‘You can’t Google everything’: the voluntary sector and the leadership of communities of place

Responding directly to the themes of the Special Issue, this paper addresses a surprising absence to date of the voluntary sector’s important role in the constitution of place leadership. Drawing on an empirical study of locally rooted voluntary sector organisations in a district of the Midlands of England, we aim to untangle the complex relationship between leadership, place and the voluntary sector, building on recent advances in the collective and critical approaches to leadership studies. A thematic analysis of a rich qualitative dataset highlighted three core themes of the voluntary sector contribution to collective place leadership: their ability to draw on and mobilise local knowledge, their positioning in a web of dense local relationships, and the notion that their intrinsic characteristics are a key source of their distinctiveness and value to the local governance network that constitutes the district’s place leadership. In addition to contributing to a nuanced understanding of the voluntary sector’s place in both the leadership and place leadership studies corpus, our findings shed light on the multiplexity and tensions of leading in the collective, as well as the extent to which the voluntary sector is constrained by wider structures and macro-dynamics.

Territorial stigmatization in theory and practice, and its implications for community development: an introduction to the themed section

This article introduces and outlines the rationale for a ‘Themed Section on Territorial Stigmatization’. It explains how ‘territorial stigmatization’ is conceptualised and understood, within the wider academic scholarship, and within the four articles that follow in this section. This introductory article outlines some key lines of academic debate and inquiry about the stigmas that adhere to communities of place and it acknowledges the pioneering theoretical contribution of Wacquant in particular. The article also discusses how the articles in this themed section of the CDJ can contribute to our ability to recognise and respond to territorial stigma as an ongoing challenge for community development theory and practice.

Eco-Disasters

This chapter seeks to encourage social workers to review their often (enforced) siloed roles in relation to communities of place and to develop stronger senses about the relationships and networks in places where those they serve actually live. The author offers a picture of force fields, system tensions which shape organizational and community life in particular ways, ways which diminish community life, and those who seek to serve community, and she provides examples from her practice experience in pre and post disaster environments. Where social workers can contribute to strengthening community networks, this will contribute to a quality of life for those they serve and then strengthen the capability of community responsiveness to a disaster. Seeing, valuing, and using these links may allow social workers to make subtle but important contributions to the field of emergency management.

Interacting with place and mapping community needs to context: Comparing and triangulating multiple geospatial-qualitative methods using the Focus–Expand–Compare approach

Geospatial-qualitative methods, which combine both observation and interpretative accounts during data collection through extended exposure and movement in place, have been increasingly used to explore “person–place” interactions and assess communities of place. Despite their increased use, there is a lack of reflexive discussion on how they differ in capturing person–place interactions and ways to combine them. Drawing on our experiences using three related methods—Photovoice, Walking through Spaces, and interactive Participatory Learning and Action exercise-led community focus groups—we compared the methodological advantages that each method brings to the construction of “place” and in exploring person–place interactions among the community of older adults living in a neighborhood of Singapore for a neighborhood assessment. We then illustrated how using a Focus–Expand–Compare approach for methodological triangulation can add value in generating greater depth and breadth of perspectives on a topic of interest explored for intervention development.

Power, control, communities and health inequalities I: theories, concepts and analytical frameworks

Summary This is Part I of a three-part series on community empowerment as a route to greater health equity. We argue that community ‘empowerment’ approaches in the health field are increasingly restricted to an inward gaze on community psycho-social capacities and proximal neighbourhood conditions, neglecting the outward gaze on political and social transformation for greater equity embedded in foundational statements on health promotion. We suggest there are three imperatives if these approaches are to contribute to increased equity. First, to understand pathways from empowerment to health equity and drivers of the depoliticisation of contemporary empowerment practices. Second, to return to the original concept of empowerment processes that support communities of place/interest to develop capabilities needed to exercise collective control over decisions and actions in the pursuit of social justice. Third, to understand, and engage with, power dynamics in community settings. Based on our longitudinal evaluation of a major English community empowerment initiative and research on neighbourhood resilience, we propose two complementary frameworks to support these shifts. The Emancipatory Power Framework presents collective control capabilities as forms of positive power. The Limiting Power Framework elaborates negative forms of power that restrict the development and exercise of a community’s capabilities for collective control. Parts II and III of this series present empirical findings on the operationalization of these frameworks. Part II focuses on qualitative markers of shifts in emancipatory power in BL communities and Part III explores how power dynamics unfolded in these neighbourhoods.

Designing with communities of place: the experience of a DESIS Lab during COVID-19 and beyond

Social distancing, lockdown, and the consequent intensification of online interactions brought by Covid-19 are raising new questions for design theory and practices. The lack of physical or face-to-face interactions blocked the design activities developed in public spaces. The article aims to share a DESIS Lab experience to overcome these limitations and continue in a contactless way. Firstly, a literature review introduces the Lab's theoretical and methodological approaches; then, a process started previously to the pandemic outbreak is presented, called My Neighborhood. It happens in a neighborhood in Rio de Janeiro, called Grajaú, with face-to-face activities developed in a public square. Secondly, a new initiative prototyped after the pandemic outbreak is described. Grajaú Collab is an online mapping that identifies micro-businesses and volunteers in the neighborhood. The Lab's theoretical and methodological approaches provided the orientation and adaptability to stay with the local community under the pandemic. My Neighborhood has moved online and generates Grajaú Collab; however, both remain closely referred to the neighborhood's physical space. Online and offline modalities become two complementary sides of the same open-ended learning process and, in the future, the lab team can restart offline and face-to-face participation in the neighborhood as a continuum of the same infrastructuring process.

Forests in common: Learning from diversity of community forest arrangements in Europe

Europe has a wealth of community forest arrangements. This paper aims to transcend the diversity of locally specific terms and forms, to highlight the value of considering them inclusively. Building on methods to make sense of diversity, we use reflexive grounded inquiry in fifteen cases in Italy, Scotland, Slovenia and Sweden. Within four dimensions (forest, community, relationships between them, and relationships with wider society), we identify 43 subdimensions to describe them collectively. Our approach shows how European arrangements contribute to wider discourses of collective natural resource management. Both tradition and innovation in Europe inform options for environmental governance. Arrangements challenge the distinction between ‘communities of place’ and ‘communities of interest’, with implications for social and environmental justice. They exemplify multilevel environmental governance through both vertical and horizontal connections. Emerging from long histories of political and environmental pressures, they have a role in enhancing society’s connection with nature and adaptive capacity.