Community politics is a movement in British politics to re-engage people with political action on a local level.
Most developed amongst the Liberal Democrats but adopted to some extent by the British Greens, other parties, and Independents.
Community Politics is based on small-scale action on local political issues. To give an example of how it works: Residents are irritated by rubbish dumped by a playing field. A 'non-community' political response would be to issue a statement calling for more resources to be allocated to deal with dumped rubbish. A 'community politics' response would be for local councillors to lead a group of people to clear the rubbish themselves, then inform the local community through a newsletter.
The result is a stronger local community who feel that their representatives are achieving something, and a better chance of even the most under-resourced local authority taking the time to stop the problem in future.
The low-budget techniques are easy to adopt. No television advertising, mass direct mailing or contacts with national newspapers are necessary.
Community politics principles can be applied to any area and by any party. The keys are local action on residents' concerns and effective communication with local residents through newsletters and face-to-face contact. Parties which espouse community politics often meet with electoral success (e.g. the Liberal Democrats' ability to break out of the third-party trap), particularly in areas which have been dominated by one political party.
Our goal transcends political theory: it is an idea of human independence in which each, individually precious, human being has the liberty and the opportunity to experiment, to experience, to learn and to influence his or her surroundings.
Communitypolitics poses a direct challenge to the social democratic ideology of centralised state welfare provision and its consequent undermining of the role of the community.
Communitypolitics recognises that society I is always changing and that the purpose of political and social organisation is to enable that change to be controlled deliberately and democratically.
Rejuvenation of state and local government, the role of those governments in state political economies, and the influence of political ideology and values in state and communitypolitics are the unifying themes of this book.
Political ideology is most relevant in the material for Chapters 12 through 17, which deal with the major policy areas confronting state and local governments (finance, crime, education, social welfare, infrastructure, environmental protection, and economic development).
The theme of political economy is relevant in several chapters of the book but nowhere more directly than in Chapter 17, which discusses the role that state and local governments play in promoting economic development.
Feeds |
Contact