Sustainable development, and party politics in the UK, are both fond advocates of localism and decentralism. In the case of the UK Conservatives, party leader David Cameron promises no less than the most “radical decentralisation” seen in a century if his party is elected.
There is something of an environmental zeitgeist in this language too. One of the most visible meta-signals in the aftermath of the 2009 Copenhagen Climate Summit was disaffection with national and international level government solutions on the part of environmentalist civil society groups, and a corresponding emphasis on the importance of local activism and bottom-up solutions to the challenges of climate change.
Community-based activism on issues such as energy and food seems never to have been so vibrant as it now is in the UK. The phenomenal rise of the Transition Town movement and local ‘climate action networks’ around the country are just two examples.
I’ve been meaning to write this post since the launch of the Hansard Society’s 2010 Audit of Political Engagement on 3rd March, because that shows a worrying counter-current. Consider the following extracts: (on pages 24-25 of the printed version of the Audit)
..there appears to have been a significant change in the public’s knowledge of local government over the past seven years. In the first Audit study [2004], 38% of the public claimed to have ‘a great deal’ or ‘a fair amount’ of knowledge about their local council. This figure had climbed to 47% in the fourth Audit report. But this year that figure has dropped back to just 40% claiming the same….
…it is perhaps not surprising that declining levels of perceived knowledge about local government are matched by equally declining levels of interest in local issues in recent years. Whereas those reporting to be ‘very interested’ in national issues has declined moderately from 25% in the first Audit to 22% this year, in comparison 32% of the public claimed to be ‘very interested’ in local issues in Audit 1 but only 19% claim the same in this year’s report…
Signs of a general loss of interest in local issues linked to declining knowledge of local government should be extremely worrying: not only for David Cameron and his team, but also for anyone concerned with sustainable development.
[NB: this post also appears on http://www.fdsd.org/category/blog/]
While I agree that many signs are not very positive (despite the likes of the Transition Movement), I’d be a little cautious about reading too much into the Hansard findings. Local authorities really stepped up their game on communications from the end of the 90s through into the noughties. I suspect that knowing at least a fair amount is a result of that.
In the past couple of years, this ‘broadcast’ model (Borough magazine to all households) etc has become old hat, hasn’t it, so maybe less effective. If I’m right, then this is simply a measure of the flow of relevant information noticed by citizens, and doesn’t really tell us anything about the type of engagement that makes serious localism possible.
Personally, I’m an advocate of ‘build it and they will come’, rather than looking for evidence that authorities and communities currently have the capacity to take on devolution / subsidiarity.