Watkins, Heather

Research Topic

Making Space for Local Participation in the Globalized City: Can Participatory Approaches and “Social Enterprise” be Transformative or do they Depoliticize Local Agency?

Since the mid-1990s, ‘social capital’ has been a watch-word of the World Bank in its development thinking, promoted as a basis for economic growth and focussed mainly on the building of local institutions.  A number of approaches, including decentralization and participatory budgeting, have been implemented as a means of addressing what are often presented as the failures of the state in the developing world.  However, what Hickey and Mohan (2004:9) describe as ‘the promotion of ‘citizenship’ as a normative goal of participation’ is not restricted to developing countries.  In the UK, social enterprise, in the form of community interest companies (CICs), which provide public services on a not-for-profit basis, has become a buzz-word for all political parties. 

In this research I hope to investigate the growing employment of the ‘third sector’, or civil society, in local service provision and development, particularly in an area of post-industrial social disintegration and reconstruction (Derbyshire/Nottinghamshire borders).  Does this restore agency to local communities in which the presence of global capital in the form of transnational corporations and brands are increasingly dominant, and public space is increasingly privatized and enclosed through development?  Or, do local participatory projects chiefly serve to stabilize and legitimize a neoliberal regime in which democratic participation has become increasingly formal, and, measured at the ballot box, is declining at both national and local levels? 

Research Supervisors

Professor Paul Heywood and Dr Sara Motta

Centre

CSSGJ and CBP

Research Interests

My research interests include social enterprise, participatory development, social capital, the third way, subaltern movements, local power and food sovereignty.