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Journal of Rural Studies 23 (2007) 254266 www.elsevier.com/locate/jrurstud

Rural governance, community empowerment and the new institutionalism: A case study of the Isle of Wight
David Clark, Rebekah Southern, Julian Beer
Social Research & Regeneration Unit, University of Plymouth, Drake Circus, PLYMOUTH PL4 8AA, UK

Abstract This article compares two different institutional modelsstate-sponsored rural partnerships and community-based development trustsfor engaging and empowering local communities in area-based regeneration, using the Isle of Wight as a case study. Following a critical review of the literature on community governance, we evaluate the effectiveness of community involvement in the Islands small towns through a comparison of the performance of the two development trusts in Cowes and Ryde, on the one hand, and that of the partnerships established under the Market Towns Initiative in Sandown, Shanklin and Ventnor, on the other. We conclude that both models reect the structuring effect of central, regional and local state steering of the Islands regeneration policy community but also that a development trust effect is observable in one location (Ryde), due to a capacity to stimulate new forms of community enterprise and to successfully alter political relationships within the local community. These ndings support a new institutionalist account of community empowerment which emphasises the importance of contextual variation and locally specic processes of institutionalisation rather than the determining effect of institutional design per se. r 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction This article compares two different institutional models for engaging and empowering local communities in areabased regeneration programmes, using the Isle of Wight as a case study. The Island is a particularly appropriate site for empirical enquiry, as over the past decade or so it has hosted a number of state-sponsored rural partnerships (see Table 1 below) as well as two community-based development trusts. To that extent, it serves as something of a natural laboratory for testing the potential and limits of alternative models of community involvement in areabased rural regeneration. In the partnership model, community involvement has been mandated from above (by central government or, in the case of Leader +, the European Union) but development trusts have been established in Cowes and Ryde as community-owned regeneration agencies and these, in principle, can be seen as providing scope for empowerment from below through their capacity to stimulate new forms
Corresponding author.

E-mail address: clarkfam@talktalk.net (D. Clark). 0743-0167/$ - see front matter r 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.jrurstud.2006.10.004

of community enterprise and new forms of micro-politics (Donnison, 1973). The article draws on insights from the new institutionalism, and particularly organisational or sociological institutionalism, as a corrective to the dominant focus in the academic literature on the constraining effects on community empowerment of the discourse and practice of a particular form of top down locality or regeneration management. In opposition to the descriptive style of traditional (old) institutionalism, the new institutionalists operate through explicit (if diverse) theoretical frameworks; they concern themselves with informal as well as formal rules and procedures; they pay attention to the way in which institutions embody values and power relationships; and they seek to study not just the impact of institutions upon behaviour but the interaction between individual (and collective) actors and institutions (Lowndes, 2001, p. 1953). Whereas rational choice institutionalists emphasise the importance of strategic action in driving institutional change, sociological institutionalists argue that action is norm-driven, following a logic of appropriateness rather than a logic of consequentiality. Institutional change involves changes in the logic of

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D. Clark et al. / Journal of Rural Studies 23 (2007) 254266 Table 1 Regeneration programmes on the Isle of Wight Programme Nature Lead central government department/agency Rural Development Commission (RDC) Department of the Environment/ Ofce of Deputy Prime Minister (ODPM) Countryside Agency Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs ODPM (now Department for Communities and Local Government) Department of Health/Big Lottery Fund Lead regional agency Extent of local (IOW) coverage 255

Rural Development Programme

Designed to help resolve problems of remoteness and disadvantage in Rural Priority Areas

Single Regeneration Budget

Market Towns Initiative Leader +

Neighbourhood Management Pathnders

Healthy Living Programme

Sure Start

Brings together a number of regeneration programmes from several government departments. SRB partnerships are expected to involve local businesses, the voluntary sector and local communities Designed to revitalise market towns in rural England, and their surrounding countryside A European Union initiative designed to assist rural communities to improve access to local services and enhance the natural and cultural heritage of their area A pilot programme in which neighbourhood managers are accountable to boards of local residents for the regeneration of 35 deprived neighbourhoods in urban and rural areas Designed to improve the health of residents living in the most disadvantaged communities. Programme implementation was devolved to 350 healthy living centres across the UK Designed to improve early years services for children and parents. Programme implementation is through some 500 local partnerships

South East England Development Agency (SEEDA) (from 1999) SEEDA

The whole of the Island apart from Ryde and Newport was designated a Rural Priority Area 19942004

Two Island-wide RoundsSRB II and SRB V. Two area-based Rounds SRB IV (Cowes/East Cowes) and SRB VI (Ryde) 19942006

SEEDA

Sandown, Shanklin, Ventnor, Brading and Wootton Bridge 20022005 Western and central parts of the Island 20022008

Government Ofce for the South East (GOSE)

GOSE

Newport (Pan estate) 20052012

All Island 20012005

Department for Education and Skills

GOSE

Ryde 20042010

appropriateness, typically through an evolutionary process (March and Olsen, 1989). In the rst part of the article, we review the literature on community involvement in the governance of regeneration programmes, noting the dominant focus of work on rural and small town governance on top down partnerships. We then introduce development trusts as an alternative institutional model of community-owned regeneration before proceeding, in the remainder of the paper, to present and discuss the ndings of our Isle of Wight case study. Our data sources are based on evaluations of two of the Islands main state-sponsored regeneration programmesthe Single Regeneration Budget (SRB) Challenge Fund and Rural Development Programme (RDP) conducted by the authors between 2003 and 2005, which included interviews with members and ofcers of the Islands two development trusts: the Cowes-based North Medina Community Development Trust (NMCDT) and the Ryde Development Trust (RDT). These interviews, and

the extensive set of primary documents made available to us, were supplemented by interviews with representatives of the Market Towns Initiative (MTI) partnerships in Sandown, Shanklin and Ventnor in the summer of 2005.1 2. Community-based regeneration, governance and New Labours policy discourse This section reviews the recent academic literature on community participation in urban and rural governance, with particular emphasis upon New Labours localisation discourse. As we see it, this is composed of two dimensions: a dominant discourse of partnership and empowerment (Atkinson, 1999) and a secondary discourse of communitybased social entrepreneurship (Wallace, 2002).
MTI is a more recent government initiative to help towns in rural areas re-establish themselves as service centres to local residents, businesses and the wider community.
1

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Focusing initially on the secondary discourse, we may regard sustainable community enterprise, with its emphasis on residents as co-producers of local services through the ownership and management of community assets, as an emergent strand in the construction of New Labours regeneration policy agenda. In this discourse, central governments own role is identied as creating an enabling environment in which social and community enterprises can ourish. This breaks down into four main activities: the development of a new legal and regulatory framework (community interest companies); the opening-up of procurement processes in central and local government; business advice and training; and ensuring that appropriate nance is available to enable social and community enterprises to invest and grow (Afeck and Mellor, 2006; Department of Trade and Industry, 2002). However, the dominant theme in New Labours localisation discourse has been community involvement in the governance of urban and rural regeneration programmes, i.e. the participation of residents in decision-making in local partnerships (Robinson et al., 2005). This discursive focus was signalled in the guidance accompanying Rounds Five and Six of the SRB Challenge Fund and in the publications of the Governments Social Exclusion Unit. Subsequently, community involvement, in its new guise as neighbourhood management (the residentled management of disadvantaged neighbourhoods), emerged as one of the central themes in the National Strategy for Neighbourhood Renewal (2000) (Lawless, 2004). Both strands of New Labours localisation discourse (and practice) have attracted critical academic attention. In the case of the rst, emergent strand, this critical commentary has centred upon the limitations, rather than the potential, of community-based economic development as a route to empowerment. From a practitioner perspective, Wallace (2002) has argued, in a critique of the metanarrative of sustainability, that only the small number of social enterprises that have achieved nancial sustainability from trading are included within the ofcial discourse, with its stress on social enterprises as businesses, albeit businesses with a social purpose. Consequently, there is a mismatch between policy expectations and the lived reality of community-based social entrepreneurship, as the majority of social enterprisesespecially those engaged in community development and those located in areas of disadvantageare not, and are unlikely ever to be, nancially sustainable. This stance is mirrored in Amin et al. (2002)s critique of two key assumptions underpinning prevailing policy discourses of the UK social economy: rstly, that social enterprises can trade their way out of state dependency; and, secondly, that good projects can provide replicable models for other localities. Their study of the dynamics of success and failure of different types of social enterprise in different local settings found that there was no such thing as a model social enterprise or model of best practice that

could be transplanted and encouraged through standardised policy interventions. Instead, success was seen as a product of a range of place-specic factors that could not be assumed to exist or be induced elsewhere. Amin et al. did, however, conclude that at least part of that success must be attributed to the transformation of the local political climate due to the social economy organisation adopting a strongly political role and opening up new possibilities and networks for people who had previously been conned to the limited resources of poor places. Social economy projects, then, and by extension development trusts, are more likely to be empowering when they have been able to alter political (our italics) relationships within local communitiescreating new forms of democratic participation as well as economic activity (ibid: x). Turning to the dominant, community involvement in governance strand of localisation discourse, there is a large literature given over to a critique of the deceptively benign notion of inclusive community participation (Edwards et al., 2003, p. 192). A key thrust is that while this discourse acknowledges difference and diversity, it does not recognise conict or power: problems can be hammered out in dialogue and a community viewpoint reached, without the need for political choices (Foot, 2001, p. 38). The effect, it has been argued, is to co-opt local communities into a depoliticised mode of partnership working, where the striving for consensus on policy agendas laid down by central government effectively restricts political debate and reafrms the power of existing state agencies (Edwards et al., 2001; Raco, 2000). For critics such as Atkinson (1999, 2003) and others whose work is informed by Foucauldian notions of governmentality and the constitutive nature of discourse, the rhetoric of inclusive community participation helps to explain and sustain the dominance of managerialist forms of partnership working at the level of the local state.2 The now extensive body of academic research that has focused on the local implementation of area-based initiatives has tended to conrm the empirical reality of the constraining effects of a particular form of locality or regeneration management that, over time, encourages or even disciplines professionals to consult with stakeholders rather than support a local community to gain the condence to own the regeneration agenda (Southern, 2001). And at a somewhat more mundane level, the academic literature has, time and again, documented the practical constraints on engaging, and then sustaining, resident involvement in

2 It is important to situate new forms of urban and rural managerialism in the wider context of the rise of the new public management, whose overall effect, at least in the Anglo-American democracies, has been to create a dispersed managerial consciousness in public service organisations. By this, we mean to refer to the processes by which all employees come to nd their decisions, actions and possibilities framed by the imperatives of managerial co-ordination: competitive positioning, budgetary control, performance management and efciency gains (Clarke and Newman, 1997, p. 77).

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institutions of local governance (Lawless, 2004; Purdue et al., 2000). Of particular relevance to our concerns in this paper is the work of Edwards et al. (2001, 2003) on community involvement in regeneration partnerships in rural areas and small towns (i.e. with populations of between 2000 and 20,000 people) in England and Wales. Signicantly, the xing on this territorial scale reects the common enrolment of town, parish or community councils into such partnerships as community representatives. Edwards et al. found that the marshalling of such local activity (as producing a health check) was frequently and all too strongly guided by the strategic framework that the centre lays down, and was carried out through mechanisms that were also centrally specied (2003, p. 202). In most contexts, the partnership process had mobilised the established elite of active citizenry, often deliberately injecting professional expertise, rather than opened doors to the community as a whole (ibid, pp. 198199). Although much of this implementation research appears to validate the concerns raised by the governmentality critique of community involvement, there is an important strand in the literature that problematises partnership working as a contradictory and contestable instrument of governance. In particular, there are tensions and ambiguities in partnership practice between the structuring effect of state discourse and regeneration management in shaping the context of local partnership working and the potential scope for community-based challenges to elite governance arising from contingent, local factors (Osborne et al., 2004) or from a capacity to generate progressive, as well as parochial and reactive, forms of politics (Cochrane, 2003; Newman, 2002). Osborne et al.s work (2004, pp. 160162) on the effect of rurality on community involvement in regeneration suggests that there are ve contextual factors that are likely to impact on the effectiveness of such involvement: physical geography and local environment; the extent and complexity of regeneration programmes and agencies in the area; the nature of human and social capital and social exclusion; the strength of the local voluntary and community infrastructure; and the nature of local political relationships. Before moving on to an empirical study of the impact of these factors in the specic case of the Isle of Wightand as a counterweight to the dominant, managerialist critique of state-sponsored regenerationwe give further consideration in the next section to the claims made in political and policy discourse for the development trust model and its empowering potential. 3. The development trust model of community empowerment The Development Trusts Association (the national network of community development trusts) denes development trusts as organisations that are: engaged in the economic, environmental and social regeneration of a

dened area or community; independent, not for prot and aiming for self-sufciency; community-based, owned and managed; and actively involved in partnerships and alliances between the community, voluntary, private and public sectors. In January 2005, there were over 300 members of the Development Trusts Association (DTA) with combined assets of 250 million and an annual turnover of 190 million (Wyler, 2005). Recent publications of the DTA and other organisations sympathetic to its aims and purposes have sought to position development trusts as institutions of bottom up community regeneration. Trusts are seen as central to an emerging agenda for change that has to do with securing the future of sustainable community enterprise, following two decades of a top down route to regeneration that is considered to have made little impression on disadvantaged neighbourhoods (Commission for Social Justice/Institute for Public Policy Research, 1994, pp. 328340; Development Trusts Association, 1997). This literature has consciously promoted the merits of development trusts in an effort to persuade central government to introduce a more supportive public policy framework for communitybased regeneration, using examples of good practice to position trusts as exible, value-driven organisations that can play a signicant role in service delivery and neighbourhood renewal in the most disadvantaged areas of the UK. Whereas the DTA tends to be protective of community development trusts as a distinctive institutional form anchored in community ownership of buildings and land, academic commentators customarily locate development trusts as part of a network of non-state, non-market organisationsvoluntary associationsrooted in civil society. In particular, the clear commonality of values between development trusts and the smaller, grass-roots voluntary organisations that are seen as fostering trust, reciprocity, solidarity, co-operation and community capacity building is often noted (Milligan and Fyfe, 2005). Nevertheless, it is important, in our view, to distinguish between development trusts and certain newer forms of (ostensibly) community-based organisation that are being created in response to a further strand of localisation discourse and practice: the opening-up of local public services to more mutual forms of ownership.3 Arguably, New Labours endorsement of the social enterprise or not for prot model conates two quite distinct rationales for supporting the virtues of localism in public service delivery: freeing staff to be innovative and compete successfully for public service contracts, on the one hand; and empowering local communities, on the other.
3 We have in mind here the emerging breed of public service mutuals, where groups of health care and local government professionals have established local co-operatives to deliver a range of public serviceswith local people represented on the board of trustees, with voting rights following the retreat by local authorities and primary care trusts from direct service delivery to a core commissioning role.

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From a new institutionalist perspective, development trusts offer an alternative pole of research from which to advance propositions about community governance in both urban and rural settings, in a eld in which theorising has to date been dominated by work on the structuring effect of state-sponsored partnerships. As Lowndes (2001) indicates, empirical changes in the institutional framework of local governance (italics in original) are serving to direct the attention of new institutionalist scholars to the more pronounced differentiation of institutional forms over time ` -vis and place, and the growth of network (weak) vis-a hierarchical (strong) modes of institutional constraint (and opportunity). These theoretical concerns suggest that development trustsin their role as collective actors subject to wider institutional constraints but also with a capacity to create spaces for new forms of organisation from below (North, 2000)are likely to become an increasingly important focus for empirical analysis. Likewise, the prospect of a changed set of political relations as a consequence of a wide range of non-state actors generating forms of politics beyond, alongside and sometimes linked to the state is increasingly recognised within the regeneration literature (for example, Atkinson, 2003; Cochrane, 2003). What considerations, then, should we take forward into our comparison of partnerships and development trusts as alternative models of community empowerment from this review of the literature? We think that three are of particular importance. First, we should recognise the signicance of the politics of place (Raco and Flint, 2001) and look to examine the performance of the Islands development trusts and MTI partnerships as political institutions, i.e. in terms of their success in altering political relationships within local communities. Second, we should be wary of the one best way reex in institutional design and take seriously the notion that the prospects for organising from below (and from above) are likely to depend as much upon the process as upon the content of institutional design (Lowndes and Wilson, 2001, p. 645). Third, and following on from this, we should be sensitive in our treatment of community involvement and mobilisation to local contextual factors, and particularly to the initial endowment (Hood, 1995, p. 105) or existing capacities to act (Edwards et al., 2003, p. 202) of local communities and place-based institutions. 4. The Island-wide regeneration context This section describes the policy, funding and institutional context of area-based regeneration on the Isle of Wight, as a prelude to understanding the issues posed by community involvement in the regeneration of its small towns. It focuses upon four themes: the delivery of the Islands regeneration strategy; the key characteristics of Island politics; an evaluation of the organisational capacity of the voluntary and community sectors; and the growing impact of regionalisation on local governance arrangements.

The Isle of Wight is a small island of 147 square miles, situated off the south coast of England. It is a predominantly rural area, with some 50 per cent of the Island designated as an area of outstanding natural beauty. Most of the Islands population of 132,731 (based on the 2001 census) live in the small towns of Newport (25,033), Ryde (26,152), Cowes (13,028) and East Cowes (6891). Newport, in the middle of the Island, is the main administrative and retail centre. Ryde and Cowes/East Cowes are the principal gateway towns to the mainland. Ryde is a coastal resort situated in the north east of the Island, linked by passenger ferry and hovercraft services to Portsmouth, and to Sandown Bay and the south east of the Island by railway. Cowes and East Cowes are coastal towns located on opposite sides of the river Medina, linked by chain ferry, and with passenger and car ferry services to Southampton. There are smaller clusters of population on the south east coast of the Island, in Sandown (5299), Shanklin (8055) and Ventnor (5978); and also in West Wight. Sandown, Shanklin and Ventnor are heavily dependent upon tourism (Fig. 1). Although it forms part of the prosperous South East region, the Islands geographical isolation means that it exhibits many indicators of poverty and disadvantage. As documented in a recent socio-economic baseline study (Isle of Wight Council, 2002):

The Island has a population imbalance with a large number of older people, which places a disproportionate burden on health care and social services. There is a net in-migration of around 1500/year, with the only outmigration occurring in the 1519 years age bracket.

Fig. 1. The Isle of Wight: its market towns and location in southern England.

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The Island has a narrow and fragile economic base. The major sectors are manufacturing, which has been undergoing restructuring and is in decline in employment terms; and tourism, a sector that, on the Island, is associated with a declining traditional tourism market. Historically, unemployment has consistently been double the South East regional average. Male, youth and long-term unemployment have presented particular challenges. The Island has several areas with high levels of deprivation. According to the Index of Multiple Deprivation (2000), 15 wards are in the most deprived 20 per cent in the country (including parts of Cowes, East Cowes, Ryde, Sandown, Shanklin and Ventnor) and two wards (Pan, Newport and Ryde St Johns) are in the worst 10 per cent.

Since the mid-1990s, the Isle of Wight has beneted from signicant levels of regeneration funding from the Rural Development Programme (RDP) and four rounds of the Single Regeneration Budget (SRB) Challenge Fund. With the transition to Regional Development Agency funding in 2001, the Islands previously separate RDP and SRB funding streams were subsumed within the South East England Development Agency (SEEDA)s single pot funding arrangements. The Island has also beneted from a number of other funding streams, including 1 million of Big Lottery funding for an Island-wide Healthy Living Programme and Leader+funding (20022008) of nearly 2.5 million for the Isle of Wight rural action zone, covering the western and central parts of the Island. Of the coastal towns of interest to us in this study, Ryde has received a comparatively generous amount of SRB funding: 6,250,00, over the period 20002006 (see Table 2 below). This has been complemented by 4.1 million of Sure Start funding which will run to 2010, aimed at improving early years services for children and parents. This amounts in total to over 10 million of grant aid over a 10-year period. Cowes and East Cowes have beneted from relatively modest levels of SRB funding (981,000) from an earlier round of bidding (19982003), which was mainly targeted on community capacity building, skills training and employment projects. Sandown, Shanklin and Ventnor, for their part, were given the opportunity to bid for MTI funding administered by SEEDA and the Countryside Agency. Sandown and Ventnor were both awarded 240,000, and Shanklin 160,000, of SEEDA funding in 2002. This was made available for a period of 3 years to supplement grants from the Countryside Agency that enabled local community partnerships to carry out a health check (involving the organisation of public consultation events and the writing of an action plan). These funding streams were used to part-nance the appointment of a co-ordinator to both assist with the health check and thereafter to project manage the delivery of the plan. In each case, MTI funding

was to be cash-matched by partner organisations including the respective town councils. Two other Island urban villagesBrading and Wootton Bridgewon smaller amounts of MTI funding, sufcient to pay for advice and project management support in drawing up village action plans. Clearly, the scale of funding in all these cases has precluded the nancing of large capital projects.4 These funding streams have been administered by the Isle of Wight Economic Partnership (IWEP), the lead regeneration agency on the Island and the principal architect of the Islands regeneration strategy Open for Business (20012005). IWEP is a multi-agency organisation whose Board includes leading representatives from the public, private and voluntary sectors on the Island. Since 2001, relations with its accountable body, the Isle of Wight Council, have been regulated by a service-level agreement specifying that IWEP is responsible for delivering both area regeneration and inward investment. Building on a previous regeneration strategy, Open for Business reiterated a policy framework for a rolling programme of town regeneration initiatives, informed by a coherent philosophy of community development (see below). Initial priority was given to Cowes and East Cowes, via the successful SRB IV bid, due in part to the high level of social deprivation in East Cowes and in part to the economic importance of the area and the loss of manufacturing capacity that was currently being experienced. It was anticipated that attention would then focus on the coastal corridor between Ryde and Ventnor, with Ryde as an initial hub of regeneration activity. However, with the establishment of single pot funding Open for Business was superseded by the Isle of Wight Area Investment Framework (AIF), one of a number of AIF projects supported and funded by SEEDA as part of a strategyrather than bidding-led approach to regeneration funding in the South East region. In recent years, regionalisation, in the form of new funding mechanisms and policy at regional level, has played a decisive part in driving the Islands regeneration agenda and in restructuring local governance. The AIF, with its strategic focus on inward investment, workforce training and improved physical infrastructures has also decisively challenged what has been described to us as a grant dependency culture on the part of the Islands voluntary and community sector organisations. Not least, SEEDA has pledged 10 million of capital investment to Cowes Waterfront, a regeneration project for the Medina Valley that is the centrepiece of the AIF. This is a major, 15-year project to regenerate the economies of Cowes and East Cowes that is expected to lever in a further 40 million of private investment.

4 Ventnor has received capital funding for the regeneration of its harbour and botanical gardens from European Union and SRB funding streams. Similarly, Sandown secured funding from the Millennium Commission for the development of a sea-front leisure complex.

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260 D. Clark et al. / Journal of Rural Studies 23 (2007) 254266 Table 2 The regeneration of the Islands small towns: funding and governance arrangements Locality Local representative bodies Main regeneration funding stream(s) SRB IV (19982003) Amount of regeneration funding 981,000 Nature of community involvement in regeneration Delegation of project commissioning to Cowes/East Cowes TCs and CPs. Delegation of project delivery and community development to North Medina Community Development Trust (NMCDT) Community development devolved to NMCDT Delegation of project commissioning/ delivery and community development to Ryde Regeneration Partnership (20002001) and Ryde Development Trust (20022005) RDT as lead agency

Cowes/East Cowes

Cowes/East Cowes Town Councils (TCs)

Cowes/East Cowes Community Partnerships (CPs) Ryde Ryde Community Forum

AIF (from 2005) SRB VI (20002006)

10,000,000 6,250,000

Project, trading and rental income (from 2005) Sandown Sandown Town Council MTI (20022005)

Open ended

60,000 (Countryside Agency)+240,000 (SEEDA continuation funding)

Delegation of project commissioning and delivery to Sandown CP

Sandown Community Partnership (CP) Shanklin Shanklin Town Council Shanklin Community Partnership (CP) Ventnor Ventnor Town Council MTI (20022005) 60,000 (Countryside Agency) +240,000 (SEEDA) Delegation of project commissioning and delivery to Ventnor CP MTI (20022005) 60,000 (Countryside Agency)+160,000 (SEEDA) Delegation of project commissioning and delivery to Shanklin CP

Ventnor Community Partnership (CP) Brading Brading Town Council Brading Community Partnership (CP) Wootton Bridge Wootton Bridge Town Council Wootton Bridge Community Partnership (CP) MTI (2002) MTI (2002) 60,000 (Countryside Agency) No SEEDA continuation funding 60,000 (Countryside Agency) No SEEDA continuation funding Brading CP (health check and local action planning only) Brading CP as lead agency Wootton Bridge CP (health check and local action planning only) Wootton Bridge CP as lead agency

The parochial character of Island politics and the existence of keen local rivalries between place-based communities has been recognised as a key issue affecting both policies of community engagement and local partnership working. Parochialism is reinforced by the electoral structure of 48 small wards and the existence of an infrastructure of parish and town councils. A local authority peer review team found that the resulting dominance of very local issues has at times worked against the balanced consideration of Island-wide interests and made it difcult for the Isle of Wight Council to concentrate upon strategic issues (Improvement and Development Agency, 2003). Similarly, although the local authority had developed a strong policy framework of links

with local community networks, including the establishment of 34 community forums/partnerships5 and a recent compact with the voluntary sector, the review team recommended that consideration be given to improving communication with forums, parish and town councils, to supporting them further through the provision of appropriate training and to seeking out further opportunities to

5 In making a local community budget available to community partnerships and forums for projects that had been identied through public consultation and drawn together in the form of a community plan, the Council had in effect endorsed an alternative model of community development to the development trust model favoured by IWEP.

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promote community grass-roots understanding of the council. Ostensibly, the Islands voluntary and community sector displays considerable institutional thickness with 5000 full-time employees, 827 registered charities plus a further 1000 estimated local groups and some 260 social enterprises employing over 2700 people (Rural Community Council, 2005). However, our research suggests that the apparently strong grass-roots institutional presence of the sector masks an opportunistic pattern of growth in response to grant-funding opportunitieswhich has presented problems of longer-term sustainabilityas well as a weak pattern of alliance building and strategic networking that has made the sector a problematic partner in regeneration. In particular, our interviewees alerted us to a history of mutual suspicion between the two main organisations representing the sector: the Rural Community Council (the Islands Council for Voluntary Service) and Island Volunteers, a training and support organisation. But our attention was also drawn to the absence of a clearly articulated philosophy of community development, in either the statutory or voluntary sectors. An external audit of community venues and spaces in Ryde, commissioned as part of the successful SRB VI bid (CLES Consulting, 2001), found that there was, at the time, no specic community development strategy for Ryde and that information and networking within the voluntary and community sector were poorly co-ordinated and connected. The sector was described as traditional: formal statutory service delivery was the norm, with very little in the way of niche provision by local voluntary and community bodies. Furthermore, despite considerable potential, there was a poorly developed social economy in Ryde. These factors have clearly inuenced IWEPs approach to the design and delivery of the Islands regeneration programmes. We are aware from our evaluation of the RDP and Island-wide SRB programmes that a number of community capacity building interventions in rural areas have been well targeted (particularly where the impetus for the project came from the parish council and/or community partnership), but it was put to us by programme managers that there had been very little community involvement in their development. These were described not as strategic programmes, underpinned by a coherent theory of community development in the organisations responsible for project delivery, but as a series of more ad hoc interventions intended to build the capacity of the existing, fragmented system of voluntary and community sector organisations. 5. Findings and analysis 5.1. The development trust model: Cowes and Ryde The SRB IV bid was strongly inuenced by a desire on the part of IWEP to support the activities of the

traditional voluntary and community sector organisations in Cowes; but also by a commitment, within the corporate management framework for the Island, to promote broader-based partnerships with a responsibility for developing and coordinating local initiatives. Accordingly, IWEP worked with (separate) groups of individuals wanting to encourage the regeneration of Cowes and East Cowes, to expand their membership to include representatives of the key political, business and voluntary organisations within the two towns, including the town councils and the business associations. The SRB IV bid anticipated that the Cowes and East Cowes Community Partnerships would identify projects that met the criteria for SRB IV funding, and the bid earmarked an element of SRB funding to support the partnership members in their role as project commissioners. By this time another community capacity building project was already under way in East Cowes, with nancial support from SRB II. The purpose of this project was to support a local East Cowes-based organisation as a prototype delivery agency for the two edgling community partnerships. The North Medina Community Development Trust was established in 2002, with pump-priming funding from the Town Councils of Cowes and East Cowes and SRB IV, in response to the perceived failure of the prototype organisation to develop into an effective delivery arm of the two partnerships. RDP continuation funding was secured to support the project for a further 12 months. These sources of funding enabled the NMCDT to acquire its own building in East Cowes and to renovate it as a community resource centre. The Trusts principal objectives are to work in partnership with the local community, voluntary sector, business interests and public agencies to promote the regeneration of Cowes and East Cowes, and to drive the development of the social economy within the two towns. The NMCDT Board has a wider membership than its predecessor, including ve members from the communities of Cowes and East Cowes in addition to representatives from the two town councils and two community partnerships. However, it is important to appreciate that the primary function of the Trust is to be the delivery agent for projects that are prioritised by the Town Councils and Community Partnerships. It was envisaged that in its early developmental (and grant-funded) phase, NMCDT would focus upon building the capacity of those involved in regeneration in the areaprimarily the community partnerships. But the Trust was also intended to have a broader community development remit: through the provision of accessible community-managed resources and services, it was expected to engender an environment where local people felt sufciently empowered and informed so as to enable them to take control of the future of their community. This next phase of development was to coincide with the Trusts transition from a primarily

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grant-funded to a primarily income-generating organisation. During this phase, NMCDTs core business would be to assist local organisations in fundraising for and delivery of community development-related projects. In most cases the business arm of the Trust would charge a fee for managing projects that would in turn be nanced from the (matched) funds raised by the Trust on behalf of that project. This revenue source would be supported by the selling of information and support services designed to build community capacity, such as survey research and local needs assessments, as well as by rental and bookings income from the community resource centre. However, our research indicates that the political compromises implicit in the Trusts institutional design, allied to its difcult gestation and operating context, have limited its effectiveness in practice. Reviewing, rstly, the problematic historical and geographical context, the area covered by NMCDT comprises two mutually antagonistic communities separated by the river Medina. Access between the two communities is by chain ferry or by road via Newport, a distance of some 10 miles. The two towns are very different in their socio-economic fabric. Both have pockets of deprivation, but whereas East Cowes is an industrial town, (West) Cowes has been more reliant on tourism and yachting for its income. Historically, the two towns have been the full 10 miles apart with regards to working together collaboratively, although only separated by metres of water (RDP appraisal document). NMCDT, then, is best understood in the context of a long and politically fraught developmental process of bringing the two councils and community partnerships together. Secondly, it seems to us that the Trusts institutional design has acted more as a constraint than an opportunity. This is because in practice it has been difcult for the Trust to reconcile its primary function as a project delivery agent of the two town councils and partnerships with its more strategic community development and social enterprise roles. Put simply, the Trust has been unable to assert its own political identity or lay claim to its own economic and managerial space. More prosaically, the time demands on the Trusts single full-time paid co-ordinator of project initiation, development and delivery in a politically charged context were underestimated. Again, because the elected politicians on the Board have wanted their own organisations to be seen to be taking the credit for new projects, the Trust has found it difcult to establish a strong public prole in its own right. At the time of writing, the NMCDT has failed to establish itself as a primarily revenue-funded community development organisation. However, it has worked effectively to build alliances and networks. It is a member of the Island Infrastructure Group, the organisational development arm of the Islands voluntary and community sector which is seeking to strengthen the sectors sustainability through rental income and service delivery. It has established its own links with SEEDA with a view to consolidating itself as the key vehicle for community

consultation in the context of the emerging AIF master plan for Cowes Waterfront. In this connection, it has developed a strategy for community capacity building based on pride of place and public art themes. Ryde Development Trust was established as a company limited by guarantee in September 2002 and gained charitable status in June 2003. As an emerging development trust, it received approximately 250,000 of SRB VI grant funding in January 2002. It is an independent Trust working to sustain the regeneration of Ryde, to champion its needs and to build the aspirations of the people living, working and playing there. Its Board of Trustees is made up of community members, a representative of Ryde Community Forum (Partnership), a representative of Ryde Business Association and an Isle of Wight councillor from one of the three most deprived Ryde wards. The principal roles of the Trust are to oversee the delivery of the Ryde Regeneration Strategy (which was developed prior to the SRB VI bid) and to undertake direct delivery of some aspects of the strategyi.e. project development and management. There have been two distinct phases in RDTs developmental trajectory. During the rst phase (2002early 2005), the Trust was to all intents and purposes a managing agent of IWEP responsible for the co-ordinated delivery of the SRB VI programme. New project ideas were discussed at the Trusts four sub-groups and, if supported, put forward for consideration by the Board. The current, social enterprise phase dates from the (premature) withdrawal of SRB revenue funding in March 2005. During this phase, the work of the sub-groups has been condensed into a cycle of meetings whose agendas alternate between business development and community items of business. Membership of RDT is open to any individual (or organisation) with an interest in the future of Ryde. As a charitable company, the Trust has a wide-ranging brief to improve Rydes physical environment; foster new and existing businesses; expand job opportunities and raise the quality of training; provide learning opportunities for community members of all ages; promote leisure and play facilities; develop affordable transport initiatives; enable access to primary health care and support healthy living; and stimulate artistic and cultural activities throughout the town. This means that RDT must necessarily work in partnership with public agencies, business interests and the voluntary sector, as well as local residents. Staff members are based at the RDTs ofces in Ryde: some are direct employees of the Trust; others are attached to the Isle of Wight Councils Arts Unit. RDT has evolved from the Ryde Regeneration Partnership, which was formed during the development of the SRB VI bid to stimulate partnership working and to co-ordinate and oversee the delivery of the Ryde Regeneration Strategy. The initial composition of the Partnerships executive group, and in particular the presence of a number of elected councillors from Ryde wards (signicantly, Ryde does not have its own town council), made it

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prone to the pursuit of personal and political agendas. Agreement was therefore reached by the Executive in late 2001 that the Partnership should become a development trust (and in doing so be bound by the DTAs 20 per cent rule: i.e. elected council members have to make up less than 20 per cent of the whole Board). We may regard this constitutional containment of elected Ryde members, along with the absence of a second political constituency of elected town councillors, as decisive factors in granting the RDT a licence to organise from below. A continuing legacy of that decision, however, has been the unresolved tension between the Trust and the Ryde Community Forumand by extension the Isle of Wight Councilover their respective claims to represent the needs and aspirations of the local community. RDTs achievements to date are impressive. It has succeeded in levering in signicant amounts of external funding through the activities of the various projects that it has developed. It has established itself as a hub for joinedup regeneration and partnership working in Ryde, and it is generally perceived to have been inuential in helping to break down some of the barriers that exist between statutory agencies and the local community, particularly through its extensive programme of community consultation, its play development activity in deprived neighbourhoods and its work (in partnership with the Isle of Wight Council) in drawing up Rydes public realm strategy.6 This was actively championed by RDT and has opened up new spaces of political debate and decision-making in relation to the streetscape and physical regeneration of the town. The Trust has been instrumental, in partnership with the Isle of Wight Councils Arts Unit, in developing and marketing the towns carnival and arts festival: together these events have made Ryde a niche tourist destination and they are a major contributor to the towns economy, as well as pivotal to the achievement of community involvement and learning objectives.7 RDT supports its community development activity by letting out its ofce space to other organisations and community groups. It is consolidating this work by continuing to promote the organisational development of the voluntary and community sector, which now includes a sustainable community enterprise cluster. It is the lead organisation on the Island for progressing the Change Up agenda, the government programme for building the capacity and infrastructure framework of the voluntary and community sector.

Necessarily, an assessment of RDTs prospects of supporting itself as a sustainable community economic development organisation, as opposed to an umbrella or holding company for short-term grant-aided projects, is somewhat speculative. However, it is currently generating sufcient income from letting its desk and ofce space and from selling its consultancy services to local authorities and other organisations to enable it to cover the costs, including salaries, of core projects previously funded by SRB VI (construction training, the arts festival, the development and management of play facilities). We encountered considerable optimism during our eld work concerning RDTs future nancial prospects, based on a positive assessment of the likely impact of a number of recent and current developments that should enable the Trust to support future planned expenditures through increased revenue generation from rents, trading income, management fees and additional consultancy work. Putting its future prospects to one side, we would want to argue at this point of time that RDTs impact as a political institutionits success in asserting a place-based identity, in establishing structures of local accountability and in forging a broad-based coalition in support of community-based regenerationis itself part of the process of creating an empowered community (DeFilippis, 1999). What has been more difcult to determine is the contribution of the community, as opposed to the professional or topocratic members of the Board and its sub-groups, in driving the organisation forward: in the nal analysis we would regard the strategic leadership of the Trusts chief executive ofcer as critical to the success of institution building. 5.2. The rural partnership model: Sandown, Shanklin and Ventnor Our ndings in respect of the three MTI partnerships in Sandown, Shanklin and Ventnor can be stated rather more succinctly. Firstly, the composition of the partnerships ensures that existing organisations and community leaders are responsible for managing the process of community engagement. There is a common format which prescribes three categories of membership: Isle of Wight councillors, (nominated) Town Councillors and a somewhat larger number of individuals or representatives from existing local organisations or groups to be invited/co-opted by the Partnership. In practice, these groups and individuals have put themselves forward following well-publicised public meetings. This process has undoubtedly helped to induct new people into local political networks. The new recruits have tended to come from the ranks of the self-employed or public sector professionals, but there is also some evidence, particularly in Ventnor where there is an active voluntary and community sector, that representatives of traditionally excluded social groups, such as tenants of social housing organisations, have become involved in the work of the partnerships.

6 The public realm strategy for Ryde has since been adopted as supplementary planning guidance and forms the basis of the Isle of Wight Councils current approach to community consultation in land use planning. 7 A study of the impact of the 2003 Ryde Carnival commissioned by the RDT found that it brought upwards of 1 million into the local economy by way of additional spend. RDT estimates that by supporting retail development and creating new niche markets around local carnival and festival activities, arts-based regeneration has created some 125 new, sustainable jobs.

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Secondly, the majority of the projects that have emerged from the health checks and action plans are concerned with renovating the fac - ades of public buildings, enhancing the streetscape or improving access to transport facilities. A number of the remaining ones, classied as social and community projects, involve the provision or refurbishment of recreational facilities and/or the installation of CCTV cameras. The partnerships selected the projects, prioritised and costed them, and negotiated their mode of nancing themselves. All may, however, be regarded as relatively conventional projects; all have required matched funding and/or working in partnership with statutory and other agencies; and all were subject to appraisal by IWEP. IWEP was also responsible for recruiting the partnership co-ordinators. Thirdly, in Sandown and Shanklin this pattern of projects and membership may be said to have given rise to a politics of place centred round local development themes, where the community partnership operates in something like a growth coalition (Molotch, 1976) mode. One clear reason for this is that expectations have been raised by the existence of a Regeneration Strategy for Sandown Bay, commissioned by the Isle of Wight Council and the regional tourist agency (Tourism South East) but currently in limbo following SEEDAs decision to prioritise investment in the Cowes Waterfront project. In the case of Ventnor, the social and community category of projects has been rather more prominent, notably a that is now running as a successful proposal for a local cafe community enterprise. Here the community partnership seems to have been rather more responsive to the needs and concerns of local voluntary and community, as opposed to business, organisations. Both these forms of micro-politics are far from conict-free but they do little to challenge existing structures of power at the level of the local or regional state. Rather, the signicance of the three MTI partnerships lies in their reinvigoration of the community scale of governance through the process of incorporating new (un-elected) representatives in a way that does not threaten the interests of those in existing leadership positions. Whether these ndings are interpreted as an exercise in creating t partners (i.e. as an exercise in governmentality) (Ling, 2000) or as an exercise in community empowerment seems to us to be a rather sterile debating point. We have no reason to believe that the members of the community partnerships whom we have met have internalised the discourses and values of locality or regeneration management. Rather, we found a pragmatic but far from unreexive acceptance that bureaucracy is part of the price needed to gain the support of larger constituencies and more powerful partners. We also encountered considerable frustration at the resulting delays in project authorisation and start-up, which effectively reduced the period of MTI funding to little more than 18 months.

5.3. Discussion of the two models In the case of the two development trusts, our ndings can be summarised as follows: despite sharing a common philosophy of community development closely linked with IWEP, NMCDT and RDT have had different starting points and developmental trajectories, leading to what we would regard at the time of writing as the relatively weak institutionalisation of NMCDT and the correspondingly stronger institutionalisation of RDT within the Islands regeneration policy community. How are we to account for this nding of internal variation in the development trust model? Certainly, there are a number of contextual factors that help to explain the rather more successful developmental trajectory of the RDT, compared with that of the NMCDT. These include the larger unit of resource, in the form of SRB grant funding, available to Ryde compared to Cowes; the cohesive sense of place of Ryde residents and small businesses; and the greater degree of interface with strategic partners and mainstream service delivery agencies implied by the Ryde Regeneration Strategy, in comparison with the strategic focus of the Cowes SRB bid on Building a Community Bridge to Employment. Another important factor has been the support given to the Trust by SEEDA, including its role in brokering periodic disputes between the RDT and its partner organisations. These context-specic factors have presented a rather different set of constraints and opportunities for the RDT than those faced by the NMCDT. We believe, then, in keeping with the attention paid in new institutionalist writing to the signicance of history, timing and sequence in explaining processes of social and political change (Hay, 2002, p. 11), that much of the internal variation in the development trust model can be attributed to processes rooted in the particular geographies and histories of the two gateway towns, which have inuenced the practical working of the two institutions. However, it seems to us that part of the variation must also be accounted for by the differential ability of particular, strategically placed actors to organise from below in the two locations. In the case of the three MTI towns, our ndings are consistent with the existing literature on rural partnerships: partnership funding has helped to reinvigorate the community as a scale of governance whilst at the same time reafrming the legitimacy of those in established leadership positions and the continuing role of the central and regional state in initiating, structuring, nancing and regulating partnership working. Interestingly, discussion with relevant IWEP ofcers suggested that two forms of calculative behaviour could be found at work in the MTI partnerships. One has been to maximise the partnerships claim on the available (SEEDA) grant funding. This is the approach that has been adopted in Ventnor, Shanklin and (to a lesser extent)

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Sandown. The other approach, evident in the case of the Brading and Wootton Bridge partnerships denied access to continuation funding, has been to settle upon a strategic vision and seek out alternative sources of regeneration funding in the manner implied by the health check and (village) action planning processesa strategy, in other words, of organising from below. In both Brading and Wootton Bridge, the success of this strategy, which is now being emulated in Sandown, can be largely attributed to the vision and leadership of the respective town clerks. To the extent that effective, strategic community involvement in the delivery of action plans is more apparent in the case of Brading and Wootton Bridge, it can be argued that lack of access to SEEDA funding has had the effect of transforming these MTI partnerships into strategic and resourceful bottom up institutions. Recasting our ndings in terms of new institutional theory, what we observe in the case of the MTI partnerships is a set of place-based organisations engaged in a process of institution building, and subject to wider institutional constraints in the manner of their counterparts in Cowes and Ryde at a comparable phase in their evolution. The difference, perhaps, is that, given the uncertain fate of the Sandown Bay proposals and the absence of post-MTI continuation funding, the Sandown, Shanklin and Ventnor partnerships are operating in more of a strategic vacuum than was the case with the development trusts. 6. Conclusion These ndings are consistent with new institutionalist accounts of organisational and policy performance which emphasise the importance of contextual variation and locally specic processes of institutionalisation, rather than formal organisational structures, in determining outcomes (Lowndes, 2001). Our Island case study conrms that the opportunities for change associated with implementing a new institutional design, whether mandated from above or community-owned, will necessarily be constrained and shaped by its interaction with existing, embedded institutional frameworks and their underlying values, logics of appropriateness and distribution of political resources. In practice, it is clear to us that both the development trust and the partnership model reect the structuring effects of central, regional and local steering of the Islands regeneration policy community. Further, we should recognise that in many ways the RDT and NMCDT are less the outcomes of an authentic civil society movement than institutions manufactured by IWEP (Hodgson, 2004). We also need to recognise that state-sponsored regeneration partnerships have been used to develop and support a similar range of capacity-building projects, often employing the same professional staff, as those currently managed under the auspices of the RDT. Taken together, these capacity building projects have produced cells of people on the ground with a good track

record of putting together successful funding bids, who are capable of self-evaluating their performance. Politically, they form a lobby that can and does put pressure on council ofcers and members to nd ways of continuing to support their projects (interview with senior Isle of Wight Council ofcer, 2004). Finally, our Island case study highlights the limitations of treating the content of an institutional design or model as a single independent variable that determines community involvement outcomes. Initially manufactured and then embedded in a wider institutional framework, only later and in one location have we observed a development trust effect in terms of a capacity to organise from below and to stimulate new forms of sustainable community enterprise.

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