Can a localised, yet connected, approach to public service innovation help us to meet complex social, political and financial challenges?
The immediate pressures on local government finances are all too familiar. In many ways, however, they are dwarfed by the longer-term challenges.
As I have argued in Public Finance before, long-term challenges, such as caring for an ageing population, driving local economic renewal, ensuring that young people have the skills they need and mitigating and adapting to the impact of climate change, all drive a widening gap between resource and demand.
In Connected Localism, a collection of essays published today by the Local Government Information Unit, we argue that our responses to meeting such challenges must be informed by two core characteristics: local innovation, not one-size-fits-all central initiatives; and a collaborative form of civil engagement that involves communities, citizens and the state in new ways of working together and of sharing power and responsibility.
We call this connected localism: connected across services, across places and across the public realm.
Local government has a key role to play in making this happen: in stimulating local innovation, in supporting the participation of communities in service design and delivery and in scaling up and connecting local successes and in providing democratic legitimacy.
While connected localism is not proposed as a theory of public management (its essence being that it allows the emergence of different forms of practice), it does have significant implications for the ways in which councils manage their finances. This is not simply because it looks towards a long-term realignment of cost and demand, but because it speaks directly to how local authorities generate income and spend money.
A common theme in all of the essays is a mixed market of service provision; one that involves commissioning from the private and voluntary sectors at a range of scales but also takes account of the informal service delivery already being undertaken by social networks within the community. It makes use of ‘social productivity’ by encouraging citizens and communities to collaborate in service design and delivery, creating new forms of public entrepreneurialism that break down the rigid distinction between different sectors.
Sophia Parker cites the example of Wigan Council trying to incentivise a social care market that is based on micro enterprise and volunteering and which uses a local currency to try and keep the value within the area. Anthony Zacharzewski counters the accusation that local people don’t want to engage in this way through case studies from Switzerland and Estonia, which show a real appetite for engagement where this is structured in such as way as to demonstrate real outcomes from their participation.
The creation of a connected public services market that draws in and upon the energies of businesses, communities, public bodies and individuals could be the precursor for even more radical structural change. In his essay, Patrick Diamond argues for a local taxation regime in which environmental taxes are earmarked at the local level and in which local authorities even have the power to tweak the top and bottom rates of income tax.
The wealth of ideas collected by the contributors to Connected Localism are designed to stimulate and provoke but they also suggest a practical blueprint for better public services and more powerful communities. Albert Einstein once said that ‘the significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them’.
Connected Localism is one way in which we can begin to contemplate what a new level of thinking might be.
Jonathan Carr-West is director of the Local Government Information Unit
