Book review: Public Policy in the Community

Public Policy in the Community (2nd edition)

By Marilyn Taylor

Reviewed by John Houghton

I described the first edition of Prof. Marilyn Taylor’s Public Policy in the Community as ‘a crucial contribution to an important policy debate’. I only know this because the back cover of the new second edition quotes my original review.
My point back in 2004 was that notions of ‘community’ were everywhere, particularly in relation to tackling deprivation, but they were often used without clear analysis or intent. Saying decisions would be ‘taken by the community’ tended to halt debate. Who wants to say they’re against community? But all sorts of questions were subsequently left unanswered – who is the community, how will they decide, what if everyone disagrees?

As Taylor put it, community was at risk of becoming a ‘spray-on solution’ to all manner of problems. Public Policy in the Community stood out because it was rooted in a belief about the capacity of communities to affect change, but also forced attention to the inherent tensions.

Since the first edition, the notion of community has become even more fundamental to arguments about how we organise our society and politics. The focus has shifted from notions of partnership working and engagement (e.g. local strategic partnerships and community empowerment networks) toward a more assertive notion of bottom-up change and local self-organisation (e.g. Big Society and community ownership).

What remains is the tendency to use community as the magic spell for all situations. This is even more dangerous in our time of austerity, with the risk that the government is ‘prescribing community to the poor’. Or even that it’s used as a ‘codeword for the continued assault on the state’ by neo-liberalism. This is the hidden agenda many people detect behind the Big Society and why it has provoked such heated debate.

In this new political context, Taylor’s book becomes even more important. Her central thesis is that if we’re serious about fundamentally recasting power relationships, if we want ‘community’ to be a meaningful agenda with radical potential, then we all have to engage with its difficulties and paradoxes. If we don’t, then community becomes the Werther’s Original of the policy cupboard, something nice and sweet, but not very fulfilling.

The second edition is structured much like the first, but updated to include new evidence, developments and arguments. The summary and discussion sections at the end of each chapter offer an opportunity to review the original arguments in light of these new factors.

The approach throughout is balanced and comprehensive in its exploration of different perspectives and ideologies. I quibbled about this in the first edition, because I wanted to hear a bit more of Taylor’s argument as opposed to everyone else’s, but I didn’t have that response this time. Certainly the open and closing groups of chapters make clear Taylor’s sense of the way forward.

The second edition concludes with the same question as the first – ‘Can community deliver?’ – and arrives at the same answer – yes, if we’re smart and pragmatic. There is no ‘blueprint or ‘grand narrative’. Instead, there are multiple invited and uninvited opportunities to challenge and recast power relationships.

Taylor deliberately avoids offering a single ‘manifesto’ for our diverse, rapidly changing society, and in so doing she offers a sophisticated and grounded way forward