Oxfam UK Poverty Programme response to Empowerment

and the Deal for Devolution, speech by Rt Hon David Miliband

MP, February 2006
Introduction: the UK Poverty Programme
This response is based on ten years of working on UK poverty issues. Working with
people with direct experience of poverty, we have learned that an integral part of the
experience of poverty in Britain is not just a lack of material wealth, but a lack of
power1. We know that this powerlessness can be experienced at a range of levels -
within the family, in neighbourhoods, in relation to service providers, and to local and
national government. Through our Programme we have been working with partner
organisations that work with individuals (e.g. ATD Fourth World), with communities in
regeneration (e.g. New Deal for Communities, Communities First in Wales and Social
Inclusion Partnerships in Scotland) as well as on more national level policy work (e.g.
Get Heard, Anti Poverty Network Cymru).

Oxfam supports many of the arguments and priorities put forward in David Milibands
Deal for Devolution speech - in particular the identification and articulation of issues
around the practice of empowerment as well as the recognition of a power gap
between what people can do and what the system encourages them to do. We
particularly welcome the focus on power and accountability within the speech as we
believe that these are the key to achieving empowerment.

In this submission, in response to the questions posed at the end of the Ministers
speech, we present some of the principal lessons that we have learned from our
work with others to further empowerment of men and women with direct experience
of poverty. We draw on examples from our programme to illustrate how barriers to
empowerment can be tackled.

We would be happy to discuss any aspects of this submission, and to provide

further evidence where requested. For further information about the UK
Poverty Programme, please see www.oxfamgb.org/ukpp; in addition Appendix
1 contains a list of our principal publications over the last three years.

Poverty as a Human Rights Issue

Our work has been underpinned by principles that are central to Oxfams
international development work as well. Women and men with direct experience of
poverty have a right to influence decisions that affect their own lives, they have a
right to have a voice, just as they have a right to a livelihood and a right to fair and
equal access to resources and outcomes. When we interpret poverty as a lack of
basic human rights (especially within a rich country), we very quickly are able to
weave voice, discrimination, access to resources and livelihoods together2.

Within a human rights approach, the outcomes of development work are not just a
reduction in hunger; practitioners focus on both short term needs attainment as well
1
Commission on Poverty, Participation and Power (2000) Listen Hear: The right to be heard,
Policy Press and UK Coalition Against Poverty
2
Lister R. (2004) Poverty, Policy Press

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as capacity to work towards longer term sustainability of meeting those needs,
through the ability to articulate rights. At community level this would be capacity
building around knowing what one is entitled to, who to approach to address
particular issues and how to hold decision makers to account around those issues. A
rights based approach also focuses on duty-bearers (governments local and national,
private sector, society in general) and their skills, capacity and attitudes required to
ensure more equitable outcomes.

1. What are the current barriers to sharing more power with local people and
how can local government, its partners and central government work
together to overcome them?

Power is a complex issue and barriers to sharing it are just as complex. To date
efforts to share power have been made with varying success. There are simple
technical barriers that some thought and sensitivity can address (such as timing of
meetings, transparency of information, ways of working, information provision). There
are also more systemic barriers that have developed through inequitable power
sharing in the past; these are based around trust, confidence and will need wide-
ranging strategies in response.

The issues we would like to cover in this section relate in particular to the latter set of
barriers and address issues around the spaces or opportunities for empowerment,
the relationships between those involved in empowerment, skills of those facilitating
empowerment and how to ensure that those involved in sharing power are motivated
to do so.

1.1 Created and invited spaces

A model that has helped shape our thinking within our project activities has been that
of invited and created space, where space refers to the arena in which dialogue is
happening. Invited space is understood to be that created and managed by those
with power, where those with less power are invited in; participation is therefore very
much on the terms of those with power. Created space on the other hand, is that
which has been developed and managed by those within the space, so participants
have autonomy over the space3.

It is important to recognise the benefits and limitations of working in both spaces.

There are times when it is appropriate to work in either one, or the other, or both in
parallel. Where community groups have come together and developed capacity
through creating their own space, they are usually much better able to engage with
invited space. So it is important to focus development on both approaches.

In terms of community involvement in regeneration, we know from our own and

partners work that the invited space of New Deals for the Community (England),
Social Inclusion Partnerships (Scotland) and Communities First (Wales) has in most
places failed to realise its commonly stated goal of community led processes.
These are classic invited spaces: the local authorities, very much power holders, are
creating the opportunities for engagement through partnership boards, community
plans, etc but still retain control over how the space is managed and how decisions
are made. Very often they are working within communities that do not have the
capacity to engage at all with the space; this could mean that there are no structures
within the community that can either assist the inviter to access the community
(through organisations or community leaders), or indeed for the invitees to be linked

3
Mott A., Increasing space and influence through community organising and citizen
monitoring: experiences from the USA, IDS Bulletin 35 (2), April 2004

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to or supported by the community if they engage with the space. These invited
spaces have usually been more productive where there has already been community
level activity, and therefore capacity within the community to engage more equally in
the process; in these circumstances the community have learned to develop and
organise their own power, or their capacity to work together and have a common
voice on any particular issue, and this is normally achieved through their own
created spaces. Very few organisations work with communities to nurture created
spaces; one that does is Community Pride Initiative and they do this through the
Schools of Participation (see Box 1), as well as Cross Community Gatherings. There
are other approaches such as Training for Transformation and Reflect that can be
used to nurture created space, but very often the process is initiated through a
crisis of some type, such as an unpopular council decision to demolish some
houses or a community resource, or indeed through a shock such as a riot or death
within a community, that galvanises energy and community organisation.

This model has helped us think about key issues around moving power sharing
agendas forward and we believe that:
It is essential to understand the power dynamics of the fora in which power-
sharing or equitable decision-making happens and through that explore what
needs to be done to move towards the desired outcomes
To enable invited space to be more effective, the inviters must explore the
power dynamics and proactively address them within the space
There should be greater investment in developing created space, and
developing capacity within communities to be able to engage on an ongoing
basis with decision makers. Such space needs to be managed to take into
account the complex power dynamics of the community, and ensure that it is not
just appropriated by the elites within a community. Community capacity building
and new models of community structures that enable this to happen need support
and investment.

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 Box 1: Refugee Charter, Manchester
The Refugee and Migrants Forum is a network of groups and individuals working to
empower refugees and migrants within Manchester. In partnership with Community
Pride Initiative (CPI)4 and the Manchester Refugee Support Network (MRSN), the
Forum organised a community leadership-training course (School of Participation)
running from January to March 2005. Community leaders undertaking the training
represented the Eritrean, Zimbabwean, Pakistani, Sudanese, Kurdish and Somali
refugee groups.

As a response to the training, the group, supported by CPI and MRSN, decided to
formulate a refugee charter in order to highlight the situation of refugees in
Manchester and to promote the positive impact that refugees and Migrants have,
both socially and economically on the city, if given the opportunity. The charter is a
reflection of issues raised by the communities. It includes sections on Basic Rights,
housing and health amongst others. It was fundamental that the Charter be both
politically acceptable to those who wish to sign and support it but also challenging
enough to facilitate change.

The Charter was launched on the 12th of January 2006 at Manchester Town Hall.
Over 450 people attended the event including Refugee Community Organisations,
representatives of local and national government and voluntary agencies. In
conjunction with the Charter, a second document will be published in order to
provide practical guidelines and recommendations for those who wish to sign the
charter. The Refugee and Migrants Forum are currently working closely with
Manchester City Council to ensure that the Charter is endorsed by all statutory
agencies across the City.

1.2 Who is involved in empowerment and how do different actors relate to

each other?
We are starting from the premise that as we need to share more power with local
people, then power is currently inequitably distributed. However, adopting a
simplistic analysis of how power is distributed will lead to accordingly simplistic
solutions. Local people are not an homogenous group just as local government is
not either. Where there is an acknowledged imbalance of representation in any
group, one common approach is to ensure a quota representation of the different
parties. So for example, to address an imbalance of men and women in a decision
making body, a common response is to strive for 50% men and 50% women
representation in the structure; to enable a community voice in regeneration
partnerships there are quotas for community representatives - many of the
regeneration partnership boards are based on equal splits, often three way between
statutory, private and community sectors. This is a widely accepted principle of
fairness and presumed to help in achieving equal access to power. Our view based
on our programme work would be that this is a necessary but not sufficient
requirement for equal access to power and decision-making. Equal opportunity is not
the same as equal access or equal outcome.

The 50:50 quota assumes that all members of each group have the same amounts of
power and this is obviously not true. Individuals occupy very different positions of
power due to many different factors and these cannot be assumed; they can relate to
age, gender, race, perceived relationships with different individuals (sometimes

4
please see www.communitypride,org.uk for more information about Community Pride Initiate
and the Schools of Participation

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people think of others as holding power, when in fact those others feel they hold very
little), and other aspects of identity. So for example, when equal numbers from each
sector sit on the board, they do not represent or carry equal power in terms of
influence, access to information and accountability.

To ensure more effective and equitable participation of community actors on a

committee or partnership board, Oxfam recommends that:
Individual confidence needs to be developed; there are excellent examples of
capacity building courses that really support individuals, such as Engendering
Change (see Box 2)
Individuals involved need to have clear links to their community and confidence in
why they are they and who they represent; it is often very difficult for community
representatives as there are no formal mechanisms by which they represent
their community. Community members sitting on these boards may not feel
respected by the other members of the board for a number of different reasons
personal as well as positional. Clarity around their role, their links to the
community and support in delivering on that are important
Time and resources are made available to ensure that individuals fully
understand the issues being discussed at meetings. Other members are there
because this is their daily work and they are therefore familiar with the issues as
a matter of course, and all the decisions that are taken between meetings. Many
community representative feel that decisions are already made before they come
to the board. Support to community members through preparatory meetings and
mentor schemes would be useful
Investment is made in the building of trust and personal contacts: other members
of a partnership board network and meet between meetings and so know about
each other, their reputations, etc. This is a key aspect of trust and
communication in any meeting and the community representatives often feel
complete outsiders. It is useful to build in team building or socialising time;
holding meetings in community buildings; having visits to community projects to
enable the community representatives to be host.
New ways of working are explored and developed at meetings; very often the
committees and boards work in a traditional way with papers circulated before
meetings and formal decision making processes. Varying the way meetings are
held is useful, possibly employing a facilitator to ensure that the process of the
meeting is inclusive.

Box 2: Case study from Women Making a Difference5 - Darlington women work
together

Four women worked together on four different issues: a Bangla school (Bengali
taught to children in school during school hours), a personal housing issue, a
community centre for everyone in the community, and short courses for women with
childcare provided. They said that working together and supporting each other had
significantly helped them and had made for more efficient campaigning; for example,
when they surveyed all parents in their local school, they were able to cover several
issues in the one questionnaire.

5
This case study is taken from the Women Making a Difference: An external evaluation of
the North East Womens Forums womens training programme, 2003 2005, Jean Bareham
2005

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After the course, they reported progress on one of the issues in their own words:
Four of us meet every two weeks to discuss progress on our issues. Weve sent
surveys out to all parents and we have received a lot of positive response. We have
typed this up as a graph and pie chart. Weve had meetings with school governors
and the Head Teacher about the Bangla school. They have offered that there could
be a Bangla school after school hours; however we dont think this is a good
response as the children will be tired after school hours, and already go to the
Mosque every day at 5.00pm. So we are now thinking of how to take the issue
further. We intend to lobby an official in the Education Department. We havent yet
done this, but at our next group meeting, we will decide who should lobby him, and
when.

Only one of the women had had contact with decision makers such as councillors at
the beginning of the course, and she said her confidence had risen greatly: I used to
go to meetings of the Northgate Partnership and not really say anything. Now I do,
especially asking questions about the community centre (my issue) and its progress.
I meet the two councillors (who met with the whole course) every month at the
Northgate Partnership meetings. Now I make sure I sit next to them at the meetings!
After the confidence building session, I arranged to go and see an Education
Department official with two other parents who are not on the course. I went with [a
parent also on the course] to the parent governors and the Head Teacher to lobby
about the Bangla school. Its made a great difference to my confidence.

1.3 Practice of empowerment

There is a constant demand for skilled practitioners to facilitate participation and
empowerment, and increasing concern that good practice is rare. We have been
working with a group of practitioners keen to explore how to push the boundaries of
practice; the Participatory Practitioners for Change are a network of practitioners
from across the UK who work with a range of tools and approaches, across a range
of sectors. Their concern is to create a forum to enable practitioners6 to improve
their own individual practice as well as raise the quality of participation work overall
through skills development, sharing good practice and learning, and lobbying for
change.

Another issue is that the distribution of power within communities is complex, and
good empowerment work needs to take this into account and understand it from each
communitys perspective. This requires considerably more competent practitioners
than currently exist (at scale) throughout the UK and an understanding of
participation beyond mere numbers of people, but around who is present, who is not,
who is speaking, who is not and who benefits and who does not.

1.4 Leadership, sticks or carrots?

At present there is a real gap between the promise of empowerment and its delivery
at community level around the country. In some ways the vision of a bottom up
approach seems to be imposed from the top down. It is essential that this vision
does come from the top, but how it then becomes owned by others is crucial. The
role of leadership in this process is critical, as are sticks and carrots.

There are no enforcing mechanisms for participation; this is a difficult area to develop
as overly rigid processes that all must adhere to ignore the reality that all situations

6
The PPfC define practitioners as anyone, paid or not, professional or amateur, who uses
participatory approaches to facilitate change and empowerment

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are different and need to be explored within their own particular context. There are
many guidelines available already, outlining what good participation should look like;
however there are no mechanisms of enforcement no one is looking over the
shoulders of those involved. In particular we feel that the central government has a
crucial role to play in checking that local prejudice and inadequate practice is not
distorting local delivery. There needs to be a mechanism by which people at
grassroots level can hold the various actors within a participatory process to account
if they do not feel that the process is effective, they need to be clear about who
they can take this up with that will then take action. It is crucial that the empowerment
vision is shared by all stakeholders and this would help all concerned recognise
when it is or is not happening. We have explored with some partners the idea of
minimum standards of participation from the grassroots perspective; a simple guide
that would help communities judge whether a process was useful or not, and exactly
how and where they can go if they would like to challenge any aspects of it.

Alongside sticks, carrots can also be helpful; without the latter, there is no motivation
for people to do any more than the minimum (or tick boxes). One way to judge staff
performance in the statutory and voluntary sector is how they have facilitated the
sharing of power.

We have undertaken a number of pilot pieces of work with local authorities7 in part to
demonstrate to other authorities a different way of doing things, and to encourage
them to adopt these new methods. This has not necessarily been the case and
despite good pilots and models it has been difficult to generate their take up more
widely. Oxfam believes that the following conditions need to be in place:
There should be champions within each organisation to drive the process of
change and they need to be at a senior level and to have clout. Everyone within
each organisation needs to know the vision of what is trying to be achieved and
what their individual role and responsibility is for that change. Care must be
taken to guard against the assumption by the majority of councillors and officers
that work on participation should only be carried out by certain staff (such as
front-line workers). It is generally important to ensure the local authority
recognises that working on participation (and equalities, etc) is a cross-cutting
facet to their core business. For example, there was a danger with the first
Gender Analysis project that we worked on with North Lincolnshire Council in
Crosby Neighbourhood Management Pathfinder that it was perceived as the sole
prerogative of Diversity Officers (while others in Council got on with the real
work).
Statutory obligations can really push change. For example the forthcoming
introduction of gender as a public duty is really forcing Local Authorities to think
about how they can achieve it and looking around for examples of tools and
approaches
Clear materials for people to take forward that demonstrate the real difference a
new way of doing something can make, and mentoring support available for
people to take new ways of working forward

7
Examples are:
Redcar and Cleveland Council, Job Connect gender analysis
Gender and Ethnicity Impact Assessment in Govan Social Inclusion Partnership
North Lincolnshire Council, Crosby Neighbourhood Management Pathfinder Gender
Analysis pilot of Neighbourhood Policing
Salford City Council, use of Participatory Appraisal in New Deal for Community area

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2 What are the key factors that will help to make empowerment attractive
and accessible to service user and citizens?

The most effective is seeing real change; when people feel that they have been
listened to, have been part of a transparent decision making process and understood
why decisions have been made the way they have, they feel that they have not
wasted their time. The sense that this has been achieved comes through two way
dialogue rather that the frustrations of a one way flow of information that so often is
the reality of participation. In practice, local authority representatives frequently
stand up at community meetings and say what they are doing, rather than listen to
what people have to say. In addition, there is often no feedback from consultation
processes, so people have no sense of what happened as a result of their
contribution.

Becoming involved in some of these decision-making processes takes up

considerable personal, and frequently unpaid, time. There are arguments that that
time should be remunerated in some way and these need to be carefully considered;
would this skew in any way their relationship with their community, with the process,
and so on? For some people remuneration might mean they have to make difficult
livelihoods decisions, such as how it would affect their benefits or any paid work they
do.

An often unmentioned or well-understood risk for individuals is their status within a

community; by putting themselves forward people are often putting personal
reputations at stake. Considerable support to individuals would assist this; mentors,
training, reimbursement of expenses, and good community representation structures
that enable people to feel accountable to their community

It is remarkable that despite all this people do still get involved, and it is currently the
motivation of feeling useful and the possibility of making a difference that drives the
few people involved to action.

3. How can we rebalance the current performance framework so that local

authorities can better respond to bottom up pressures to improve the
quality of public services?

A hidden assumption behind the concept of equal opportunities is that if available to

all, resources will be shared equally. In fact, resources may need to be distributed
differently in order to get over invisible (or visible) discrimination and inequality in
allocation. For instance, in the Redcar and Cleveland gender analysis study8 an
employment service offered to all actually benefited more men (75%) than women
(25%) in terms of who accessed the service. Therefore to ensure that the service
really reached men and women equally, Redcar and Cleveland Council started an
outreach programme to find women and attract them to the service, a positive action
which could be perceived as unfair.

Gender budgeting illustrates where inequalities exist for men and women, but the
basic principles can be applied to explore inequalities in local provision to different
groups. Bottom up pressures often are in response to these inequalities (they are
much more visible from the service users perspective), and so developing more

8
Accounting for gender: support for work in South Bank and Grangetown, by Romi Jones
and Julia Lyford (Fourth Action) March 2005

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analytical and responsive tools and techniques to ensure better proofing of services
would be very beneficial.

Oxfam has been doing considerable work with local authorities on gender budgeting
to help identify who benefits from policies and programmes. The gender duty will
help in this and one could extend this to other aspects of identity. Consistent
collection of disaggregated data will help local authorities and service providers know
who is receiving what; using analytical tools such as gender budgeting and other
types of proofing to check the impact of provision will also assist. We can provide
considerable more information on this both examples of local authority gender
audits (in community policing, and Job Connect provision) as well as manuals and
other publications (see Appendix 1).

4. What are the implications of more citizen and neighbourhood

empowerment for local governance and the role of democratically elected
representatives?

The key issue here is that these do not become parallel and separate processes it
is essential that they interact and that elected representatives see citizen
empowerment as a way to be more effective in their role. Elected representatives
responses to participation tend to fall into two distinct camps:
Those who see participatory processes as a way to enhance what they are there
to achieve, as they ensure more consultation and feedback, more ongoing
connection with the wider community and so bolster their representative role, and
Those who see it as a challenge to their role and obstruct the processes as much
as possible.

Communities will respond to these reactions; they often vote for local councillors
because they know they work for their local communities, so the more engaged
councillors are, the more likely they are to be trusted by the community and re-
elected. What puts people off local politics is the perceived (and usually real) power
mongering that goes on within city chambers. In Porto Allegre in Brazil, following
fifteen years or more of pioneering participatory budgeting, local democracy has
been strengthened not undermined precisely because through engaging with
participatory budgeting, people have started to understand local government better,
see it as more responsive and so feel the effectiveness of their vote.

Oxfam recommends that to ensure citizen and neighbourhood empowerment

strengthens local democracy, support needs to be developed for local elected
representatives, to assist them in understanding the roles and relationships involved,
develop their capacity to engage more fully with participative processes, and be more
effectively representative of their constituency. Locally developed guidelines on
accountability would be useful, that make it clear to all how different actors relate to
each other, who is accountable to whom, and how.

5. How cost-effective is empowering users and citizens as a way of driving

service improvement?

We have not been directly involved with cost benefit analysis in this area, although
we have worked with partners to evaluate participation processes and assess impact
of that work on individuals as well as project delivery. The benefits of wider
ownership of projects, better targeted and designed service delivery are well
documented in the literature. Our own experience has shown that investment in
involving men and women in project development does lead to better targeted project

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delivery. In addition to the gender budgeting examples given here, we could provide
further examples that illustrate this.

6. How do we ensure that the interest of disadvantaged people and

neighbourhoods are addressed and avoid capture by unrepresentative
individuals/groups?

Investment in community capacity is important. One of the common issues faced by

community representatives on regeneration boards is that they do not feel
representative; often there are no mechanisms for them to be able to engage with
their community, no resources, no community structures that enable them to hold a
transparent and accountable position within the community. There is no support for
them in terms of resources for meetings, telephone bills, training, and mentoring.

Investment in created space (see 1.1) is also a key way to address this issue, so that
more marginalised groups are able to voice their needs and opinions and engage
more confidently in dialogues and processes.

Our work with partners has demonstrated that public service providers lack
mechanisms to collect gender-disaggregated data (i.e. the picture of whether men
and women are accessing services equally), which means that they cannot see
gender discrimination when it occurs. Because women do not necessarily use their
voices even if they are represented in local decision making fora (and BME women
even less so) this is not brought to the attention of decision makers through
participation mechanisms either.

So there needs to be widespread use of more sophisticated monitoring tools,

collection of disaggregated data, and gender and race impact assessments.
Developing robust participation monitoring and evaluation processes would be an
important component of this work. The Gender and Empowerment in Manchester
(GEM) project provides a good example of where this has been done checking
through a gender and diversity filter who is involved and where, and then thinking
through why that should be, and what needs to be done to address it9. Ensuring
marginalised people are involved requires long-term commitment and a range of
different strategies, as identified above.

UK Poverty Programme

31st March 2006

For further information please contact:

Charlotte Flower
Participatory Methods Advisor
UK Poverty Programme

Tel: 01887 830691

cflower@oxfam.org.uk

9
For more information on this see http://www.manchesterwomen.net/projects.php

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