Assessing community participation in local economic development - lessons for the new urban policy

Urban policy in Britain has long been characterised by circumscribed and fl uctuating institutional structures of community involvement. From the Commu nity Development Programmes of the early 1970s to the assertive neo-liberal ism of the 1980s and back to the partnership based politics of the 1990s, c ommunity involvement in the construction and delivery of urban policy has b een a critical theme. The new administration with its emphasis on the 'stak eholder' society seems set to continue the trends of the 1990s by promoting the concept of partnership as something of a panacea for the difficulties and exclusionary politics that have dogged urban policy programmes. Consequ ently, a vital area of study into the next century concerns the form that l ocal democratic structures will take and the relative levels and distributi on of risk and reward that regeneration schemes create for different sectio ns of local communities. Drawing on material from Cardiff, this paper examines the construction of l ocal political relations in the new urban governance and addresses the issu e of community involvement in the politics of local economic regeneration. In particular, it focuses on a small business association which emerged in the wake of the major regeneration programmes being undertaken by the Cardi ff Bay Development Corporation (CBDC), a powerful quango established by cen tral government in the late 1980s. The study demonstrates how the associati on, which consisted of local businesses, tried to influence the local regen eration programmes and how its 'pro-growth' stance was actively used by the CBDC to legitimate its own policies in the face of wider criticisms from l ocal residential groups. The paper looks at the difficulties of constructin g local community participation and concludes that voluntarist, top-down pa rtnership structures in existing policy may only serve to legitimate and im plement policy decisions taken by powerful non locally-accountable regenera tion agencies. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.