Community Participation in Planning and Community Service Provision

Abstract

The conclusions of the previous chapter pointed to a situation of contradictions. In Britain, as in so many other countries, government-developed community policies at the beginning of the 1990s were marked by formal commitments to community-based approaches, with multi-party support for community-based systems of social care. But there were widespread criticisms too. Governments had been accused of failing to take account of sociological analyses of that ambiguous concept of ‘community’, or to recognise the policy implications of the reality to which these analyses pointed; including the reality that the concept of ‘community’ takes on different meanings in different social contexts, depending on such factors as class, location, age, ethnicity and gender (for example Bulmer, on the work of Abrams, 1986). The patterns of social networks and the relative strengths or weaknesses of community involvement and organisation have varied in relation to these, as well as in relation to other factors of local history and geography. Community policies in general, and specifically policies to promote community care, needed to address these underlying issues if they were to be realistic. But at the outset of the 1990s there was insufficient evidence that this was happening at government level.