‘Governmentality after Neoliberalism: the British Experience’
Organised by the Centre for British Studies & sponsored by the Mellon Foundation
University of California, Berkeley, 5 December 2014
Social Housing and the ‘New Localism’: a response to the crisis in
the neo-liberal project?
Dr Kim McKee, Centre for Housing Research
University of St Andrews
Author Details
Dr Kim McKee
Director, Centre for Housing Research
The Observatory, Buchanan Gardens
University of St Andrews
Scotland
KY16 9AL
Email: km410@st-andrews.ac.uk
Tel: 01334 46 1786
Twitter: @kim_mckee
Blog: http://criticalurbanists.wordpress.com/about-us/
Abstract
The literature on governmentality has offered housing studies scholars within the UK a
critical lens by which to explore the political rationales underpinning contemporary
governing practices. Nonetheless, it is a school of thought that often stands accused of
neglecting the situated nature of agency, and the messiness of projects of rule. This tension
is the starting point for this paper.
Drawing upon empirical research on community ownership of social housing in Scotland
over the last decade, this paper highlights how the reinvigoration of ‘the local’ represents a
new mentality of rule that seeks to overcome the crisis in neo-liberalism by governing
tenants through their bonds and attachments to place-based communities. Yet it will also
illuminate that power’s effects can never be guaranteed, by highlighting the capacity of local
actors to challenge dominant political and policy discourses, and thus think and act
otherwise.
1
Introduction
Neoliberalism has had a major impact on public policy in the UK and internationally. Giving
rise to a multitude of different academic research projects and papers informed by a variety
of disciplinary, theoretical and epistemological perspectives, it can broadly be conceived of
as a set of economic policy initiatives that came to the fore in the 1980s (Gallaher 2009). It
represents not only a resurgence of laissez-faire economics, but also enshrines a particular
ideological perspective about how society should be run: along free market lines, and with
an emphasis on personal freedom and individualism (Harvey 2007). Foucauldian scholars
have attempted however to move beyond this narrow focus on economic imperatives and
draw attention to neoliberalism as a strategy of government concerned with regulating
‘conduct’ (see for example, Brady 2014; Rose 1999; Dean 1999). The emphasis here is on
the changing nature of state-citizen relations against a backdrop of government
retrenchment in public life. No longer is the state expected to solve all of society’s
problems. Rather individuals and communities are to be mobilised to take control of their
own well-being and future destiny, through policies which emphasise voluntary endeavour,
self-determination and local control. The flip side of this devolution of autonomy is
however heightened responsibilisation, and a rolled-back neo-liberal state.
These governance shifts are highly visible within housing policy in Scotland and the UK, as
reflected in the policy narratives of the ‘Big Society’ and ‘localism’. Drawing on the policy
imaginary of community-ownership and community-anchor organisations within social
housing policy in Scotland, this paper explores the way in which governmental policies have
sought to empower local people and place-based communities, as a strategy to tackle the
problem of poverty during austere times. As the paper will examine, this reflects particular
understandings of the causes and solutions to place-based inequality, and about ‘good’ and
‘bad’ citizens more broadly. A binary division is constructed here between ‘responsible’
consumers who can enterprise their own lives and consume goods and services on the
market, and those who are problematized because they are ‘dependent’ on the state to
provide housing for them (Flint 2003). Encouraging social housing tenants to become more
empowered, self-reliant and actively involved in decisions affecting their housing has
therefore emerged as a key policy goal.
Influenced by ‘ethnographies of government’ this paper also seeks to go beyond an analysis
of policy discourses and illuminate the way in which ‘governable subjects’ may challenge,
contest, resist and show ambivalence towards particular technologies of power which seek
to mobilise, shape and regulate their conduct towards particular ends (see for example,
Brady 2014; Li 2014, 2007). This underscores the way in which power’s effects can never be
guaranteed, for projects of rule are messy, unstable and continually subject to challenge
from above and below. As John Clarke (2004) has argued, governable subjects are
fundamentally ‘subjects of doubt’: they don’t always come when power calls their name.
This fundamental tension is the conceptual starting point for this paper. Usefully, such a
methodological approach also supports a more nuanced and detailed study of ‘actually
existing neoliberalism’ which varies across time and geographical space, and is sensitive to
daily practices, and subjective experiences and understandings (Wacquant 2008).
2
To critically explore these key issues, the paper is divided into four sections. First, it briefly
outlines the impact of the global credit crunch on housing policy and outcomes in the UK,
before tracing the emergence of ‘the new localism’ as a neoliberal strategy of government
designed to empower local people and communities as part of a broader shift in statecitizen relations. This is followed by a discussion of the empirical data which highlights how
the language of community anchors has been utilised within Scottish housing and
regeneration policy. In this context the skills, time, resources and energy of local people are
regarded as ‘assets’ to be activated by government in order to tackle societal problems at
the local scale; thus promoting an ethic where people and places are ‘responsible’ and less
reliant on state services . The final empirical section of the paper makes reference to the
case study of the Glasgow housing stock transfer to illuminate how the ways in which social
housing tenants navigate policy and political discourses of empowerment is highly variable,
contingent and messy. The paper concludes by arguing for more empirically rich
ethnographies of government, which can help illuminate the messy and contested nature of
contemporary governing practices as well as tease out the nuances of ‘actually existing
neoliberalism’.
Austerity Britain and the Recasting of State-Citizen Relations
The global credit crunch of 2007-8 illuminated only too clearly the relationship between
housing, global financial flows and economic instability; not least the way in which
economies are vulnerable to shifts in the value of housing assets (Kennett et al 2013; McKee
and Muir 2013). What is especially interesting about the credit crunch is the way in which it
was constructed by national governments, who quickly shifted it from being a financial crisis
affecting the banking sector, to a fiscal crisis affecting government spending. It is a
pertinent example of an ideological reworking of what was initially an economic problem
into a political argument for public sector reform and state retrenchment (Clarke and
Newman 2012; Ginsburg et al 2012); one that has ushered in a new era of austerity and
government spending cuts. It remains the subject of academic debate however, whether
this represents a new phase of neo-liberalism or something else entirely (Newman 2014;
Clarke 2010; Peck et al 2010; Brenner et al 2010). Castree (2010) for example suggests that
the neoliberalisation of society reflects the lack of coherence and uniformity within ‘actually
existing neoliberalism’, which varies across time and geographical space, and that
neoliberalism is not necessarily the omnipotent, universal modality of economic power it is
often presented as. Moreover, different modes of power (other than neoliberalism) can
also influence social change and daily life (see also, Lippert 2014).
Whatever your conceptual stance on ‘neoliberalism’ it is clear that the fallout from the
credit crunch has had a devastating effect on housing markets within Scotland and the UK.
House prices fell dramatically; repossessions and evictions rose; whilst tightening mortgage
lending criteria made it increasingly difficult for people to get on the housing ladder,
especially First Time Buyers (Kennett et al 2013). This exacerbated already existing spatial
and generational inequalities, and pushed more people, especially at the lower end of the
age and income scale into rental housing in the private sector. The sector now houses 14
3
per cent of households in Scotland, which represents a doubling of the 1991 Census figure
(Aldridge and Kenaway 2014).
The credit crunch has also had reverberations beyond housing policy. It has underpinned a
recasting of state-citizen relations, and shift in the rights and responsibilities of citizenship
towards individualistic asset-based approaches to welfare (McKee 2012; Doling and Ronald
2010). The UK has witnessed the most fundamental transformation of the welfare state
since the post-war welfare settlement was established. Crucial here has been what Clarke
and Newman (2012: 309) have described as the “various imaginings of morality that occupy
the spaces between economy and society” for “the politics of austerity combines an
economic logic with a particular moral appeal to shared sacrifice and suffering, to fairness
and freedom, to a sense of collective obligation”. The imaginary of austerity has been
mobilised to justify and legitimate shifting the “costs of the banking crisis away from the
wealthy and on to the shoulders of ordinary people” (Ginsburg et al 2012: 297). This is
evident not only in budgetary cuts to core areas of welfare spending, not least social
housing, but also in the increasingly punitive sanctions and conditionality being introduced
through the UK government’s welfare reform agenda (Hancock and Mooney 2012).
Austerity, however it is window-dressed, is ultimately a political project that both advances
particular understandings of the causes of poverty and inequality, and seeks to reduce the
size and role of the state in public life. It is firmly anti-statist.
In the UK context these public policy debates have crystallised in the rhetoric of ‘Broken
Britain’, which has been advanced by the Conservative government since the 2010
Westminster General Election. In summary, this argument blames society’s ills on ‘problem
people’ and ‘problem places’, which have been created through decades of state welfare
(for critical commentary see Manzi 2014; Jacobs and Manzi 2013; Hancock et al 2012). The
quote below, from the right-wing think tank the Centre for Social Justice captures this
perspective quite clearly. It highlights the assumptions being made about the behaviour of
people in ‘poor’ communities and the underlying causes of their material deprivation.
According to this perspective, social housing is problematized as trapping households in
poverty by creating labour market disincentives:
“Over the years, our housing system has ghettoised poverty, creating broken estates
where worklessness, dependency, family breakdown and addiction are endemic.
The levels of dependency among social housing renters is quite staggering. Two
thirds of social tenants receive housing benefit, despite the fact that rents are about
half of those in the private sector. More than two thirds of social tenants are among
the poorest 40% of the population. Children who grow up in social housing see little
purposeful activity among adults: more than half the households heads of peak
working age (25–54) are not doing any paid work; and a quarter are classed as
permanently sick or disabled. Fathers are routinely absent from their children’s lives:
18% of social tenants are lone parents, compared with 7% of all households. Escape
from this situation is rare: more than 80% of people living in social housing in 2006
were within the sector ten years earlier” (Centre for Social Justice 2008: 5).
4
Whilst there are clear parallels with previous debates in the UK around the underclass and
social exclusion, there is also a new and distinctive geography at play here (McKee 2014;
Tyler 2013). These narratives depict dysfunctional and chaotic lifestyles of a work-shy,
feckless, criminal and welfare dependent underclass living on council-built estates. Such
negative stereotypes, which serve to construct low-income households and neighbourhoods
as ‘the other’, have a strong spatial dimension and clear stigmatising affect. As Manzi (2014:
1) asserts welfare reform therefore represents the “culmination of a long-standing debate
about the regulation of welfare”, and the “role of ideas” in shaping the governance of
welfare. Moreover, these narratives illuminate the power relationships that operate within
and across networks, institutions and regimes, and their locations in frames of meaning.
It is however difficult to fully appreciate the governance of welfare, and the nuances of
policy formulation and implementation in the context of the UK, without acknowledging the
devolution of public policy: a process that has been evolving since 1999 and the reestablishment of the Scottish Parliament, and which culminated recently in the 2014
Scottish independence referendum. Whilst some matters remain preserved powers of the
UK government in London, such as defence, taxation and welfare, most areas of public
policy making are devolved in the context of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. This has
resulted in significant policy divergence across the UK, with social housing policy in Scotland
taking a particularly distinctive path (McKee and Phillips 2012). The political geography of
the UK is critical to understanding the policy realm across the four jurisdictions; yet it
remains in flux, given Westminster politicians’ political promises over further constitutional
change.
The Neo-liberal Crisis and Empowering the ‘Local’
As Dorling (2014, 2011) has traced in great detail, neoliberalism is responsible for deep and
entrenched inequalities within and between nation states. However, after Brady (2014),
Tyler (2013), Clarke (2007, 2004) and others, this paper seeks to get beyond neoliberalism
as simply a process of free market rule. Rather it considers it as a mentality of government,
which requires the “tentacles of government extending and dispersing into every stratum of
social and cultural life” (Tyler 2013: 6; see also, Dean 1999, Rose 1999, McKee 2009a). This
is however, not a totalising view of power. Rather it highlights, after Foucault (2003a,
2003b), the diffuse nature of power in society, and how technologies of power are
predicated on the ‘freedom’ of governable subjects – they seek to structure, shape and
mobilise the operation of our freedom through ‘governing at a distance’. As Rose (1999)
asserts, the state can no longer know, plan and steer from the centre to meet all of society’s
needs, resulting in the devolution of autonomy downwards, coupled with the expectation
that citizens should take greater responsibility for their own welfare. Self-sufficient
individuals and communities are therefore the hallmark of the neoliberal project, reflecting
an emerging ethic of less reliance on state provided services for life’s necessities (Castree
2010; Rose 2000). Such governing projects signify a fundamental reconfiguration of social
citizenship, and the relationship between the state and its citizens. Crucially, it also opens
up regulatory as well as liberatory possibilities, for decentred and dispersed governance
does not necessarily mean governing less.
5
In the UK we are witnessing the emergence of the ‘new localism’ as a contemporary
technology of government (McKee, forthcoming 2015). Whereas Broken Britain, as
discussed in the previous section, reflects a right-wing analysis of the problems facing
society, localism has been advanced by the Coalition government as the necessary solution.
In a period of austerity, the mobilisation of the voluntary and community sector has been at
the heart of public policy reforms across the UK. Whilst the nuances vary from country to
country, in broad terms the ‘new localism’ is united by a focus on encouraging place-based
communities to take responsibility for their own welfare through the ownership and
management of community assets. This has resulted in the emergence of more pluralistic
model of welfare provision, which gives greater prominence to the voluntary and
community sector: a shift described as the ‘voluntary turn’ (Milligan and Conradson 2006;
see also Moore and McKee 2014), and underlined by Castree (2010) as a fundamental
tenant of the neo-liberal project.
Third sector organisations are deemed not only to have a critical role in service provision (at
reduced cost to the public purse), but also represent key instruments for developing active
citizenship and responsible community, through their close connection to the people and
places they service. As Macmillan and Townsend (2006: 29) highlight, this involves “specific
constructions of space, scale and temporality, which have important consequences for the
shape and structure of the emerging welfare state”. Moreover, it signifies a discursive
privileging of the expertise and capacities of local people to take responsibility for their own
future welfare and well-being, through becoming involved in the ownership and
management of community assets. Within England these debates have been captured by
the language of the Big Society: the UK Prime Minister’s ‘big idea’ which promotes self-help,
volunteering, self-determination and a rolled-back state:
“[T]here are too many parts of our society that are broken, whether it is broken
families or whether it is some communities breaking down; whether it is the level of
crime, the level of gang membership; whether it’s problems of people stuck on
welfare, unable to work; whether it’s the sense that some of our public services
don’t work for us – we do need a social recovery to mend the broken society. To me,
that’s what the Big Society is […] So, what this is all about is giving people more
power and control to improve their lives and their communities. That, in a nutshell,
is what it is all about” (Cameron 2014: no page number).
Elsewhere in the UK, devolved governments have sought to distance themselves from this
label, using the more inclusive language of localism instead (McKee 2014). Nonetheless,
uniting both approaches is an emphasis on redistributing power and encouraging a culture
of volunteering; empowering active citizens and communities; and facilitating residents to
take over local services. As Kisby asserts:
“It is principally about citizens having a moral obligation to undertake voluntary
activity in the community and to take responsibility for their own individual welfare
needs. If the ‘big society’ is largely about ordinary citizens doing their bit to keep the
free market going then surely this is something even hard- line Thatcherites can
embrace (2010: 486).”
6
This governmental ambition to mobilise community action through the bonds and
attachments that people have within place-based communities is not a new idea (for
excellent historical over-view see, Ravetz 2001). It has long antecedents in housing and
social policy within the UK, a point that will be returned to later in this paper. Nonetheless,
it represents a striking example of what Cruikshank (1999) has described as the ‘Will to
Empower’. Writing about the American War on Poverty she traces the emergence of
technologies of citizenship that seek to act on the actions of others by transforming political
subjectivity into an instrument of government. It is a means of working through, rather
than against the subjectivities of ‘the poor’. After Foucault (2003b), this is a productive
form of power that seeks to encourage active political participation by maximising the
actions, motivations and interests of local people. The limits of democratic government
mean however that the War on Poverty could not be won without the voluntary
participation of the poor in resolving their own situation:
“When we hear that subjects are apathetic or powerless and that citizenship is the
cure, we are gearing the echo of the will to empower […] I have argued that the will
to empower is a strategy of government, one that seeks solutions to political
problems in the governmentalization of the everyday lives of citizen-subjects”
(Cruikshank 1999: 122-123).
Powerlessness therefore came to be defined by government and its experts as the root
cause of social problems. ‘The poor’ thus came to be defined by what they lacked and their
disinterest and apathy in turn became problematized. In the American context, as in the
contemporary UK, empowerment emerged as the solution to the ‘problem’ of poverty, and
a means of stirring ‘the poor’ into action. As Li advances:
“Neoliberal governing consists in setting conditions and devising incentives so that
prudent, calculating individuals and communities choosing ‘freely’ and pursuing their
own interests will contribute to the general interest as well […] Governing is a matter
of ‘getting the incentives right’ so that some conduct is encouraged and enabled,
while other conduct becomes more difficult” (Li 2014: 37).
The flip side of this, however, is the problematization of people and places who fail, or
refuse, to regulate their conduct in line with governmental ambitions. Indeed, Wacquant
(2008) and Tyler (2013) have drawn attention to the way in which neoliberal governance
utilises stigmatization as a mechanism by which to distinguish ‘the poor’ as distinct from
mainstream society, thus justifying targeted and punitive interventions. As Sharma
elaborates:
“Neoliberalism paints a naturalised picture of poverty and powerlessness, where
certain people lack the requisite attitudes and means to become rational, economic
agents; the solution, therefore, is to supply them with those means and outlooks so
that they can contribute to economic growth by helping themselves out of poverty.
This represents the tautological thinking whereby some people are poor because
they are powerless and they are powerless because they are poor; hence
empowerment becomes and obvious and obviously depoliticised, bureaucratic
solution to both poverty and powerlessness” (Sharma 1998: 27)
7
Nonetheless as alluded to earlier, democratic government cannot ‘force its interests’, rather
it must enlist the willing participation of individuals, for it is a project of rule that governs
people by getting them to govern themselves:
“The will to empower may be well intentioned, but it is a strategy for constituting
and regulating the political subjectivities of the ‘empowered’. Whether inspired by
the market or by the promise of self-government and autonomy, the object of
empowerment is to act upon another’s interests and desires in order to conduct
their actions towards an appropriate end; thus ‘empowerment’ is itself a power
relationship and one deserving of careful scrutiny” (Cruikshank 1999:69).
Foucauldian scholars from anthropology have been particularly adept at advancing this
careful scrutiny by illuminating how these micro-practices of rule, which seek to mobilise
and shape particular behaviours, seek to realise their effects (for useful over-view, see Brady
2014). The strength of these studies is their ability to develop detailed ethnographies of
government, which challenge the presumed homogeneity of neoliberalism’s effects and the
reification of the state (Kerr 1999). This allows us to consider how empowerment is
conceptualised and implemented as a strategy of government, and crucially, how these
ideas are brought to life in people’s daily practices and interactions. Such a methodological
approach therefore enables an exploration of the “inevitable gap between what is
attempted and what is accomplished”, opening up a critical space to study the
contradictions within projects of rule (Li 2007: 1). This offers a counter to critiques of
governmentality scholars like Rose (1999), who privilege the study of the rationales of
government over and above sociologies of rule. By contrast, ethnographies of government
seek to unravel and document the messiness of government, including failures, fractures
and disjunctures between political rationales and grass-roots programmes. It thus avoids
separating the study of political rationalities from actual practices of governance (Brady
2014). Making governmentality studies more ethnographically rich, as Li (2007) demands,
also brings with it greater emphasis on specificity, situated practice, agency, context,
ambivalence, contestation, dissent, desire, refusal and resistance. After John Clarke this
paper treats governable subjects as fundamentally ‘subjects of doubt’, and seeks to explore
the power relations and practices through which subjectivities are formed (or not, as the
case may be). As Clarke surmises:
“Put simply, I do not believe that either systems or subjects function according to the
plans of the powerful. Achieving and maintaining subjection, subordination or
system reproduction requires work/practice - because control is imperfect and
incomplete in the face of contradictory systems, contested positions and contentious
subjects” (Clarke 2004: 2-3).
Drawing on qualitative fieldwork conducted across multiple research projects on tenant
empowerment and community ownership of social housing in Scotland (2004-2014), this
paper seeks to advance our understanding of the unevenness of power’s effects and the
struggles around subjectivity. Community ownership refers to the Scottish housing policy of
transferring council housing to not-for-profit housing associations located in the voluntary
sector through housing stock transfer2. It originally emerged in Glasgow in the late 1970s as
a bottom-up solution to the problem of poor housing in low-income neighbourhoods. It was
8
subsequently rolled out as a national housing policy of the Scottish Executive 3, but at the
scale of municipal government, as local authorities sought to transfer their entire stock of
public sector housing. It has contributed significantly to the rise and evolution of the
community-based housing association (CBHA) movement in Scotland. This refers to a model
of social housing comprised of small, locally-focused housing associations or co-operatives
who provide services in a geographically bounded area, and are managed by a committee of
local people, normally with a tenant majority on their governing body. CBHAs have a strong
reputation for community-led regeneration and tenant empowerment within the social
housing sector. More recently, they have been promoted and imagined as communityanchor organisations within Scottish regeneration and housing policy. They vary in size, but
normally manage between a few hundred and few thousand homes. Crucially, CBHAs
represent a strong example of community empowerment and self-determination at a local
scale, yet they also illuminate the inherent tension between the twin devolution of
autonomy and responsibility at the heart of the neo-liberal project.
Community Anchor Organisations and Asset Based Welfare
Central to the Scottish Government’s (2011) regeneration strategy: Achieving a Sustainable
Future is a stronger focus on community-led approaches. That is, on mobilising funding and
other mechanisms to better support local people and communities to address their own
social, economic and environmental problems. The skills, time, resources and energy of
local people are regarded as ‘assets’ to be activated by government in order to tackle
societal problems at the local scale:
“[Our] approach is not on the deficits of an area but rather the assets that
communities have. To support communities to be sustainable we must identify the
assets that exist – economic, physical and social – and use these assets to deliver
sustainable, positive change” (Scottish Government 2011: 12).
In adopting this community-led approach to regeneration the strategy is in accordance with
the recommendations of the Christie Commission (2011) on the future delivery of public
services in Scotland. It underlined the importance of community-ownership as a key
component in revitalising and transforming service delivery:
“Our evidence demonstrates the need for public services to […] become transparent,
community-driven and designed around users’ needs. They should […] work more
closely with individuals and communities to understand their circumstances, needs
and aspirations and enhance self-reliance and community resilience” (Christie
Commission 2011: 22).
Underpinning Scottish Government strategy then is the belief that the ‘problems’ facing
Scotland’s low-income neighbourhoods cannot be tackled without agencies working
together in partnership with local people. Moreover for strategies to be effective,
communities need to take responsibility for developing their own local solutions by taking
over the management and ownership of former public services:
9
“Community-led regeneration is about local people identifying for themselves the
issues and opportunities in their areas, deciding what to do about them, and being
responsible for delivering the economic, social and environmental action that will
make a difference. It is a dependent on the energy and commitment of local people
themselves and has a wide range of benefits” (Scottish Government 2011: 20: my
emphasis added).
In line with arguments advanced by Foucauldian scholars such as Rose (1999) and
Cruikshank (1999) no longer is the state, either at the national or local scale, expected to
solve all its citizen’s problems, nor meet all their needs. Instead, autonomy and
responsibility are to be devolved downwards through an emphasis on community
empowerment and mobilising the knowledge, skills and capacities of local residents. In a
period of austerity, the mobilisation of ‘the local’ is now, more than ever, being constructed
as a policy panacea for social problems and a key element of neoliberalism (Castree 2010).
As discussed earlier in this paper, in relation to ‘Broken Britain’ and the ‘Big Society’, this
represents a particular governmental understanding of both the ‘cause’ and necessary
‘solution’ to place-based inequalities. This spatial focus is significant, for there is a strong
correlation between neighbourhoods of multiple deprivation and areas of social housing,
with particular ‘people’ and ‘places’ being identified as needing to take greater
responsibility for their own future, and avoid dependency on state provided services.
Yet as the regeneration strategy itself highlights Scotland already has a rich and diverse
voluntary and community sector. However, this recognition sits in tension with the
perception that these organisations are perhaps not fulfilling their potential. Consequently,
they have been re-imagined and valorised as ‘community-anchor organisations’ within
dominant policy narratives:
“Community Anchor Organisations have strong links to their communities and
usually stimulate high levels of voluntary activity. They are well placed to spot the
talent and opportunities in their areas and have the energy and creativity to nurture
and exploit those. Increasingly, these organisations take an enterprising and assets
based approach to their work” (Scottish Government 2014: 2)
Anchor-organisations are defined by the Scottish Government as: being controlled by local
residents; having a proven track record of delivering community activities; actively engaging
with all sections of its local community and supporting community development; working
with partners in the public, private and third sectors to deliver services in a holistic way; and
able to lever in additional monies and opportunities. Yet at the same time, there are
inherent tensions within government policy, reflecting not only a lack of joined up thinking,
but the very fact that the ‘state’ is not a single, homogenous entity: it too is characterised by
actors pulling in different directions. An illustrative example of this is the critique by the
housing association sector of the 2014 Community Empowerment (Scotland) Bill. They
argue that the Bill fails to build on the 2011 regeneration strategy and the positive
contribution and legacy of the CBHAs as anchor organisations; moreover, it conflates
empowerment with engagement, participation and so forth, thus diluting the ambitions of
the Bill (GWSF 2014). This is one example of how ‘governable subjects’ do not accept their
subject positions without question or critique, and may indeed, propose their own
10
alternative localised solutions. It is clear however, that the language of community-anchors
now has resonance beyond housing policy into wider regeneration and third sector policies.
It is however no accident that ‘the local’ is being emphasised as the appropriate scale for
policy intervention and service delivery, given public sector spending cuts and the impact
this has on local government and social programmes historically delivered by the state.
Neoliberal reforms are therefore central to understanding the resurgence of asset-based
approaches being lauded as the ‘best way’ to address the challenges of austerity plaguing
Scotland’s most fragile communities.
Nonetheless, senior housing association staff interviewed were strongly in favour of the
language of community-anchors, perceiving it as highly relevant for their organisations.
They regarded it as a metaphor that strongly connected with their ethos, and the mission
statement of their organisations, especially their aspiration to play a greater role in
minimising the negative impact of public sector cuts on their communities. In particular,
interviewees were keen to stress CBHA’s local asset-base, place-based focus and strong
relationship with their communities and other partners. They regarded themselves as more
than landlords with responsibility for the ‘bricks and mortars’ of their properties, and
indeed, saw themselves as community organisations concerned with the wider social,
economic and environmental circumstances within their local area of operation. Not only
do many CBHAs in the west of Scotland already provide a diverse range of community
projects and activities designed to help people build their skills and confidence, find
employment, engage in volunteering and improve their health and well-being (McKee,
forthcoming 2015). But they also already have governance structures premised on the
principle of community-asset ownership. They are owned and managed by local people,
governed via a management committee comprising a majority of local tenants and
residents. They are also regulated social businesses with a proven track record of successful
service delivery and partnership working:
“If you look at the definition of [community anchors], it could be forests, it could be
a recycling organisation, it could be a faith based group in some communities. So it
doesn’t have to be a housing association. It just so happens that in a lot of areas the
most robust and sensible organization is the housing association” (Interview 2,
Senior Officer, Membership Organisation).
The language of community-anchors, which brings into focus local aspects of place and the
social glue that binds people together, is a central element to this contemporary, and
distinctly Scottish, strategy of empowerment. Through this imaginary and rhetoric
community organisations, and local people, are being mobilised not only in terms of their
place-based identity but also in pursuit of the ‘Will to Empower’ (Cruikshank 1999). Whilst
this may bring positive benefits for people and places, it is nonetheless a relationship of
power that needs to be subject to critical scrutiny, for it involves the shaping of behaviour
towards particular governmental ends, as well as a fundamental rolling back of the state.
Indeed, the housing professionals interviewed did not embrace the idea of anchororganisations uncritically. They were universally keen to distance themselves from the
language of the Big Society which they deemed to be an ‘English’ and ‘Tory’ idea. 1 By
contrast the language of community-anchors, and its emphasis on participation and
11
volunteering at the local scale, was deemed to be more in tune with traditional Scottish
working class values around community mutual support. This perhaps reflects the origins of
CBHAs in Scotland, which emerged as a grass-roots response to poor housing in areas of
significant multiple deprivation (Clapham et al 1996; see also, Young 2013; McKee,
forthcoming 2015).
Senior housing association staff also questioned central and local government presumptions
that housing associations would fill the gap caused by welfare state retrenchment. They
expressed concern that this may result in a blurring of the boundaries between public and
third sector providers. Moreover, they were keen to emphasise that austerity had also
created financial challenges for the housing association sector, and that this impacted on
their ability to resource community projects in the way that they (and government) would
like. More importantly perhaps, they also questioned whether ‘the local’ was the
appropriate scale at which to tackle fundamental social problems, like poverty,
unemployment and poor health, and whose responsibility it should be to meet these
fundamental rights of citizenship. The crux of their frustration was the expectation that
housing associations were expected to do more and more to meet the needs of households
in low-income communities, yet did not perceive this to be matched by financial or policy
support from the Scottish Government. This underlines a fundamental tension between
different schools of thought regarding the respective importance of structure versus agency
in understanding poverty, and in turn, the appropriate scale of policy interventions needed
to tackle place-based inequalities driven by neoliberalism.
These points of contestation, not only underline the importance of contextualising local and
national policy debates within broader neoliberal shifts and austerity, but more importantly
perhaps, illuminate the ability of front-line ‘welfare professionals’ to act and think otherwise
(Barnes and Prior 2009). They are, as Clarke (2004) has argued, fundamentally ‘subjects of
doubt’; front-line ‘welfare professionals’ do no simply enact policy uncritically or without
reflection. Whilst government has increasingly come to rely on housing associations to
deliver their social housing policies, they are nonetheless independent organisations
outwith direct state control. Securing their consent and compliance with particular
governmental policy objectives, community-anchors being just one example, highlights the
challenge of translating political rationales into successful governmental programmes on the
ground in this era of decentred, network governance (Bevir 2013; Rhodes 1997). As
Foucault emphasises, power’s effect cannot be guaranteed, and governmental objectives
are not always realised in practice given the plethora of social actors and institutions
involved, and thus the inevitable messiness of projects of rule:
“Power is exercised only over free subjects, and only insofar as they are ‘free’. By
this we mean individual or collective subjects who are faced with a field of
possibilities in which several kinds of conduct, several ways of reacting and modes of
behaviour are available. Where the determining factors are exhaustive, there is not
relationship of power: slavery is not a power relationship when a man is in chains,
only when he has some possible mobility, even a chance of escape” (Foucault 2003b:
139).
12
One final thought in relation to these broader shifts in the governance of welfare. The
promotion of ‘community anchors’ also reflects the growth of the housing association sector
in the UK over the last twenty years. They are now the main providers of social housing for
rent. Located in the third sector, these are not-for-profit, often charitable organisations
that are independent from the state. Yet they are heavily reliant on public funding to
sustain their activities, through grant funding and their tenants’ housing benefit payments.
Because of this, housing associations are subject to much greater regulation than other
voluntary sector organisations. This in turn has fuelled central-local tensions between
associations and the Housing Regulator in Scotland, with landlords, and their tenant
governors, arguing they are being dictated too and over-regulated. This underlines how
dispersed forms of governance continue to co-exist alongside more traditional hierarchical
forms of control. Indeed, Wolch (1990) famously argued that voluntary sector organisations
were part of a ‘shadow state apparatus’. This again underlines the point made earlier that
decentred governance does not necessarily equate to the state governing less; only
differently.
As the next section will explore, it is not only front-line housing professionals and the
housing organisations they represent who have expressed ambiguity and dissent towards
particular policy and political narratives. Social housing tenants themselves have also
shown themselves to be fundamentally ‘subjects of doubt’.
Activating the Empowered Citizen-Consumer in Austere Times
As alluded to earlier in this paper, empowering local residents is by no means a new public
policy preoccupation in Scotland and the UK. Political parties on both sides of the spectrum
have long supported initiatives around greater involvement, participation and voice within
social housing, as well as the ability to exit the sector altogether (Jacobs and Manzi 2013).
Notable examples within Scottish social housing policy include: the statutory right to tenant
participation; the sale of council housing to housing associations through ‘community
ownership’ neighbourhood-level stock transfers; and the Thatcherite housing policy that
afforded sitting council tenants the ‘right to buy’ their home (McKee and Phillips 2012).
These measures reflect the rise of the citizen-consumer in social policy more generally
(Clarke et al 2007), a governance shift that has gained momentum as public sector budgets
have come under increasing pressures because of austerity measures, and the subsequent
mobilisation of the ‘local’ (McKee, forthcoming 2015). The policy of community ownership
of social housing that was promoted in Scotland in the early 2000s offers an interesting
example through which to unravel and investigate these govern-mentalities of rule, and the
tensions provoked and created. The remainder of this section considers this governance
shift through the case study of Glasgow, Scotland’s largest urban conurbation. Given the
long legacy of community ownership in the city and the explicit promises made within the
Glasgow transfer agreement regarding tenant empowerment, it is a highly relevant example
by which to consider these policy narratives.
The city of Glasgow’s de-industrialisation resulted in a decline in fortunes of the city’s public
sector housing stock. In order to secure additional housing investment and write-off historic
debt, the city council proposed to sell its housing to the newly created Glasgow Housing
13
Association (GHA). Following a tenant ballot, the sale was affected in 2003 and the GHA
became Europe’s largest social landlords. Although GHA was the legal landlord, rentcollector and owner of the housing, in accordance with the principles of the transfer
agreement it devolved day-to-day management of its housing to a city-wide network of 60+
Local Housing Organisations (LHOs). These neighbourhood level organisations were in turn
governed by committees of local residents, comprising of a tenant majority. They were
responsible for local housing strategy, deciding for example, how to spend allocated
resources, and how to implement planned refurbishment programmes (for detailed
discussion see, McKee 2007). Local control was however to be only the first step on the
pathway to full ‘community ownership’, as Glasgow’s transfer was sold to tenants on the
belief that these LHOs would eventually become the owners as well as the managers of the
housing (for detailed discussion, see McKee 2011). The intention was to have further
second-stage neighbourhood level stock transfers in order to recreate the success of
Scotland’s CBHA model:
“This Framework will allow the opportunity to develop new and radical forms of local
housing management, ownership and community-based regeneration. Local people
must be at the centre of change in realising better housing and better-equipped
organisations to deliver improved housing management and repair services […] The
proposition we have commended is one which allows that evolution to a local level
to take place in accordance with community capacity and choice. Change must be
driven forward by communities at that local level” (Glasgow City Council and the
Scottish Executive 2000: 2).
By emphasising transformations in housing governance and the mobilisation of local
knowledge, activity and skills the Glasgow housing stock transfer clearly embodies what
Cruikshank (1999) describes as a political ‘Will to Empower’. Central to the discursive
narrative of community ownership is an emphasis on:



Choice - through promoting the transfer of ownership and control of council-built
housing to alternative social landlords in the third sector (e.g. housing associations)
Agency – through empowering tenants to become directly involved in the
management and ownership of their housing at the local scale through the LHO
network, and tenant participation initiatives more broadly
Responsibility – through devolving decision making powers and accountability for
policy success and failure from the local state to active citizens/communities
Qualitative research with tenants highlights that the way in which governable subjects
navigate policy and political discourses of empowerment is however highly variable, and not
always consistent. Their perspectives are marked by both ambivalence and ambiguity, at
the same time as interest and passion. For example, participants spoke eagerly about
positive changes that had occurred since the stock transfer, both in terms of improvements
in their homes and communities, as well as more general involvement in local decision
making. Despite clear echoes of the ‘Will to Empower’ local people, especially those
involved in LHO governing bodies, stressed tensions in the delegated governance model.
This pertained largely to the LHO’s limited financial autonomy and lack of ownership of the
14
housing assets – both of which were sources of considerable frustration to tenant
committee members. This underlines the key point that the devolution of decision-making
is not always matched by the devolution of resources.
Yet the broader tenant body were even more sceptical and unconvinced by the ‘Will to
Empower’. They expressed a very instrumental view towards their participation,
articulating it as a means to an end: to secure investment in their homes and improve their
housing, and were not necessarily attracted to the notion of community ownership or
empowerment per se. This was in turn problematized by housing professionals as ‘apathy’,
which they endeavoured to address through an array of initiatives designed to encourage
their residents to engage with them, and to become more involved in local decision making.
This chimes with the arguments advanced by scholars such as Li (2014, 2007), Sharma
(2008) and Cruikshank (1999) who draw attention to the empowerment of the ‘powerless’
as central elements of neoliberal welfare reforms. Critical commentators have further
questioned the extent to which this rescaling of policy interventions might lead to the
“localization of policy failure” (Macmillan and Townsend 2006: 19-22), as this quote
encapsulates:
“[Community ownership] offers choice. It offers control, which is really important
(and) with all this control and choice comes responsibility. It was dead easy years
ago for committee members or community activists to say ‘ooh it was the council,
but no we’re great’ but then suddenly it will be us and I think we’ll need to learn to
say ‘wait a minute the buck stops here’. With all this choice comes an awful lot of
responsibility” (LHO Committee Member).
Yet individuals are constructed not only as empowered citizens but also active consumers,
capable of, and expected to, exercise choice within the market. Those unable to secure
their own welfare through normal acts of consumption are in turn regarded as ‘flawed
consumers’ and denigrated and problematized as ‘failures’. Within housing policy this
marker of social difference manifests itself in the valorisation of homeownership and
subsequent stigmatisation and pathologization of social housing (see for example,
Arthurson et al 2014; Flint 2003). These debates have a strong spatial dimension as
Wacquant (1998) and others have elaborated in their discussions of ‘territorial
stigmatisation’. Within the social housing sector the introduction of consumerist principles
are only too apparent, and have been heightened through the growth of the housing
association movement through housing stock transfer. The quasi-private identity of transfer
housing associations has required them to become more business-like and customer
focused in order to protect their asset-base and income streams. As one prominent tenant
committee-member reflected:
“It’s only really since the stock transfer […] They never called the tenant a customer
before. They didn’t have a customer base it was just a tenant and they needed a
house. [Going to the council housing department] was like going to the doctors or
the dentists or going to a hospital appointment. Because they [the council] were the
professionals and they knew better” (GHA Tenant & LHO Committee Member).
15
Yet social landlords can only deliver more ‘flexible’ and ‘responsive’ services from a position
of knowledge: this requires soliciting the active engagement, feedback and participation of
their tenant customers, so services and policies can be tailored to local needs and priorities.
More fundamentally, and in line with neoliberal governance, it also requires landlords to
mobilise social housing tenants to behave like ‘active’ consumers: to secure their own future
through market or quasi-market processes, and reduce their dependency on public provided
services.
Yet as Clarke (2007) argues consumerism within the public sector ‘is not like shopping’ (see
also, Bevir and Trentmann 2007). Indeed, the extent to which social housing tenants really
have a ‘choice’ and the ability to ‘voice’ their concerns and ‘exit’ their current service is
highly doubtful (Hirschman 1970). Choice is highly constrained and contingent on material
resources: Glasgow’s social housing neighbourhoods are areas of significant multiple
deprivation. Moreover, this consumerist rhetoric opens up further questions regarding the
extent to which transformations in housing governance can really address the scale and
complexity of the daily challenges faced by households living in the city’s most fragile
communities. The case study of the Glasgow housing stock transfer is therefore illuminative
on many levels. For the purposes of this paper it highlights an important juncture in the
shift towards asset-based approaches to regenerating low-income communities, and the
‘new localism’ as outlined in the introduction. Furthermore, an analysis of tenants’
perspectives indicates a stark difference between political rationales as articulated in key
policy documents and the views expressed by local people, which is in turn a product of
their own life experiences and social-spatial identities. The Glasgow transfer is then a
striking example of how local people identified with, but simultaneously challenged,
contested and questioned the echoes of the ‘Will to Empower’. It clearly illuminates
Clarke’s (2004) argument that people do not always come when power calls their name, and
that we need to make this the starting point, not an afterthought, in our analysis of
governing practices.
Conclusion
Drawing on the policy examples of community ownership and community-anchors within
social housing and regeneration policy in Scotland, this paper has traced the shifting nature
of state-citizen relations in austere times. With reference to the ‘mobilisation of the local’
and the promotion of activated, empowered, citizen-consumers it has traced the emergence
of asset-based approaches to solving the problems of poverty and place within low-income
communities. It is argued this represents an increasingly important policy and political
narrative within current neo-liberal welfare reforms. But also, that it reflects a particular
understanding of poverty and its causes, premised on a binary division between ‘good’ and
‘bad’ citizens. With reference to contemporary debates within neo-liberal governmentality
theory the paper also underlines that decentred and diffuse modes of governing do not
necessarily mean less government; nor is neo-liberalism necessarily the only influence on
governing daily life. Moreover, by advocating an ethnographic approach to the study of
governing in situ this papers argues there is much to be learned from the messy sociologies
of rule, not least the way in which ‘governable subjects’ may challenge dominant narratives
both from above and below. Such an approach also opens up a critical space in which to
16
consider resistance and contestation in a more nuanced, reflexive and detailed way, by
teasing out the importance of local context and subjective experiences of governing
practices. This not only addresses an important gap within Foucauldian governmentality
theory, but also facilities a more temporal and spatially sensitive account of ‘actually
existing neoliberalism’, which avoids reifying the state.
Endnotes
1
Tory refers to a member of the Conservative party, or someone with Conservative ideals.
2
Housing stock transfer refers to the sale of public sector housing (built by the local
authority or Scottish Homes) to an independent not-for-profit landlord such as a housing
association, co-operative or local housing company located within the third sector. The
drivers and models of stock transfer that have emerged in the UK, vary quite significantly
both historically and in terms of national policy contexts.
3
Scottish Executive refers to the executive branch of the devolved Scottish Parliament
which was re-established in 1999 through the Scotland Act 1998. In 2007, following the
election of the SNP administration, it was rebranded as the Scottish Government. For all
intents and purposes the Scottish Executive and the Scottish Government refer to the same
thing, but with different labels.
4
Housing benefit is a means-tested social security benefit paid by the UK government to
enable low-income households (in both the private and social rented sector) to pay their
rent. Given the correlation between social housing and low-income in the UK, it forms an
important part of social landlord’s rental income. Historically this was paid direct to the
landlord, but welfare reforms means in future it will be the tenant’s responsibility to make
the rental payment.
Acknowledgements
My ESRC funded seminar series on the Big Society, Localism and Housing Policy (2012-14)
(ES/J021172/1), and the discussions that emerged from it, helped frame this paper
conceptually and tighten the arguments within it. But this paper draws primarily on
empirical data from multiple qualitative research projects I have been involved in during
2004 – 2012: Reconfiguring Housing Governance in Glasgow Post-stock Transfer: regulatory
and liberatory possibilities (ESRC PhD Studentship PTA-030-2003-0-01008); Empowering
Glasgow’s Tenants through Community Ownership: a tenants’ perspective (British Academy
SG 50318); Community Controlled Housing Organisations and Regeneration (Glasgow and
West of Scotland Forum of Housing Associations); and Scotland’s Community-Based Housing
Association Movement: the epitome of the Big Society? (Carnegie Small Grant).
Special thanks to Sharon Leahy for offering detailed comments on earlier drafts of this
paper. Responsibility as ever lies with the author.
17
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