The Right To Participate

In considering a Community Rights Act for Northern Ireland (CRACT NI) communities should have a right to buy, own, challenge and participate.

So, what do we mean by ‘participate,’ and how do we define ‘community’ in this instance?

Community

Place is an important determinant in understanding what we mean by community. It shapes how public bodies plan for and provide services, and it also helps to define our identity.  So, when we talk about community in the context of a Community Rights Act, we are talking about a place with which citizens identify.

The importance of place however should not discount the significance of communities of interest (farming, church, sport etc). Our emphasis should be on the importance of including all voices in place shaping, in commissioning, in planning. And it is that purpose, in place shaping, that our sense of community is most valuable. In the places we inhabit, our voices must be heard in determining how they look, how they connect to other spaces, to commerce, to schooling, to health, to regeneration and so forth.

Participation

If we are not part of the process of shaping our communities and determining its needs, then we continue to be the passive recipients of services planned and delivered by public officers with no immediate relationship to the people and places those services are designed for (e.g. where the provision of housing is shaped and built by people who live elsewhere). Traditionally, where we have been engaged as participants in place shaping and in planning, consultations have been perceived as box-ticking exercises where local opinions represent the ratification of decisions already made.

In this model of development in NI, planning by committee is the norm and that is reflected in the shape of public service provision. Communities are not acknowledged as authorities on the places they live in, but it is they who must suffer the consequences of committee-led planning decisions, which all too frequently fail to deliver for communities. The communities that were socially and economically deprived 30 years ago are, largely, still socially and economically deprived today, their problems seemingly intractable.

The role for community organisations within this cycle of policy failure appears to be as management agents of poverty.

The tools for change are community rights: rights that allow communities to participate as active agents in determining the shape of the places in which they live and the services they require. A right to participate is a foundational principle of civic democracy.

But not only will it serve to advance democracy; it will also promote community wellbeing, confront social injustices, improve our environment and advance our economic circumstances.