Open Government - public participation strategy: advice

Recommendation 4

Implement subsidiarity in order to develop community empowerment and in the longer term community resilience

The wider feeling from the experts is that instead of government funds bypassing local partnerships and going to desperate community organizations, there should be much more local buy-in and support for local authorities and other local public bodies to work alongside the community sector to respond.

Power should be appropriately and proportionately decentralised to local authorities and communities in order to allow them to apply flexible and responsive solutions to problems experienced within their communities. Implementation should be as local as possible (Talat Yaqoob), we need to avoid a one-size-fits-all approach and allow local authorities, with the third sector, to adapt as needed.

According to Oliver Escobar, real subsidiarity is connected to responsiveness but responsiveness that comes with the power to act. He believes that communities, third sector organisations, and some local authorities were empowered to act during Covid, ‘the power to act was devolved defacto and the question is whether that's going to be called back or whether people will be able to keep operating in those ways’. The collective action and networked approach witnessed is not new, but the context of Covid enabled new practices to fulfil those principles.

Community groups are adept at changing priorities in response to the needs of the wider communities. Carnegie (2020) report that while initially food and medicine was required for those shielding, the community groups then needed to adapt to offer social support in terms of those living in poverty and mental health.

Action:

• There needs to be national investment and national strategy, but implementation should be as local as possible
• Examine where groups and local authorities have done well and let them retain the power to act
• Be bolder about decentralising power