Productive Margins: Regulation for Engagement

The ways in which we regulate for engagement need a radical re-design. When businesses, professionals and policy-makers set up forums to 'allow' communities to participate in decision-making all too frequently community members' voices are not heard. Academic approaches to regulation are stuck in a cul-de-sac of co-regulation, which only enables relatively powerful actors to be engaged. We start from a different place. We ask: How can we harness the expertise, knowledge and passions of communities to design more effective systems for community engagement? In doing so, we aim to turn the academic and policy-maker dialogue around, from regulation of engagement to regulating for engagement. This programme will bring together a wide range of experts to investigate and challenge how and where community engagement takes place. The experts are drawn from - People working within communities - Academic researchers Researchers and communities will work together to co-produce the research programme. Together they will decide what is to be researched and design the ways in which research is carried out. Community members will be involved in doing the research and getting the research ideas out to other communities, policy-makers, service providers and businesses. We will interact through - A Programme Website and other digital social media to generate research ideas that meet community needs and discussion concerning the nature of engagement - The Productive Communities Research Forum which will decide on the research agenda and design projects - Half-yearly Festivals to get our ideas out to a wider audience of communities, policy-makers and business. The strength of the partnership between Bristol and Cardiff universities lies in the diversity of communities we work with, from de-industrialised south Wales' valleys, to inner-city ethnic minority communities and social enterprises experimenting with alternative ways of organising. Research projects co-produced by those working in communities and academic researchers will be focused around three themes which reflect the expertise of the academic researchers: - Mobilising neighbourhoods: examining how law, geography and the social make-up of neighbourhoods offer bridges and / or create barriers to communities engaging with policy-makers, government and business - Harnessing digital space: experimentation with websites, social media and mobile phone technologies to create digital spaces that allow communities to harness existing expertise and develop new skills to engage in policy-making and politics - Spaces of dissent: working in collaboration with key organisations and activists, we will identify how new understandings and practices are developed when groups offer resistance, exploring if and how these practices create new ways of engaging Our 'cross-border' collaboration between communities and academics in southwest England and south Wales will enable us to contrast the different ways that community engagement is enabled and controlled in two nations of the devolved UK. These insights will allow us, together, to create new bottom-up experiments in community engagement.