheaply. Focused on homes and gardens, using recycled materials which have been thrown away or are second hand and involving people for non- financial motives inevitably brings costs right down. Community level activists would often rather meet in the hut they built themselves for next to nothing than the million pound prestige centre. To some degree the political structures can help by allowing a symbiotic relationship to their mainstream services. If you do not have to pay for a new workshop but can rent a few hours in a health services day centre workshop then you can operate very cheaply indeed. The mainstream public sector services would end up carrying many of the overheads.
Projects can therefore grow within, or on the edges of, the mainstream but eventually one reaches the point where one becomes competitors for a small amount of resources. It is very galling when you have proved that an idea works and when it is so cheap, and when it is what people want to do, that you still, nevertheless, have little chance of getting mainstream funding. You look into the mainstream services and see resources being squandered on things which have few, or no benefits for disadvantaged people, and yet you cannot get access to them. There is a potential for conflict here which has to be faced.
Funding Dilemmas - If you fund this you may have to unfund that
The funding for this work is typically short term - the going period is often three years. The idea used that if you could prove a new project idea in 3 years you would get taken into mainstream funding. But that implied a growth in public sector resources that could then be allocated to you. These times are gone. Now, even if you do prove your innovation, in 3 years you are still looking for continuation funding. Indeed a condition for getting money is that at the end of the period of finance you will not go back to the public sector and ask for more - you must have "an exit strategy".
But bluntly, if you commission empowerment projects out of existing budgets you must decommision something else. When things are decommissioned within a public institution to reallocate expenditure to somewhere else in the same institution then it will often be possible to reassign staff in the process so that redundancies do not occur. However when you want funds to cross from one organisation to another, from public sector to the Third sector or community organisation, things are not so easy.
Reallocating resources without undermining empowerment
There are possible ways of doing this but there are no ideal solutions. Staff can be seconded from mainstream services part time or wholely - but the more a transfer of resources takes the form of a secondment of staff the less and less the empowerment organisation retains its original flavour and the more it is integrated into the public sector.
There are of course natural wastage processes. When people leave a mainstream job on retirement or to take up a new post, it will sometimes be possible to rethink whether what they were doing might be better reprovided in a different form. It is not impossible to think of ways in which the freed up funding could be passed to empowerment projects without too much pain or conflict. Unfortuately things often go wrong.
A local example from Nottingham gives a flavour of the sorts of problems. Although I would not describe it as "an empowerment organisation" the Nottingham not for profit agency "Family First" has had a mental health day centre, called Miscellany, with many good practice features. Its staff are not professionally trained and have forged personal friendship relationships with many of the users of their centre. This is what these users want - not to be treated as "cases". However recently this has begun to change. The managers of Family First came to a deal with the manager of the official mental health rehabilitation services. The Miscellany Day Centre would merge with another Day Centre inside the "official" mental health services under the management of Family First.
But the transfer of resources out of the official services has been at a tremendous cost. The users rejected the merger but it happened nonetheless. Now the staff at Miscellany have got to start treating their friends as "cases" - for example doing "risk assessments" of them behind their backs. Transferring resources out of the existing services is no solution if you also transfer their icy clinical style of work which does all the damage and which you are trying to escape from in the first place.
Joint work with the official services is not always futile. My own project has a very good and fruitful relationship with another "official" mental health day centre - but we keep our independence and our own style of working. We have not tried to merge with them.
Funding on their agendas - the corrosive influence of job creation programmes
Another possible source of funding has been through employing people from job creation schemes but the not for profit sector has had major dilemmas both in Britain and in Germany. You cannot empower yourself using funding programmes which are very short term and which are assumed to be temporary expedients for bridging problems in the labour market.
The assumed priority is the generation of employment in the private competitive sector and job creation is thought of as a temporary measure to maintain people in the discipline and routines of work, as well as ameliorating the social stresses associated with unemployment. Last, and least important from the point of view of governments, is that such programmes might provide some social, cultural and environmental services that would otherwise not happen. But there is no willingness to accept that public expenditure should be permanently available to another kind of labour market focused on social, cultural and environmental needs on anything other than a very small scale.
State funding policies which disempower
While job creation programmes started relatively generously - particularly immediately after German reunification - the trend is now to cut them back and back. If a national economy is to compete in the world market, the theory goes, then the well off must be allowed to get wealthier. Otherwise they will take their money, their investments and jobs somewhere else. Therefore it is necessary to reduce the "burden" of taxation, of social insurance contributions and high interest rate levels (caused by too much state borrowing) from these wealthy people.
In Britain the earlier job creation schemes of the 1970s were paid at a real rate for the job, were full time and in some cases might be of two years duration. Later the pay rates went down, the projects became part time and finally they became schemes in which benefits were merely topped up by a fixed amount to pay for fares to work and the extra expenses of working. Now the job creation schemes are becoming compulsory for people who have been long term unemployed.
For organisations wishing to pursue social projects thorugh job creation programmes this slow deterioration in standards has had a terribly corroding influence. The organisations involved in job creation (which were also often providers of training programmes) have seen standards, conditions and pay deteriorate. At the beginning the organisations were started with social and environmental ideas and ideals. After several years their permanent staff find themselves working with people who have been bullied to take part in their programmes by the labour office. Idealist organisations becomes agencies that will take anyone to do anything. Their radical not for profit agenda has been undermined by the icy effect of labour market policies.
A good example from Germany of the dangers of working with official agencies can be found in what has happened in Leipzig. European Union money was obtained for a model project to ecologically restructure a geographical sector of the city. The original project developers formed an alliance of grass roots organisations and were aware from the start that a major problem in ecological neighbourhood restructuring was the departmentalised and specialised character of local government. They tried to grapple with this problem but the European funding was handed over to the city authority department responsible for job creation programmes. This department kept large parts of the money for itself and for the pursuit of its own programmes. The carefully constructed alliance set up to pursue the programme broke down. (Ekhart Hahn and Michael LaFond, "Local Agenda 21 and Ecological Urban Restructuring. A European Model Project in Leipzig" published by Science Centre, Berlin, 1997)
Is it worth believing then, that anything can be done that will be helpful? It is very difficult to be hopeful. In the UK the Labour Government have wanted to connect environmental work with local unemployed labour by forcing people to work on environmental and social schemes after they have been unemployed for a number of months. This has already begun to happen and will undermine the environmental cause. It is yet another example of the way in which state policy tends to corrode the potential of the not for profit sector. The idea that people might be freed up and supported to help themselves has not even been considered.
When you end up being ripped off
Unfortunately self help has its dangers for us. The idea of self help is in itself not new. It can indeed be a very negative and not at all helpful idea when it is used as a slogan to mean that vulnerable people, without access to resources or help, who are desperately trying to cope with the chaotic life conditions caused in large part by the economic strategies of large players in society, are expected to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. Self help can come to be the cheap option that justifies cutting away other support services. Indeed it is often difficult for it not to turn into this. In this scenario the movement which aspires to empowerment becomes undermined by the society of power and greed and used for its own purposes.
Project developers like myself must issue a health warning to those who might wish to follow in our footsteps: self help is no panacea. The slogan of empowerment can be robbed of any real content. To try to develop self help projects in the face of official indifference or hostility is an uphill struggle. Where the lack of resources and support are lacking it happens almost automatically that if you want to see a thing happen then you do it yourself for nothing. You end up doing more and more for nothing until your whole life can be nothing but a mountain of obligations. If you are motivated by the desire for social justice and change and by anger at how society works then you can eventually get trapped in a cruel paradox. Perhaps you are not motivated by money but your donation of your time to your project work can invade the space in which you should have a life of your own. If the mainstream is motivated by greed then people motivated by altruism tend to get ripped off. The more they give the more the others take.
In an economic study of social enterprises and self help projects in German Karl Birkhoelzer and Gunter Lonrenz express the problem exactly:
Voluntary activity is to be found widely in self help projects and also in the management committees of job creation organisations. However this is often not really freely given unpaid work in the sense that doing it yourself becomes a substitute for inadequate capital and financial inadequacies because of inadquate income. Not infrequently colleagues are staying involved out of the absence of any other alternatives for them." (My translation)
Karl Birkholzer and Gunter Lorenz "Der Beitrag Sozialer Unternehmen zur Arbeitbeschaffung. Der Bereich personenbezogener Dienstleistungen. Published by the Interdisziplinares Forschungsgruppe Lokale Okonomie an der Technische Universitat Berlin. Berlin 1997 p 18).
New structures are better than adapted old ones
Without help "from above" it is doubtful that anything will change. However if things are to change then support must come through an entirely new structure that is set up to support the aims of the Third sector directly. Finance which comes to it indirectly, through bureaucratised and departmentalised local government systems or through labour market institutions who assume the primacy of the first labour market is definitely second best.
In Britain the National Charities and Lotteries Board is an example of an organisation that has grown up to service the needs of the not for profit sector. It is increasingly tuned into the needs of the sector and exists at arms length from government. Unfortunately its sources of funding (the proceeeds of the UK National Lottery) are far too limited. Bids for its resources often are 5 times greater than what it can award. Moreover its programmes are only for three years. An organisation like this, that is not staffed by government appointees who do not understand their roles, might be an appropriate way to fund the not for profit sector.
An organisation like this should then prioritise grant aid for those projects that best matched the empowerment agenda and the multi-functional focuses described in this book. But where could the money actually come from? The most convincing and appropriate source would be a reallocation inside mainstream government expenditure. In Britain, according the the government's own advisers £20 billion of taxpayers money is spent on subsidies to environmentally damaging industry, energy and agriculture. Doubtless a similar calculation for Germany would give rise to an equally huge sum of money. Of course all sorts of powerful vested interests will resist axeing this money trying to draw attention to the social and economic consequences of doing so. However it can be argued that to continue to subsidise ecological destruction is in breach of the Rio Treaty - and is an economic and social cost, or better said an economic and social crime, committed against future generations.
Yet more radical, and there to be worked towards in the long term, is that demand, mentioned in a previous chapter, that compensation claims for ecological damages should be based on the incomes of perpetrators and not of victims - and paying a part of these damages into community controlled funds for community development projects to repair social and environmental damage.
Welfare Benefits Policies, technology and local development policies
For empowerment projects to blossom it is also necessary that there are supporting policies in welfare benefits and rights as well as support for small scale ecological technology and a quite different priority for, and understanding of, local economic development.
It will make a major difference to the evolution of the local economy if there are changed welfare rights and income support arrangements for unemployed people. LETS systems are severely held back by welfare rights policies in the UK - though not in other countries where their value is better recognised. Involvement in local project initiatives should be seen as extensions of people's domestic activities and therefore not effecting welfare rights benefits. Indeed involvement in these activities should be seen as a legitimate alternative to seeking work. The danger is that involvement in LETS schemes, when they become extensive enough, will be seen as an alternative to welfare rights and welfare benefits might then be cut because there is a local LETS scheme.
There are further dangers like this. After a time the existence of a network of community gardens supplying a variety of needs could be seen as a reason to cut benefits - you don't need welfare benefits, they will say, you can join your local community economic group. In this case a dual economy would evolve - an economy of the multinationals, of wealth, power and shallow pretensions still generating pollution and poverty - while another economy, a solidarity economy struggling to heal the wounds created in the power economy is used by it parasitically so that it does not have to meet its social and environmental obligations, instead relying the solidarity economy as a means to cut its costs. This too is, in fact, already beginning .
In conclusion - a new approach for tackling the "wicked issues"
At the time of writing there has been a recognition that there are a variety of "wicked issues" that the public sector and state is not good at solving - partly because public sector institutions are so specialised. (The term comes from Professor John Stewart). Mental health problems, community degeneration, crime and drugs occur in the parts that the mainstream services cannot reach on their own. New organisations developed by and for the victims of the wicked issues can, however, take root and grow in these places enabling people to solve their own problems and empower themselves. As they do so they are likely to evolve quite different theories, ideas and ways of understanding of what the problems are. Such new organisations will have a multi-functional focus that answer a number of problems for individuals at once - a place where disempowered people can solve their problems together - find friendship, activities, recreation , home making skills, reduced living costs and perhaps, later, employment or self employment.
Obviously specialist public sector services cannot be replaced altogether. Supporting bottom upwards empowerment means moving into an era in which specialist services transfer some of their resources of people, finance and materials into community level organisations, into multi-functional projects which may be pioneered and developed in large part by people who have hitherto been failed by the local and national state.The result will be a much more complexed networked structure for the public sector with blurred edges with the voluntary and community sector. There are, however, real dnagers in this. It is necessary to recognise that the Third Sector needs new sources of money and that that money ought to come from phasing out the subsidies that are promoting ecological disaster.
An ideal development would be the financing of a programme of experimental community development of the type mentioned here - a programme where the lessons and the experience was independently evaluated to find out the best roads to empowerment and holistic development and fed back into the next programme of projects as well as being used to design the policies which would support more bottom upwards initiatives.
Whatever we do the shear weight and distorting mass of the power economy, its way of thinking and the taken for granted way of working of its principle actors, will tend to turn what we want to achieve into the opposite of what we intend. To resist this the radical representatives of the third sector must over the long term develop an agenda of empowerment which extends to the transformation of society. Although in the early stages of empowerment it is not prudent for people to try to "enter politics" as this will not be the most productive use of their energies in the long term the "empowerment agenda" does require some intervention in policy formation and in politics.
This does not mean trying, as was the case with communism, to build a uniform and centralised movement. Even less does it mean preparing for the futility of armed revolution, which, in the modern world, would lead to a nuclear holocaust. It need not mean supporting a particular political party. What it does, however, mean is a struggle for certain key principles of environmental and social justice, embodied in legal and institutional changes. These would simultaneously finance and facilitate the development of self help and empowerment projects, as well as serving to undermine the moral authority of all those political and economic interests driving humanity and the other species on the planet towards disaster.
© BRIAN DAVEY