Memorandum from NESTA
SUMMARY
1. NESTA is the UK's foremost independent expert
on how innovation can solve some of the country's major economic
and social challenges. Its work is enabled by an endowment, funded
by the National Lottery, and operates at no cost to the government
or taxpayer. NESTA is a world leader in its field and carries
out its work through a blend of experimental programmes, analytical
research and investment in early-stage companies.
2. In the constrained fiscal context and with
significantly reduced budgets across public services and local
government, localism is increasingly important. Locally-led approaches
have the potential to engage service users more directly in the
design and delivery of public services, and to make services more
effective at meeting needs and more efficient in using resources.
Further, longer-term social issues such as climate change, demographic
change, poor mental and physical health and high rates of recidivism
and anti-social behaviour require more engagement from citizens
that local approaches can deliver.
3. We believe there is huge potential for a radical
approach we call "Mass Localism" to respond to these
challenges and deliver greater decentralisation. NESTA believes
that mass localism can be deployed by local government to encourage
many more widespread, high quality responses to some of the big
challenges they face. It depends on a different kind of support
from local government: by creating more opportunities for community
groups to develop and deliver solutions and to learn from each
other.
4. Based on NESTA's research and practical programmes
this submission focuses on our work on mass localism, which offers
a means of engaging communities in finding their own solutions
to tackling social challenges. We outline practical steps needed
to achieve desirable outcomes and consider some of the challenges
that need to be negotiated when delivering programmes on a local
scale.
THE INNOVATION
IMPERATIVE IN
PUBLIC SERVICES.
5. The need for innovation in public services
has been argued before.[6]
However, forthcoming reductions in public spending mean that councils
and public services will struggle to deliver the same type of
service in the same ways. Radical innovation - developing different
approaches to public services that are more effective and lower
cost - is now imperative.
6. Our practical programmes, in partnership with
public service professionals and communities across the UK, have
demonstrated that that when citizens and frontline workers lead
the transformation that is required, better outcomes can be produced
at a lower cost. Examples of this kind underpinned a NESTA report
published last year, which highlighted the perceived failure of
big campaigns aimed at mass changes of public behaviour and demonstrated
that locally-led initiatives were more effective. Projections
in the report, based on practical examples from NESTA's Innovations
in Mental Health and Health Launchpad programmes, suggest that
the NHS could save £6.9 billion per year by adopting these
patient and/or frontline worker-focused approaches more widely.[7]
7. The complexity and local specificity of today's
big social challenges means that centrally-led, technology-driven
approaches are struggling to make an impact. Through stimulating
communities to get involved in public service delivery, and engaging
citizens to take action, activities can be generated that better
reflect the needs of the community. In addition, the solutions
they lead to are also cost effective as they can access more directly
the resources of citizens themselves to deliver change.
8. NESTA has significant experience of the reality
of how to engage local communities in tackling the kind of social
challenges we are facing. Our experience in programmes like the
Big Green Challenge has demonstrated that there is significant,
hitherto largely untapped, capacity within our communities to
generate localised and new ideas to help combat the problems that
they face.
9. A recent NESTA survey showed that communities
want to get more involved: eight out of ten people believe the
government should allow communities to come up with their own
solutions to difficult social challenges such as youth crime,
obesity and climate change. However, the biggest barrier to taking
action was identified as not knowing where to get the right support,
with 80% of those with ideas saying they would progress their
idea if there was appropriate support in place.
10. NESTA's Big Green Challenge, a £1 million
prize challenge for community groups to develop responses to climate
change, revealed that within our communities there is both considerable
appetite for tackling these problems, and the ability to generate
truly innovative solutions. In this case, the four winning communities
achieved, through different and locally-driven projects, carbon
emission reductions of between 10% and 32%.
11. The practical experience of running the Big
Green Challenge showed that community groups can generate innovative
and effective ideas to resolve some of the biggest problems facing
our society, and it provided a framework for NESTA's "Mass
Localism" report.[8]
This showed how policy-makers can stimulate local responses to
a variety of challenges, through community-led initiatives, networks,
and local voluntary groups.
PRINCIPLES OF
MASS LOCALISM
1. NESTA believes that the radical approach offered
by mass localism can be used to deliver more decentralised and
effective responses to these challenges. Mass localism can be
used by local government to encourage many more widespread, high
quality responses to big challenges our communities face. However,
it depends on a different kind of support: one where local government
creates more opportunities for community groups to develop and
deliver solutions and to learn from each other.
2. Local government has traditionally found it
difficult to support genuinely local solutions. We know that there
are countless community and grass roots organisations and groups
that are working towards public outcomes in different and effective
ways, but to date it has been unclear how local government is
best placed to work with these groups and spread best practice
and good ideas.
3. Government often struggles to marry localism
with national impact and scale, as well as overcoming criticisms
of equity of service in different parts of the country. Current
support tends to fund activity rather than outcomes, creating
a cycle of dependency and undermining the potential for local
approaches to scale and become self-sustaining. In order to change
this cycle, local government support must be more focused on funding
outcomes and accessing the full range of local groups and going
beyond "usual suspects".
4. NESTA's research and practical work has explored
how mass localism could be applied to a number of social issues,
particularly seemingly intractable issues that require citizen
engagement and go beyond best practice, such as anti-social behaviour,
wellbeing and public health and climate change.
5. There are five principles which underpin mass
localism:
- Establish and promote a clear, measurable outcome:
- The focus on clear outcomes (in the case of the
Big Green Challenge, it was reducing carbon emissions) provides
a clarity of purpose that increases the likelihood of engaging
citizens. While it is understandable that local government seeks
to provide accountability, too many additional objectives, targets,
secondary aspirations and considerations can act as a disincentive
for many groups, and cloud their sense of purpose.
- Presume community capacity to innovate:
- The belief that communities, with the appropriate
levels of support, develop and deliver their own responses was
a defining characteristic of the Big Green Challenge. Giving communities
ownership of developing and delivering their own responses to
the big social challenges they face is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
- In the early stages, challenge and advice is
more valuable than cash:
- The Big Green Challenge was a staged process,
with help for the development of ideas at the beginning and graduated
financial rewards at later stages. This approach allows ideas
with promise to be stretched and developed early on, without limiting
their potential by allowing a lack of prerequisite skills or capacity
to become a barrier.
- Identify existing barriers to participation,
and then remove them:
- The individual and shared experience of projects
can help to identify in what conditions community action can flourish,
and what barriers prevent local solutions from being designed
and delivered. For example, if a project depends on local volunteers
donating their time, the project could be de-railed by requirements
for professional accredited contractors. Whenever possible, conditions
that prevent local engagement or contractors should be removed.
- Don't reward activity, reward outcomes:
- Providing financial support upfront can easily
be misinterpreted as grant funding made in payment for activity,
regardless of outcomes. When financial support is a reward for
outcomes, it helps to galvanise sustainable community-led action,
rather than leading to a dependency on relatively short-term financial
support.
6. Mass localism requires local government being
able to identify and understand existing community resources.
Finding out exactly where the local community networks are and
what the key groups are is the beginning. Through working more
closely with those groups, local government can more readily identify
what local needs and interests are, and how they could be met
more effectively.
7. The next step is using a range of tools to
engage the community. Social media and new communication technologies
also offer a new range of (cheap) opportunities for local authorities
in how they engage with the community and local groups. NESTA
has recently developed a practical guide for local authorities
in how to use social media to best effect.[9]
For example, Councils should publish and share their data so that
local groups can help to interpret and present it in different
ways online.
October 2010
6 Harris, M and Albury, D (March 2009) "The Innovation
Imperative", London: NESTA Back
7
Bunt, L and Harris, M (2009) "The Human Factor", London:
NESTA Back
8
Bunt, L and Harris, M (2010) "Mass Localism", London:
NESTA Back
9
Gibson, A (September 2009) "Local by Social", London:
NESTA Back
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