Communities, places and institutional relations: assessing the role of area-based community representation in local governance

The New Labour government has highlighted the democratic reform of local governance as one of its key priorities. Old fashioned systems of representative democracy and bureaucratic–technocratic decision-making and policy implementation are, it is proposed, to be superseded by more participative mechanisms of community consultation and involvement in which citizens are encouraged to take a more active, rather than passive, role in local politics. Local authority–community relations and the institutional mechanisms in and through which consultation takes place have become the subject of this reform. This paper, drawing on a study of community–local authority relations in two Labour-led Scottish local authorities, examines the complexities, problems and opportunities of enhancing community participation. It suggests that too little attention has been given to place–space tensions at the local level and that arguments for the breaking-open of democratic processes raise critical issues over the scales, systems and structures of local authority decision-making processes and accountability.