The strength of a community lies in its citizens – so the RSA's Citizen Power programme is designed to bring about change from the bottom up. Programme director Sam Mclean introduces a bold new approach to civic engagement and the redistribution of power

We did not need the MPs' expenses scandal to show us the importance of rebuilding trust and legitimacy in government. General election turnout has declined by roughly a quarter since 1950 and political party membership has been in sharp decline for the past four decades. According to a recent Ipsos MORI poll, politicians have now replaced journalists as the professionals who are least trusted by the British public. In fact, 82 percent do not trust politicians to tell the truth – the highest negative proportion in the 26-year history of the survey.

Both are symptoms of a decline in political legitimacy, but they are not necessarily symptoms of apathy. Political and civic apathy is a powerful myth that serves to legitimate the rotting infrastructure of representative democracy in the UK. Indeed, the number of people – particularly the young – who now choose to be involved in pressure groups and non-party political campaigns is rapidly increasing.

But the benefits of localism and citizen power should not be reduced to a sterile argument about the size or nature of state intervention. It is not an argument for more or less government. It is an argument for smart government. This means developing citizen-centric public services that cultivate individual and collective capability to make a difference in their communities, as Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum have been telling us for the past 25 years.

Over the past decade, public participation in policymaking, however poorly executed or undertaken, has become part of the operational DNA of public services. The pressure for public services to shift from the New Public Management of the 1980s and 1990s to one more focused on ‘user empowerment’ and ‘citizen-focused service delivery’ is coming from top-down and bottom-up forces alike.

People are now demanding greater capacity to influence and actively shape the environment in which they live. While a declining number of people in the UK feel that they have this capacity, the latest Citizenship Survey (2009) data shows that a vast majority of people (79 percent) consider it ‘very important to have real influence over local decisions’. Shifting power from Whitehall to frontline services and local people in order to reinvigorate British democracy and improve public services has quickly become ‘common sense’ in policy circles.In the past two years, all the major political parties have been desperate to position themselves as the ‘radical party’ committed to the virtues of ‘people power’.

But this was at a time of year-on-year increases in public spending: in 2008–09, government spending on public services was 44 percent of national income (£620bn). So, what does the future hold for public service innovation and citizen power at a time of significant public spending cuts? It is improbable but not impossible that, in 50 years’ time, the collapse of Lehman Brothers will be seen as the moment when the ‘neoliberal consensus’ that dominated social and economic policy for 30 years self-destructed, providing the catalyst for innovative and experimental ways of reinvigorating civic life. Part of the future success of the RSA will depend on our capacity to generate new ideas and practical solutions for turning the rhetoric of change into action.

This is what the Citizen Power programme – the latest addition to the RSA Projects portfolio – is all about. Based on a close link between the theory and practice of radical democracy, its primary focus is on enhancing local people’s capability to determine the future of shared civic spaces and to influence decision-making processes in our new socio-economic climate.
The Citizens of the Future project is the centrepiece of this programme. It goes to the heart of the RSA’s mission to turn ideas about social progress and citizen-led change into practice. The project will be delivered through a ‘sustainable citizenship’ campaign that links together pro-environmental behaviour with a wider project of developing civic capacity and citizen-led public services in Peterborough.

This ambitious social action project is led by the RSA and supported by Peterborough City Council, Arts Council East and Opportunity Peterborough. Over a period of 18 months (January 2010 to June 2011), the Citizens of the Future project team will work closely with local citizens and community groups to develop a robust infrastructure for addressing some of the major challenges facing Peterborough today. These include:

• Designing public services around citizens' needs
• Changing citizens’ attitudes and behaviours concerning the environment to help meet Peterborough’s strategic goal of becoming the 'Environmental Capital of the UK'
• Strengthening cohesion between the disparate communities in Peterborough
• Developing an infrastructure for high-quality art.

From September to November 2009, the Citizen Power team at the RSA undertook a scoping phase to begin developing a coherent citizen-centric strategy for meeting these challenges. This included five deliberative workshops with local citizens and community groups and 30 in-depth interviews with senior stakeholders from local services and the creative sector, as well as an extensive literature review.

The RSA’s Citizen Power programme and its flagship Citizens of the Future project will act as a testing ground for a number of themes and contentions emerging from this research. The starting point is to identify practical ways of cultivating civic behaviour. This means establishing collective spaces conducive to the formation of social networks and developing individuals’ capabilities to exploit these opportunities. The identity of Peterborough as a distinctive place to live and visit is dependent on active citizens – people who reflect the positive identity of place in their actions and practical commitments.

Second, to cultivate this, local people need to be at the heart of any social change strategy. People are far more likely to identify with something they helped to develop. Attempts to impose an identity or process on people and places will always lead to resistance, increased levels of distrust and withdrawal from public spaces and dialogue. One way of overcoming this is to ensure that collective targets and goals are built into the social change strategy. Collective agreements and pledges to achieve collective goals generate a sense of purpose that binds people together, feeding civic behaviour. These connections tend to be strongest and most resilient at the neighbourhood level.

Third, the arts have an important role to play alongside policy-focused interventions. They can deliver citizen-led social change through their capacity to generate shared meaning, identity and collective behaviour. For too long, studies of social change have neglected the role of the arts and culture in building civic capacity.

Underlying these preliminary findings is the argument for greater citizen involvement in public services. The RSA Citizen Power research suggests that localising public service delivery and decision-making is often the most effective way of ensuring this. It is a pragmatic approach to tackling some of the most acute public policy problems we are dealing with today, such as generating civic behaviour in areas of low social capital, tackling entrenched anti-social behaviour in socially deprived areas and empowering long-term drug addicts to overcome drug dependency.

But localism is only radical if framed as an ethics of civic action. In this sense, the localisation of power embodies a radical democratic ethos that assumes people have significant conditional rights and responsibilities to actively shape their environment. We should explore the idea of rewarding people

for civic behaviour through community credit schemes, reductions in council tax or additional service rights as a mechanism for encouraging civic action at a neighbourhood level.
This opens up the possibility of experimenting with a new generation of local services centred on active citizens, innovation and collective ownership. The RSA Citizen Power team is looking at the potential of reshaping and building public services – whether hospitals or schools – as mutuals and co-operatives in which citizens and frontline staff have part-ownership over local public services.

The preliminary Citizens of the Future work with Peterborough residents indicates that this approach may help to combat declining levels of trust and legitimacy: "Choice bloody choice. Of course it’s a good thing, but the only way things will really improve is if the views of ordinary local people are heard at the top… which means having local people like me on boards and having real influence" (Peterborough resident).

Engaging people in their communities is the only way to make real change. This is the long-term goal of the Citizens of the Future project in Peterborough. By establishing citizen forums across the city, introducing the RSA’s Opening Minds curriculum framework in local schools, helping to increase levels of recycling and energy efficiency among residents, developing an infrastructure for high-quality art in the city and providing the tools for evaluating and improving levels of civic health, the RSA hopes to provide a sustainable model of citizenship that will help Peterborough to meet the challenges of the 21st century.

As one Peterborough resident put it: “What we need is something that brings the different groups living in Peterborough together for a positive reason and cause. This could be it.”

Sam Mclean is RSA director of public participation.