Localism: empowering communities as partners in shaping their place and redefining the requirements for effective service delivery
The Local Governance Think Tank exists to support local government in realising the vision stated in the first purpose in the Local Government Act: “to enable democratic local decision-making and action by, and on behalf of, communities”
We do so drawing on many years of international research and practice on strengthening local governance at the heart of which is an understanding of localism as a way of working which places communities at the centre of a rebalancing from top-down centralised government to bottom-up local governance.
In this note we set out an introduction to this practice and provide linkages to the research and ideas informing current practice. We also draw on evidence demonstrating the very real benefits for both councils and their communities from strengthening local governance.
We then pull the different elements discussed in this note together to demonstrate how New Zealand councils could build on international experience to embed strong local governance through empowering and supporting self- identifying communities. We argue this will shift the balance of decision-making from what is inherently a top down centralised system to much more of a bottom-up decentralised system which will not only strengthen community well- being, but also rebalance the relationship between central government and local government in favour of the latter.
To help make this note a valuable resource, we provide quite significant detail on each of the initiatives discussed. This summary provides an overview intended to outline the essence of each of the initiatives. The key elements in the note are:
The definitive understanding of localism comes from a 2017 report by the English think tank Locality prepared under the chairmanship of a former head of the UK civil service - the ultimate central government bureaucrat. That report (access it here) stated “Localism must be about giving voice, choice and control to communities who are seldom heard by our political and economic institutions. Localism should enable local solutions through partnership and collaboration around place, and provide the conditions for social action to thrive. Localism is about more than local governance structures or decentralising decision-making. It is about the connections and feelings of belonging that unite people within their communities. It is about how people perceive their own power and ability to make change in their local area alongside their neighbours.”
The emphasis on voice has been repeated again and again for both research and practice by leading think tanks and practitioners in the UK and the US. In the UK the Carnegie UK trust has adopted democratic well-being as one of its four well- being domains (the trust does well-being research for the OECD and a number of government and local government entities), describing it as “we all have a voice in decisions that affect us”.
New Local, a leading local government think tank in the UK, has applied this approach to re-examining the respective roles of central and local government. Its analysis looks at a succession of paradigms informing the design, targeting and delivery of public services. It makes the case for a shift from a state (central government does it all) and now market (services are contracted out) paradigm to a community paradigm the fundamental principle of which is to place the design and delivery of public services in the hands of the communities they serve (access the community paradigm report here.
New local provides a compelling and practical illustration of the case for community decision-making in the article Why the NHS urgently needs to turn to the community - and how to do it (access this here).
In the US it is common to speak of doing things with rather than doing things to communities. This is exemplified in the work of one of the US’s largest pro local democracy networks, Democracy Innovation, which is an activity of the National Civic League. It positions itself with this statement “The real work to improve democracy is happening at the community level. Local leaders of all kinds are generating new ideas and practices to help people make decisions and solve problems together. The Center examines, supports, and shares these innovations through hands-on technical assistance in communities.”. Read more.
Another influential US voice is the Kettering Foundation which states its mission as “We advance inclusive democracies by fostering citizen engagement, promoting government accountability, and countering authoritarianism.” For communities this is expressed as “Strengthen community voices, mutuality, and collective action for greater citizen engagement and influence over local problem-solving and government.”
Community empowerment emerges through different local initiatives.
Consistent with the belief in the bottom-up/doing with rather than doing to communities approach, community empowerment to enable communities to have a real voice over what happens in their place has, until recently, largely been the result of local initiatives responding to local conditions:
The success of individual local initiatives has led to growing recognition of the power and effectiveness of community empowerment, and initiatives to extend community empowerment more broadly. In the US this is taking place through the initiatives of a number of major national networks committed to enabling local democracy.
The success of local initiatives highlights both the commonality of pressures on communities in the United States and other jurisdictions, especially England and Scotland, and the differences in the way these types of pressures are handled in different jurisdictions. In the United States community wealth building is led by the Democracy Collaborative, which began in Cleveland Ohio in 1985 and now works across the US and increasingly internationally as a support service. Its partners in individual initiatives may be councils, community groups, philanthropic foundations or other anchor institutions. In England it is led by the Manchester based think tank Centre for Local Economic Strategies. In contrast to the US, in the UK the local lead is invariably taken by a council, an approach for which Preston is the exemplar. Read more.
In the US the direct empowerment of communities takes place in a variety of ways reflecting the different conditions in different states, as well as the different perceptions of a number of major think tanks and NGOs committed to promoting local democracy. In the UK the approach has been more coordinated, partly because of collaboration amongst a few leading think tanks, and partly because much community empowerment has been a response to particular policy and/or legislative drivers which have been common across the jurisdiction. In England, the way NHS commissioning practices have been evolving. In Scotland the emphasis since 2003 on community planning (community planning is a legislative requirement placed on councils and public bodies under which individual councils convene major public service providers within the council district to coordinate policy development and delivery so as to better meet the needs of communities).
These various experiences provide a rich source of research and practice on which New Zealand local government can draw in order to embed a policy and culture of empowering strong communities. One common theme which comes through every one of these examples is the importance of people identifying with their community - understandings of community cannot be imposed through some kind of legislative process drawing boundaries; it needs to come from the people of the community.
We now look at each of these experiences in turn.
Wiltshire is a county in south-east England which has a population of approximately 450,000 and is made up of some 18 long established market towns, the best-known of which is a Salisbury, and their rural hinterlands.
In responding to a directive the new council should improve engagement with its communities, Wiltshire started with the advantage of being based on long established communities most of whose people already identified with them.
English councils are elected from wards. Wiltshire decided to use the ward structure as the basis for improving engagement. It set up 18 ward committees as committees of the council (this was the most straightforward way of creating a workable structure a local community could use - the same could also be the case in New Zealand), one for each of its 18 market towns and hinterland, each made up of the ward members for the area.
In legal terms, the ward members were the sole members of the committee, and exclusively charged with the right to decide on any matters delegated to it by the Council. To enhance community engagement the Council delegated decision- making on local issues to the ward committee, now known as an area board and put in place what was in essence a town hall meeting decision process. All decisions were to be taken at meetings which any member of the public from within the area was entitled to attend. The meeting would have perhaps as many as 100 people present, begin as a social event, usually with live music and food, and then move onto decision-making. The decision rule was that anyone present was entitled to vote. In formal legal terms any decision was necessarily a decision of the elected ward councillors only. In practice, if the meeting had a broad consensus, that consensus was adopted as the committee’s decision. In the absence of a broad consensus, the decision would be made by the ward councillors.
It’s been very successful in triggering a lot of community involvement and positive input including communities often volunteering to take responsibility for matters that would normally have to be dealt with by the Council. Leaving aside the details, there are two important lessons for New Zealand councils. The first is that, given the opportunity, communities are responsible and committed participants in helping improve outcomes within their community. The second is effective community engagement actually saves money. It enables the Council to draw on community knowledge thus improving the efficiency and effectiveness of service delivery. Communities also will quite often take responsibility for matters that councils would otherwise have to deal with.
More detail on the Wiltshire experience can be found in a New Zealand local government Journal article, Local by Default, written by Steve Milton who led Wiltshire’s community engagement for 10 years (access the article here).
This is how Steve reports the benefits:
In 2018, every £1 spent on interventions by the boards levered £6 of total community investment. So, from a purely economic standpoint, devolution and community governance make good business sense. But, it’s about much more than simply mitigating the impact of austerity. It’s about local communities being co-producers of their own well-being, taking the lead and being at the heart of service delivery.
A U-tube presentation by Steve Milton on the Wiltshire experience can be accessed here.
In the mid-1970s Portland Oregon’s council was seeking to implement a major urban renewal programme in an older and much loved part of the inner city area (at the time a number of US cities were undertaking ‘urban renewal’ based on acquiring entire blocks, razing them, rebuilding and repopulating effectively destroying existing communities). There was strong resistance to the city’s proposal from the local inhabitants who made it clear that, if necessary, they would fight the city council all the way through to the US Supreme Court. This was no empty threat as amongst the local inhabitants were people who had the planning and legal skills needed to mount that opposition without needing outside help.
Council officials debated whether the city should fight the community, or try and work with it, opting for the latter approach. In considering how to do this, the council recognised that it did not actually know where its communities were in the sense of where the area recognised as one community ended and other communities began. After much deliberation it decided that the best way of dealing with how to define its communities in order to be able to work with them was to adopt a policy under which it would recognise communities of place.
This meant developing a set of criteria which a group would need to satisfy to be recognised as a community, and making it attractive to want to be recognised.
Criteria for becoming what was to be known as a “recognised residents’ association” included having a recognised boundary accepted by people within and beyond the boundary, some formal structure and demonstrated capability, and a commitment to open democratic operation. Groups which succeeded in achieving recognition would be accepted as the council’s dialogue partner for activity in the area, receiving some modest financial support, and a range of logistical assistance including professional development.
Today Portland has some 95 recognised residents’ associations in a population of approximately 600,000. The associations themselves are grouped into seven districts which in turn come together at the city level. This gives the city the opportunity of engaging at a very local level, a district level or citywide.
An overview of the Portland experience can be seen in this presentation put together by Paul Leistner who was Portland’s neighbourhood programme coordinator for a number of years and is recognised as one of the US’s leading authorities on community engagement.
Over the years Portland has developed a number of invaluable guides on different aspects of community engagement which are available to the local governance think tank as a resource for New Zealand councils to draw on. This includes guidance on recognising communities other than communities of place - communities of identity, ethnicity, indigeneity…
A webinar presentation by Paul Leistner on the Portland experience can be accessed here.
Cleveland and Preston present a different aspect of community engagement; the involvement of institutions of various kinds which by virtue of their function or investment are ‘anchored’ to the place and thus have a vested interest in the health and prosperity of the local community. This recognises that councils themselves do not have a monopoly over governance of the district they serve. Instead it is better to think of the council as the lead player in governance with the implicit role of facilitating collaboration amongst institutions which have a significant influence on governance in the sense that their actions help shape future outcomes for the district’s community.
For both cities, and many other councils/districts which are now going down the same path, the issue is taking back control of the local economy so as to improve opportunities and outcomes for local people and local businesses.
Approaches are somewhat different between the US and the UK (and other Westminster jurisdictions) because of the different balance between local government and others committed to community development. In the US it is quite common for initiatives intended to reshape the governance of the community to be led by collaborations of differing interests within the community in combination with state or national networks committed to change, such as the Democracy Collaborative, with councils sometimes simply a participant or even only an observer.
In the UK, and other Westminster jurisdiction countries, the anchor institution approach will almost always be led by the council. Despite the differences between the US and Westminster jurisdictions there is a strong commonality of approach with significant exchange of practice and ideas between the different jurisdictions (the Democracy Collaborative has been a major influence on the development of the anchor institution approach in the UK).
The UK approach is summed up in this extract from a history of community wealth building in the UK put out by the Centre for Local Economic Strategies which is the lead advisor to UK councils on anchor institutions and community wealth building (access it here):
In a nutshell community wealth building is an intentional reorganisation of the economy – and particularly local economies – to ensure that communities have more ownership over the wealth that’s being generated in their areas. It’s about how we use the levers of the local state to change the nature of ownership within the economy so that there are more SMEs, more social enterprises, more co-operatives and more community businesses.
In the US, the Democracy Collaborative sets out the purpose of community wealth building in this extract of its guide to CWB (access it here).
Through a defined five-pillar approach, CWB seeks to direct and retain more wealth in communities by creating new fair work opportunities; helping local businesses and democratic and inclusive enterprise models to expand; anchoring capital and resources locally; and placing control of assets in the hands of local people and communities. Doing so will help ensure that our collective wealth is harnessed and used for the benefit of all.
In both the US and the UK the anchor institutions/community wealth building approach is very much a push back against trends which have seen an increasing dominance of local economies by national or international enterprises. Typically, especially in the public sector, these have been the beneficiaries of contracting out in the belief that scale will generate efficiencies in provision without regard to the impacts on the health of the local economy. Proponents of the anchor institution/community wealth building approach argue it’s important to push back against the loss of opportunity for local businesses and the profits from outsourced activity leaving the community (New Zealand councils may see evidence of this in areas such as the current school lunch programme and the building and maintenance of transport and other infrastructure).
Cleveland was one of the US cities hardest hit by the decline in traditional manufacturing industries including steelmaking. The city’s population declined from a peak of 914,000 in 1950 to less than 400,000 in 2010.
The city remained the centre for a number of nationally significant institutions in health, the arts and as the home of a major university, most of these institutions being located in an area known as the greater university circle.
The city’s decline, and the implications for the future of its major institutions led to the Cleveland community foundation, in partnership with these institutions and the Cleveland City Council, developing what has been one of the most successful of all anchor institution initiatives. The history of this experience is covered in a very detailed and insightful report, Cleveland’s Greater University Circle Initiative (access it here).
Perhaps the most significant initiative from a community wealth building perspective resulted from major institutions adjusting their procurement policies to provide opportunities for the emergence of worker cooperatives as employment opportunities for disadvantaged especially black residents within the area.
The Evergreen Cooperative Initiative gives GUC residents 1) employment opportunities and 2) direct ownership in businesses that are geographically tied to the neighborhoods. The transformative potential of the Evergreen Initiative is especially powerful given the area’s history of disinvestment and economic inequities.
Evergreen is modeled on the Mondragon Cooperatives network in Spain. Since its formation in the 1950s, that network has grown to include 120 cooperative businesses employing nearly 100,000 people and generating $20 billion in annual revenue. The businesses are worker-owned and form an intricate regional supply chain. As a result, they have deep geographic ties that make relocation unlikely.
As in Mondragon, the Evergreen Cooperative Initiative catalyzes new businesses that can meet the purchasing needs of local anchor institutions and are worker- owned. The jobs created by these businesses build community wealth by paying living wages and offering decent benefits, and by creating a mechanism for cooperative ownership. The businesses also respond to institutions’ growing interest in building green economies and green jobs.
In England, councils following the anchor institution/community wealth building approach have also focused on the impact on their local economies of the dominance of banking by four major banks which they see as shifting capital out of the local community (New Zealand councils may see a parallel with the dominance of the New Zealand banking sector by four Australian banks). In England there is now an increased focus on how to encourage the emergence of regional banks.
Preston’s experience demonstrates that the anchor institution approach can make a very major difference to community well-being and the strength of the local economy. It began adopting the policy in response to significant economic decline. Year by year performance has improved.
Price Waterhouse Coopers in conjunction with Demos, a leading governance think tank, undertakes an annual Good Growth for Cities survey of the top 51 performing cities in the UK. Preston ranked 13th overall in the 2022 index, which measures the performance the 51 cities against categories including jobs, income, work-life balance, transport, skills, environment and the house price to earnings ratio.
In the 2022 report, Preston remained the highest performing city in the north- west, for the third time, and scored above average across a number of categories the public think are most important when it comes to economic wellbeing, including the availability of jobs, a positive work-life balance, the skills of the population and the variety of roles on offer.
Matthew Baqueriza Jackson, who has been and remains a lead advisor to Preston, and works extensively with the European Union on anchor institutions and community wealth building initiatives, has been supporting the local governance think tank in its objective of introducing New Zealand councils to the anchor institutions/community wealth building approach. This has included recording a webinar in which he and Matthew Brown, the leader of Preston City Council, present on Preston’s experience. It can be seen here.
What began as a series of localised initiatives in places such as Wiltshire, Portland, Cleveland and Preston has in the past few years been transforming into an increasingly coordinated movement committed to enabling strong community governance albeit with somewhat different characteristics depending on the jurisdiction.
In the United States, it is taking place largely through the work of major NGOs and civil society organisations. This reflects first that local government and hence local governance is a state-level matter not a federal one. Next, it also reflects the very different understandings of local government as such in the different states of the US. This means that some states will see local government taking the lead (Oregon is a good example with a number of councils promoting innovative approaches to community governance) but more generally it will be national networks, community foundations, or philanthropic organisations experienced in building community networks.
The extent of community-based democracy in action is illustrated by Democracy Innovation’s Healthy Democracy Ecosystem Map (access it here) which records nearly 10,000 community groups across the US actively involved in the promotion of democracy.
The anchor institutions/community wealth building approach is being led by the Democracy Collaborative which, as noted above, is active across the United States. It describes its approach as “CWB takes progressive elements like community land trusts, worker cooperatives, public banking, and more and supercharges their power, systemically connecting and scaling them to change people’s lives and the economic future of our communities. It does so in coordination with local governments, economic development teams, anchor institutions, and community leaders and organizations, helping them to adapt the model to their own needs and contexts.” Of interest for New Zealand, the Democracy Collaborative offers advisory services internationally in support of the development of a community wealth building approach.
In England there is a strong and growing movement making the case for the importance of involving communities in decision-making, placing increasing emphasis on research on the importance of communities having ‘voice, choice and control over decisions that affect their place’. The present and previous governments have been preoccupied by trying to design and implement meta- level initiatives such as mayoral led combined authorities and various programmes for levelling up and devolution. There has been no clear focus from government on the role and place of communities.
Despite what is arguably a lack of focus from central government, the strength of demand for greater community involvement especially in the design, targeting and delivery of major public services, continues to grow. Work by New Local on the future of the health system includes compelling analysis on the importance of community involvement, such as that contained in the article, why the NHS urgently needs to turn to the community - and how to do it, referred to at page 2 above.
The Kings Fund, a major think tank which describes itself as “an independent charitable organisation working to improve health and care in England” has published a number of recent research reports and think pieces as part of the debate on how to restructure the NHS. A good example is this blog “Not a ‘nice to have’ – the importance of working with people and communities” (access this here). This extract sets out the argument in terms which should be read and understood by everyone involved with New Zealand’s health service:
There are strong moral and ethical reasons for ensuring that people’s and communities’ voices are heard: people have the right to have their say over the public services they pay for. But the case for doing this work is as much a business decision as anything else. Services will be more effective, more efficient and safer if users’ voices are built into how they are designed, monitored and evaluated. There are so many examples of services that have been designed, leaflets written, admin processes put in place with little to no input from users of services and then people scratch their heads wondering why they do not seem to have the desired impact.
The Kings fund is complementing its research activity by supporting the establishment of what is intended to be (and indeed already is) a major grass roots movement, #DoWith, to build support for a “radical and hopeful change in how public services work with people and communities [which] is urgently needed. #DoWith is a network of people and organisations calling for a radical shift in the public sector from ‘doing to’ to ‘doing with’.” (See more here).
The greatest changes in the direction of community empowerment, and those of most significance for New Zealand, are taking place in Scotland.
Following the devolution of much of central government power from Westminster to Edinburgh, including responsibility for local government, the Scottish assembly legislated for the introduction of what it termed community planning. This requires each local authority to establish a community planning partnership described on a Scottish government website, as “a Community Planning Partnership (or CPP) is the name given to all those services in any local authority area that come together to take part in community planning. Each CPP focuses on where partners’ collective efforts and resources can add the most value to their local communities, with particular emphasis on reducing inequality. CPPs are, at their heart, about collaboration and working towards the best outcomes for a place.”. See the community planning discussion at: https://www.ourplace.scot/community-planning.
In 2019 the Scottish assembly amended its planning legislation to provide a new right for communities to produce their own local place plans as part of the new Scottish planning system. The our place.scot website describes the opportunity local place plans offer as:
Local Place Plans are more than just a plan: they can help communities understand what they want to be like in the future and help to develop a positive community identity. They can help develop local connections and collaborations and develop community capacity and improve social capital. They can support community aspirations on the big challenges for a future Scotland, such as responding to the global climate emergency and tackling inequalities. They are an opportunity for real, community-based change.
What really stands out from the legislation is that the responsibility for identifying a community rests with the people of the community themselves. For a group to be recognised as a community, it simply needs to satisfy a set of relatively straightforward criteria very similar to those which Portland has used for its recognised residents’ associations. This is the first example of a government legislating to enable the emergence of self-identifying communities.
A number of local place plans have already been developed or are in the course of development. The best overview is provided by the website of Nick Wright, the Scottish planner who has been advising the Scottish government on local place planning (access the website here). We have had a number of discussions with Nick Wright about the local place planning process. One thing we have reached agreement on is that local place planning should work better without the kind of explicit legislative provision Scotland has adopted. Instead, councils should simply rely on the inherent democratic mandate.
What is clear from the Scottish experience so far is there is a very real appetite for communities to have a means of expressing who they are, how they would like to see their place develop, and who the community believes should be responsible for doing what.
This webinar, presented by two people have been closely involved with local place planning, provides a good overview.
A related Scottish initiative, also important for community empowerment, is the agreement between the Scottish assembly and COSLA (the Convention of Scottish local authorities) each Scottish Council should allocate a minimum of 1% of its annual budget through participatory budgeting (PB). Under PB a Council sets aside a defined sum of money to be spent on defined purposes (these may be very specific or general) within a defined part or parts of the district. It will then provide facilitation and other support for the community of the area where the money is to be spent to come together and determine how best to spend it.
Participatory budgeting is seen in Scotland as an excellent way of encouraging local democracy, bringing people together to make decisions affecting their place without having to become experts in bureaucratic process and language. The associated website (access it here) is an excellent resource describing the nature and practice of participatory budgeting. It includes a participatory budgeting charter intended to show “what a fair and high quality participatory budgeting process should look like”.
This webinar presentation looks at the Scottish experience with participatory budgeting.
The third recent Scottish initiative which rounds out a comprehensive approach to community empowerment is the introduction to the Scottish assembly on 20 March 2025 of the Community Wealth Building (Scotland) Bill. which, once enacted, will “require public sector bodies to collaborate to create Community Wealth Building action plans.” The Centre for Local Economic Strategies, which has been closely involved in the development of the legislation, has prepared a discussion of community Wealth building and the purpose of the bill (access it here)
The international research and experience covered in this note provides the building blocks for developing an evidence-based and comprehensive strategy for implementing strong community governance. It demonstrates the benefits both for councils, and the communities they serve, as well as illustrating how increasingly important strong community governance will be for dealing with many of the challenges New Zealand currently faces - how to build a strong and effective health system; putting in place the preconditions for effective emergency management and responding to climate change; rebuilding social cohesion; turbocharging local economic (and social) development and much more.
It makes it clear that strong community governance enhances rather than reduces the role of elected members, highlighting the importance of their leadership role and how they can use the tools at their disposal to improve outcomes for their communities economically, socially, environmentally and culturally.
It demonstrates what makes for success in identifying and supporting strong communities including, particularly through the Scottish experience, how best to make community involvement attractive to people of the community themselves.
The benefits from rethinking the nature of local governance as a collaborative undertaking rather than the sole prerogative of councils, and the contribution this rethinking can make to community wealth building and taking back control of the local economy have been clearly demonstrated in the work of major think tanks such as the Centre for Local Economic Strategies and the Democracy Collaborative, both of which are keen to share their expertise in assisting the spread of CWB practice.
The Local Governance Think Tank has taken the learnings from the research and practice discussed in this note to develop a practical and fiscally positive strategy for councils to adopt and implement a policy of supporting and empowering self- identifying communities. The expected benefits for councils include rebuilding trust, the better and more efficient delivery of local government services, and rebalancing the relationship between local government and central government as it becomes clear that local government again has the trust of its communities and speaks on their behalf.
The think tank is currently working with several interested councils on the development and implementation of a comprehensive policy for supporting and empowering self-identifying communities. It looks forward to welcoming more councils into this initiative.