A new vision of active citizenship

The hard reality of spending cuts is forcing us to re-think what public services are and should be. Lets embrace the possibility of radical change argues Sam McLean.

The global financial crisis was a shock to the system. It has changed the landscape of public services for a generation. Local public services across the country are looking ahead to a period of severe financial constraint. Irrespective of which political party forms the next government, the public sector is facing between five and ten years of severe spending restrictions.

The crisis also opens up the possibility of radical change. The hard reality of spending cuts is forcing us to re-think what public services are and should be. The looming ‘age of austerity' demands that we again ask fundamental questions about the type of society we want to live in and the type of citizens we need to be if we are going to make this happen. The two are essentially connected: public services are the embodiment of wider social values. It is no coincidence that the growing marketisation of public services of the past two decades took place alongside the rise of a hyper-individualism in our society in which levels of social solidarity, feelings of belonging and support for economic redistribution all declined.

If society is to flourish and such challenges are to be turned into opportunities for progressive social change we need more than Total Place efficiency savings and co-production in service delivery. Both form important parts of a strategy to develop a new generation of more co-operative, innovative forms of public service owned by local people. But without a coherent account of future active citizenship marked by strong forms of attachment between people and place, participation in civic life and social innovation, co-production and efficiency savings are utterly incapable of generating the kind of radical shift we need.

This takes us to the heart of the Citizen Power: Peterborough programme being launched by the RSA today. This is an ambitious two-year programme exploring the relationship between place and identity, looking at different ways of cultivating active citizenship at a local level. In the accompanying report, Citizen Power in Peterborough, we argue for a civic rather than a consumerist approach to public services and tackling social challenges. The civic model we advocate is a demanding one. More power should be redistributed and decision-making more decentralised. But as citizens we also need to be more engaged, altruistic, resilient and creative. We need to be both more demanding (and critical) of ourselves and those elected to make decisions on our behalf.

The Citizen Power: Peterborough programme will start putting this thinking into practice, trialling projects designed to help citizens to participate more in their communities; to develop strong attachment to the city and where they live and tackle social problems in innovative ways. This will include working with drug users to design drug services and a ‘recovery community' to tackle long-term dependency; developing and evaluating innovative behaviour change strategies to promote environmentally-friendly behaviours; building a ‘learning community' in the city with local institutions and residents working together to situate the citizenship of young people at the heart of the community; using social media to mobilise people and deliver transparent, open-source policy making; harnessing the power of the arts to inspire local people and pioneer creative solutions to community cohesion and social capital, and constructing new ways of measuring the ‘civic health' and wellbeing of communities through social network analysis, rigorous quantitative data analysis and ethnography.

The Citizen Power programme was launched by the RSA this week. The first report outlining the conceptual framework and strategy will be published on Monday 22 March. To read the full report, visit www.theRSA.org/citizen-power. To find out more about the programme contact Sam McLean on sam.mclean@rsa.org.uk or 07827947126.

Photo: Flyer6756

Sam McLean is Director of Public Participation and Head of Citizen Power programme at the RSA

11 Mar 2010 13:37

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