clark2007_rural governance, community empowerment and the new institucionalism_a case study of

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Journal of Rural Studies 23 (2007) 254266

Rural governance, community empowerment and the new

institutionalism: A case study of the Isle of Wight

David Clark, Rebekah Southern, Julian Beer

Social Research & Regeneration Unit, University of Plymouth, Drake Circus, PLYMOUTH PL4 8AA, UK

Abstract

This article compares two different institutional modelsstate-sponsored rural partnerships and community-based developmenttrustsfor engaging and empowering local communities in area-based regeneration, using the Isle of Wight as a case study. Following a

critical review of the literature on community governance, we evaluate the effectiveness of community involvement in the Islands small

towns through a comparison of the performance of the two development trusts in Cowes and Ryde, on the one hand, and that of the

partnerships established under the Market Towns Initiative in Sandown, Shanklin and Ventnor, on the other. We conclude that both

models reflect the structuring effect of central, regional and local state steering of the Islands regeneration policy community but also

that a development trust effect is observable in one location (Ryde), due to a capacity to stimulate new forms of community enterprise

and to successfully alter political relationships within the local community. These findings support a new institutionalist account of

community empowerment which emphasises the importance of contextual variation and locally specific processes of institutionalisation

rather than the determining effect of institutional design per se.

r 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction

This article compares two different institutional models

for engaging and empowering local communities in area-

based regeneration programmes, using the Isle of Wight as

a case study. The Island is a particularly appropriate site

for empirical enquiry, as over the past decade or so it has

hosted a number of state-sponsored rural partnerships (see

Table 1 below) as well as two community-based develop-

ment trusts. To that extent, it serves as something of a

natural laboratory for testing the potential and limits of

alternative models of community involvement in area-

based rural regeneration.In the partnership model, community involvement has

been mandated from above (by central government or, in

the case of Leader +, the European Union) but develop-

ment trusts have been established in Cowes and Ryde as

community-owned regeneration agencies and these, in

principle, can be seen as providing scope for empowerment

from below through their capacity to stimulate new forms

of community enterprise and new forms of micro-politics(Donnison, 1973).

The article draws on insights from the new institution-

alism, and particularly organisational or sociological

institutionalism, as a corrective to the dominant focus in

the academic literature on the constraining effects on

community empowerment of the discourse and practice of

a particular form of top down locality or regeneration

management. In opposition to the descriptive style of

traditional (old) institutionalism, the new institutionalists

operate through explicit (if diverse) theoretical frame-

works; they concern themselves with informal as well as

formal rules and procedures; they pay attention to the wayin which institutions embody values and power relation-

ships; and they seek to study not just the impact of

institutions upon behaviour but the interaction between

individual (and collective) actors and institutions (Low-

ndes, 2001, p. 1953). Whereas rational choice institution-

alists emphasise the importance of strategic action in

driving institutional change, sociological institutionalists

argue that action is norm-driven, following a logic of

appropriateness rather than a logic of consequentiality.

Institutional change involves changes in the logic of

ARTICLE IN PRESS

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doi:10.1016/j.jrurstud.2006.10.004

Corresponding author.

E-mail address: [email protected] (D. Clark).
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appropriateness, typically through an evolutionary process

(March and Olsen, 1989).

In the first part of the article, we review the literature on

community involvement in the governance of regeneration

programmes, noting the dominant focus of work on rural

and small town governance on top down partnerships.

We then introduce development trusts as an alternative

institutional model of community-owned regeneration

before proceeding, in the remainder of the paper, to

present and discuss the findings of our Isle of Wight case

study. Our data sources are based on evaluations of two of

the Islands main state-sponsored regeneration pro-

grammesthe Single Regeneration Budget (SRB) Chal-

lenge Fund and Rural Development Programme (RDP)

conducted by the authors between 2003 and 2005, which

included interviews with members and officers of the

Islands two development trusts: the Cowes-based North

Medina Community Development Trust (NMCDT) and

the Ryde Development Trust (RDT). These interviews, and

the extensive set of primary documents made available to

us, were supplemented by interviews with representatives of

the Market Towns Initiative (MTI) partnerships in San-

down, Shanklin and Ventnor in the summer of 2005.1

2. Community-based regeneration, governance and NewLabours policy discourse

This section reviews the recent academic literature on

community participation in urban and rural governance,

with particular emphasis upon New Labours localisation

discourse. As we see it, this is composed of two dimensions:

a dominant discourse of partnership and empowerment

(Atkinson, 1999) and a secondary discourse of community-

based social entrepreneurship (Wallace, 2002).

ARTICLE IN PRESS

Table 1

Regeneration programmes on the Isle of Wight

Programme Nature Lead central

government

department/agency

Lead regional

agency

Extent of local (IOW) coverage

Rural

Development

Programme

Designed to help resolve problems of

remoteness and disadvantage in Rural

Priority Areas

Rural

Development

Commission

(RDC)

South East

England

Development

Agency (SEEDA)

(from 1999)

The whole of the Island apart from

Ryde and Newport was designated a

Rural Priority Area 19942004

Single

Regeneration

Budget

Brings together a number of

regeneration programmes from several

government departments. SRB

partnerships are expected to involve

local businesses, the voluntary sector

and local communities

Department of the

Environment/

Office of Deputy

Prime Minister

(ODPM)

SEEDA Two Island-wide RoundsSRB II and

SRB V. Two area-based Rounds

SRB IV (Cowes/East Cowes) and SRB

VI (Ryde) 19942006

Market Towns

Initiative

Designed to revitalise market towns in

rural England, and their surrounding

countryside

Countryside

Agency

SEEDA Sandown, Shanklin, Ventnor, Brading

and Wootton Bridge 20022005

Leader + A European Union initiative designed

to assist rural communities to improve

access to local services and enhance the

natural and cultural heritage of their

area

Department for

Environment,

Food and Rural

Affairs

Government Office

for the South East

(GOSE)

Western and central parts of the Island

20022008

Neighbourhood

Management

Pathfinders

A pilot programme in which

neighbourhood managers are

accountable to boards of local residents

for the regeneration of 35 deprived

neighbourhoods in urban and rural

areas

ODPM (now

Department for

Communities and

Local

Government)

GOSE Newport (Pan estate) 20052012

Healthy Living

Programme

Designed to improve the health of

residents living in the most

disadvantaged communities.

Programme implementation was

devolved to 350 healthy living centres

across the UK

Department of

Health/Big Lottery

Fund

All Island 20012005

Sure Start Designed to improve early years

services for children and parents.

Programme implementation is through

some 500 local partnerships

Department for

Education and

Skills

GOSE Ryde 20042010

1MTI is a more recent government initiative to help towns in rural areas

re-establish themselves as service centres to local residents, businesses and

the wider community.

D. Clark et al. / Journal of Rural Studies 23 (2007) 254266 255


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Focusing initially on the secondary discourse, we may

regard sustainable community enterprise, with its emphasis

on residents as co-producers of local services through the

ownership and management of community assets, as an

emergent strand in the construction of New Labours

regeneration policy agenda. In this discourse, central

governments own role is identified as creating an enablingenvironment in which social and community enterprises

can flourish. This breaks down into four main activities:

the development of a new legal and regulatory framework

(community interest companies); the opening-up of pro-

curement processes in central and local government;

business advice and training; and ensuring that appropriate

finance is available to enable social and community

enterprises to invest and grow (Affleck and Mellor, 2006;

Department of Trade and Industry, 2002).

However, the dominant theme in New Labours

localisation discourse has been community involvement

in the governance of urban and rural regeneration

programmes, i.e. the participation of residents in deci-

sion-making in local partnerships (Robinson et al., 2005).

This discursive focus was signalled in the guidance

accompanying Rounds Five and Six of the SRB Challenge

Fund and in the publications of the Governments Social

Exclusion Unit. Subsequently, community involvement, in

its new guise as neighbourhood management (the resident-

led management of disadvantaged neighbourhoods),

emerged as one of the central themes in the National

Strategy for Neighbourhood Renewal (2000) (Lawless,

2004).

Both strands of New Labours localisation discourse

(and practice) have attracted critical academic attention. Inthe case of the first, emergent strand, this critical

commentary has centred upon the limitations, rather than

the potential, of community-based economic development

as a route to empowerment. From a practitioner perspec-

tive, Wallace (2002) has argued, in a critique of the meta-

narrative of sustainability, that only the small number of

social enterprises that have achieved financial sustainability

from trading are included within the official discourse, with

its stress on social enterprises as businesses, albeit

businesses with a social purpose. Consequently, there is a

mismatch between policy expectations and the lived reality

of community-based social entrepreneurship, as the ma-

jority of social enterprisesespecially those engaged in

community development and those located in areas of

disadvantageare not, and are unlikely ever to be,

financially sustainable.

This stance is mirrored in Amin et al. (2002)s critique of

two key assumptions underpinning prevailing policy

discourses of the UK social economy: firstly, that social

enterprises can trade their way out of state dependency;

and, secondly, that good projects can provide replicable

models for other localities. Their study of the dynamics of

success and failure of different types of social enterprise in

different local settings found that there was no such thing

as a model social enterprise or model of best practice that

could be transplanted and encouraged through standar-

dised policy interventions. Instead, success was seen as a

product of a range of place-specific factors that could not

be assumed to exist or be induced elsewhere.

Amin et al. did, however, conclude that at least part of

that success must be attributed to the transformation of the

local political climate due to the social economy organisa-tion adopting a strongly political role and opening up new

possibilities and networks for people who had previously

been confined to the limited resources of poor places.

Social economy projects, then, and by extension develop-

ment trusts, are more likely to be empowering when they

have been able to alter political (our italics) relationships

within local communitiescreating new forms of demo-

cratic participation as well as economic activity (ibid: x).

Turning to the dominant, community involvement in

governance strand of localisation discourse, there is a large

literature given over to a critique of the deceptively benign

notion of inclusive community participation (Edwards

et al., 2003, p. 192). A key thrust is that while this discourse

acknowledges difference and diversity, it does not recognise

conflict or power: problems can be hammered out in

dialogue and a community viewpoint reached, without the

need for political choices (Foot, 2001, p. 38). The effect, it

has been argued, is to co-opt local communities into a

depoliticised mode of partnership working, where the

striving for consensus on policy agendas laid down by

central government effectively restricts political debate and

reaffirms the power of existing state agencies (Edwards

et al., 2001; Raco, 2000).

For critics such as Atkinson (1999, 2003) and others

whose work is informed by Foucauldian notions ofgovernmentality and the constitutive nature of discourse,

the rhetoric of inclusive community participation helps to

explain and sustain the dominance of managerialist forms

of partnership working at the level of the local state.2 The

now extensive body of academic research that has focused

on the local implementation of area-based initiatives has

tended to confirm the empirical reality of the constraining

effects of a particular form of locality or regeneration

management that, over time, encourages or even disciplines

professionals to consult with stakeholders rather than

support a local community to gain the confidence to own

the regeneration agenda (Southern, 2001). And at a

somewhat more mundane level, the academic literature

has, time and again, documented the practical constraints

on engaging, and then sustaining, resident involvement in

ARTICLE IN PRESS

2It is important to situate new forms of urban and rural managerialism

in the wider context of the rise of the new public management, whose

overall effect, at least in the Anglo-American democracies, has been to

create a dispersed managerial consciousness in public service organisa-

tions. By this, we mean to refer to the processes by which all employees

come to find their decisions, actions and possibilities framed by the

imperatives of managerial co-ordination: competitive positioning, budget-

ary control, performance management and efficiency gains (Clarke and

Newman, 1997, p. 77).

D. Clark et al. / Journal of Rural Studies 23 (2007) 254266256


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institutions of local governance (Lawless, 2004; Purdue et

al., 2000).

Of particular relevance to our concerns in this paper is

the work of Edwards et al. (2001, 2003) on community

involvement in regeneration partnerships in rural areas and

small towns (i.e. with populations of between 2000 and

20,000 people) in England and Wales. Significantly, thefixing on this territorial scale reflects the common enrol-

ment of town, parish or community councils into such

partnerships as community representatives. Edwards et al.

found that the marshalling of such local activity (as

producing a health check) was frequently and all too

strongly guided by the strategic framework that the centre

lays down, and was carried out through mechanisms that

were also centrally specified (2003, p. 202). In most

contexts, the partnership process had mobilised the

established elite of active citizenry, often deliberately

injecting professional expertise, rather than opened doors

to the community as a whole (ibid, pp. 198199).

Although much of this implementation research appears

to validate the concerns raised by the governmentality

critique of community involvement, there is an important

strand in the literature that problematises partnership

working as a contradictory and contestable instrument of

governance. In particular, there are tensions and ambi-

guities in partnership practice between the structuring

effect of state discourse and regeneration management in

shaping the context of local partnership working and the

potential scope for community-based challenges to elite

governance arising from contingent, local factors (Osborne

et al., 2004) or from a capacity to generate progressive, as

well as parochial and reactive, forms of politics(Cochrane, 2003; Newman, 2002).

Osborne et al.s work (2004, pp. 160162) on the effect of

rurality on community involvement in regeneration sug-

gests that there are five contextual factors that are likely to

impact on the effectiveness of such involvement: physical

geography and local environment; the extent and complex-

ity of regeneration programmes and agencies in the area;

the nature of human and social capital and social

exclusion; the strength of the local voluntary and commu-

nity infrastructure; and the nature of local political

relationships.

Before moving on to an empirical study of the impact of

these factors in the specific case of the Isle of Wightand

as a counterweight to the dominant, managerialist

critique of state-sponsored regenerationwe give further

consideration in the next section to the claims made in

political and policy discourse for the development trust

model and its empowering potential.

3. The development trust model of community empowerment

The Development Trusts Association (the national

network of community development trusts) defines devel-

opment trusts as organisations that are: engaged in the

economic, environmental and social regeneration of a

defined area or community; independent, not for profit and

aiming for self-sufficiency; community-based, owned and

managed; and actively involved in partnerships and

alliances between the community, voluntary, private and

public sectors. In January 2005, there were over 300

members of the Development Trusts Association (DTA)

with combined assets of 250 million and an annualturnover of 190 million (Wyler, 2005).

Recent publications of the DTA and other organisations

sympathetic to its aims and purposes have sought to

position development trusts as institutions of bottom up

community regeneration. Trusts are seen as central to an

emerging agenda for change that has to do with securing

the future of sustainable community enterprise, following

two decades of a top down route to regeneration that is

considered to have made little impression on disadvantaged

neighbourhoods (Commission for Social Justice/Institute

for Public Policy Research, 1994, pp. 328340; Develop-

ment Trusts Association, 1997). This literature has

consciously promoted the merits of development trusts in

an effort to persuade central government to introduce a

more supportive public policy framework for community-

based regeneration, using examples of good practice to

position trusts as flexible, value-driven organisations that

can play a significant role in service delivery and

neighbourhood renewal in the most disadvantaged areas

of the UK.

Whereas the DTA tends to be protective of community

development trusts as a distinctive institutional form

anchored in community ownership of buildings and land,

academic commentators customarily locate development

trusts as part of a network of non-state, non-marketorganisationsvoluntary associationsrooted in civil

society. In particular, the clear commonality of values

between development trusts and the smaller, grass-roots

voluntary organisations that are seen as fostering trust,

reciprocity, solidarity, co-operation and community capa-

city building is often noted (Milligan and Fyfe, 2005).

Nevertheless, it is important, in our view, to distinguish

between development trusts and certain newer forms of

(ostensibly) community-based organisation that are being

created in response to a further strand of localisation

discourse and practice: the opening-up of local public

services to more mutual forms of ownership.3 Arguably,

New Labours endorsement of the social enterprise or not

for profit model conflates two quite distinct rationales for

supporting the virtues of localism in public service delivery:

freeing staff to be innovative and compete successfully for

public service contracts, on the one hand; and empowering

local communities, on the other.

ARTICLE IN PRESS

3We have in mind here the emerging breed of public service mutuals,

where groups of health care and local government professionals have

established local co-operatives to deliver a range of public serviceswith

local people represented on the board of trustees, with voting rights

following the retreat by local authorities and primary care trusts from

direct service delivery to a core commissioning role.



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From a new institutionalist perspective, development

trusts offer an alternative pole of research from which to

advance propositions about community governance in

both urban and rural settings, in a field in which theorising

has to date been dominated by work on the structuring

effect of state-sponsored partnerships. As Lowndes (2001)

indicates, empirical changes in the institutional frameworkof local governance (italics in original) are serving to direct

the attention of new institutionalist scholars to the more

pronounced differentiation of institutional forms over time

and place, and the growth of network (weak) vis-a` -vis

hierarchical (strong) modes of institutional constraint

(and opportunity). These theoretical concerns suggest that

development trustsin their role as collective actors

subject to wider institutional constraints but also with a

capacity to create spaces for new forms of organisation

from below (North, 2000)are likely to become an

increasingly important focus for empirical analysis.

Likewise, the prospect of a changed set of political

relations as a consequence of a wide range of non-state

actors generating forms of politics beyond, alongside and

sometimes linked to the state is increasingly recognised

within the regeneration literature (for example, Atkinson,

2003; Cochrane, 2003).

What considerations, then, should we take forward into

our comparison of partnerships and development trusts as

alternative models of community empowerment from this

review of the literature? We think that three are of

particular importance. First, we should recognise the

significance of the politics of place (Raco and Flint,

2001) and look to examine the performance of the Islands

development trusts and MTI partnerships as politicalinstitutions, i.e. in terms of their success in altering political

relationships within local communities. Second, we should

be wary of the one best way reflex in institutional design

and take seriously the notion that the prospects for

organising from below (and from above) are likely to

depend as much upon the process as upon the content of

institutional design (Lowndes and Wilson, 2001, p. 645).

Third, and following on from this, we should be sensitive in

our treatment of community involvement and mobilisation

to local contextual factors, and particularly to the initial

endowment (Hood, 1995, p. 105) or existing capacities to

act (Edwards et al., 2003, p. 202) of local communities and

place-based institutions.

4. The Island-wide regeneration context

This section describes the policy, funding and institutional

context of area-based regeneration on the Isle of Wight, as a

prelude to understanding the issues posed by community

involvement in the regeneration of its small towns. It focuses

upon four themes: the delivery of the Islands regeneration

strategy; the key characteristics of Island politics; an

evaluation of the organisational capacity of the voluntary

and community sectors; and the growing impact of

regionalisation on local governance arrangements.

The Isle of Wight is a small island of 147 square miles,

situated off the south coast of England. It is a predomi-

nantly rural area, with some 50 per cent of the Island

designated as an area of outstanding natural beauty. Most

of the Islands population of 132,731 (based on the 2001

census) live in the small towns of Newport (25,033), Ryde

(26,152), Cowes (13,028) and East Cowes (6891). Newport,in the middle of the Island, is the main administrative and

retail centre. Ryde and Cowes/East Cowes are the principal

gateway towns to the mainland. Ryde is a coastal resort

situated in the north east of the Island, linked by passenger

ferry and hovercraft services to Portsmouth, and to

Sandown Bay and the south east of the Island by railway.

Cowes and East Cowes are coastal towns located on

opposite sides of the river Medina, linked by chain ferry,

and with passenger and car ferry services to Southampton.

There are smaller clusters of population on the south

east coast of the Island, in Sandown (5299), Shanklin

(8055) and Ventnor (5978); and also in West Wight.

Sandown, Shanklin and Ventnor are heavily dependent

upon tourism (Fig. 1).

Although it forms part of the prosperous South East

region, the Islands geographical isolation means that it

exhibits many indicators of poverty and disadvantage. As

documented in a recent socio-economic baseline study (Isle

of Wight Council, 2002):

The Island has a population imbalance with a large

number of older people, which places a disproportionate

burden on health care and social services. There is a net

in-migration of around 1500/year, with the only out-

migration occurring in the 1519 years age bracket.

ARTICLE IN PRESS

Fig. 1. The Isle of Wight: its market towns and location in southern

England.



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The Island has a narrow and fragile economic base. The

major sectors are manufacturing, which has been

undergoing restructuring and is in decline in employ-

ment terms; and tourism, a sector that, on the Island, is

associated with a declining traditional tourism market.

Historically, unemployment has consistently been dou-

ble the South East regional average. Male, youth andlong-term unemployment have presented particular

challenges.

The Island has several areas with high levels of

deprivation. According to the Index of Multiple

Deprivation (2000), 15 wards are in the most deprived

20 per cent in the country (including parts of Cowes,

East Cowes, Ryde, Sandown, Shanklin and Ventnor)

and two wards (Pan, Newport and Ryde St Johns) are

in the worst 10 per cent.

Since the mid-1990s, the Isle of Wight has benefited from

significant levels of regeneration funding from the Rural

Development Programme (RDP) and four rounds of the

Single Regeneration Budget (SRB) Challenge Fund. With

the transition to Regional Development Agency funding in

2001, the Islands previously separate RDP and SRB

funding streams were subsumed within the South East

England Development Agency (SEEDA)s single pot

funding arrangements.

The Island has also benefited from a number of other

funding streams, including 1 million of Big Lottery

funding for an Island-wide Healthy Living Programme

and Leader+funding (20022008) of nearly 2.5 million

for the Isle of Wight rural action zone, covering the western

and central parts of the Island.Of the coastal towns of interest to us in this study, Ryde

has received a comparatively generous amount of SRB

funding: 6,250,00, over the period 20002006 (see Table 2

below). This has been complemented by 4.1 million of

Sure Start funding which will run to 2010, aimed at

improving early years services for children and parents.

This amounts in total to over 10 million of grant aid over

a 10-year period. Cowes and East Cowes have benefited

from relatively modest levels of SRB funding (981,000)

from an earlier round of bidding (19982003), which was

mainly targeted on community capacity building, skills

training and employment projects.

Sandown, Shanklin and Ventnor, for their part, were

given the opportunity to bid for MTI funding administered

by SEEDA and the Countryside Agency. Sandown and

Ventnor were both awarded 240,000, and Shanklin

160,000, of SEEDA funding in 2002. This was made

available for a period of 3 years to supplement grants from

the Countryside Agency that enabled local community

partnerships to carry out a health check (involving the

organisation of public consultation events and the writing

of an action plan). These funding streams were used to

part-finance the appointment of a co-ordinator to both

assist with the health check and thereafter to project

manage the delivery of the plan. In each case, MTI funding

was to be cash-matched by partner organisations including

the respective town councils. Two other Island urban

villagesBrading and Wootton Bridgewon smaller

amounts of MTI funding, sufficient to pay for advice and

project management support in drawing up village action

plans. Clearly, the scale of funding in all these cases has

precluded the financing of large capital projects.4

These funding streams have been administered by the

Isle of Wight Economic Partnership (IWEP), the lead

regeneration agency on the Island and the principal

architect of the Islands regeneration strategy Open for

Business (20012005). IWEP is a multi-agency organisa-

tion whose Board includes leading representatives from the

public, private and voluntary sectors on the Island. Since

2001, relations with its accountable body, the Isle of

Wight Council, have been regulated by a service-level

agreement specifying that IWEP is responsible for deliver-

ing both area regeneration and inward investment.

Building on a previous regeneration strategy, Open for

Business reiterated a policy framework for a rolling

programme of town regeneration initiatives, informed by

a coherent philosophy of community development (see

below). Initial priority was given to Cowes and East

Cowes, via the successful SRB IV bid, due in part to the

high level of social deprivation in East Cowes and in part

to the economic importance of the area and the loss of

manufacturing capacity that was currently being experi-

enced. It was anticipated that attention would then focus

on the coastal corridor between Ryde and Ventnor, with

Ryde as an initial hub of regeneration activity. However,

with the establishment of single pot funding Open for

Business was superseded by the Isle of Wight AreaInvestment Framework (AIF), one of a number of AIF

projects supported and funded by SEEDA as part of a

strategyrather than bidding-led approach to regenera-

tion funding in the South East region.

In recent years, regionalisation, in the form of new

funding mechanisms and policy at regional level, has

played a decisive part in driving the Islands regeneration

agenda and in restructuring local governance. The AIF,

with its strategic focus on inward investment, workforce

training and improved physical infrastructures has also

decisively challenged what has been described to us as a

grant dependency culture on the part of the Islands

voluntary and community sector organisations. Not least,

SEEDA has pledged 10 million of capital investment to

Cowes Waterfront, a regeneration project for the Medina

Valley that is the centrepiece of the AIF. This is a major,

15-year project to regenerate the economies of Cowes and

East Cowes that is expected to lever in a further 40 million

of private investment.

ARTICLE IN PRESS

4Ventnor has received capital funding for the regeneration of its

harbour and botanical gardens from European Union and SRB funding

streams. Similarly, Sandown secured funding from the Millennium

Commission for the development of a sea-front leisure complex.



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The parochial character of Island politics and the

existence of keen local rivalries between place-based

communities has been recognised as a key issue affecting

both policies of community engagement and local partner-

ship working. Parochialism is reinforced by the electoral

structure of 48 small wards and the existence of an

infrastructure of parish and town councils. A local

authority peer review team found that the resulting

dominance of very local issues has at times worked against

the balanced consideration of Island-wide interests and

made it difficult for the Isle of Wight Council to

concentrate upon strategic issues (Improvement and

Development Agency, 2003). Similarly, although the local

authority had developed a strong policy framework of links

with local community networks, including the establish-

ment of 34 community forums/partnerships5 and a recent

compact with the voluntary sector, the review team

recommended that consideration be given to improving

communication with forums, parish and town councils, to

supporting them further through the provision of appro-

priate training and to seeking out further opportunities to

ARTICLE IN PRESS

Table 2

The regeneration of the Islands small towns: funding and governance arrangements

Locality Local representative bodies Main regeneration

funding stream(s)

Amount of regeneration

funding

Nature of community involvement in

regeneration

Cowes/East

Cowes

Cowes/East Cowes Town Councils

(TCs)

SRB IV

(19982003)

981,000 Delegation of project commissioning

to Cowes/East Cowes TCs and CPs.

Delegation of project delivery and

community development to North

Medina Community Development

Trust (NMCDT)

Cowes/East Cowes Community

Partnerships (CPs)

AIF (from 2005) 10,000,000 Community development devolved

to NMCDT

Ryde Ryde Community Forum SRB VI

(20002006)

6,250,000 Delegation of project commissioning/

delivery and community development

to Ryde Regeneration Partnership

(20002001) and Ryde Development

Trust (20022005)

Project, trading

and rental income

(from 2005)

Open ended RDT as lead agency

Sandown Sandown Town Council MTI (20022005) 60,000 (Countryside

Agency)+240,000 (SEEDA

continuation funding)

Delegation of project commissioning

and delivery to Sandown CP

Sandown Community Partnership

(CP)

Shanklin Shanklin Town Council MTI (20022005) 60,000 (Countryside

Agency)+160,000 (SEEDA)


and delivery to Shanklin CP

Shanklin Community Partnership

(CP)

Ventnor Ventnor Town Council MTI (20022005) 60,000 (Countryside

Agency) +240,000

(SEEDA)


and delivery to Ventnor CP

Ventnor Community Partnership

(CP)

Brading Brading Town Council MTI (2002) 60,000 (Countryside

Agency)

Brading CP (health check and local

action planning only)

Brading Community Partnership

(CP)

No SEEDA continuation

funding

Brading CP as lead agency

Wootton

Bridge

Wootton Bridge Town Council MTI (2002) 60,000 (Countryside

Agency)

Wootton Bridge CP (health check

and local action planning only)

Wootton Bridge Community

Partnership (CP)

No SEEDA continuation

funding

Wootton Bridge CP as lead agency

5In making a local community budget available to community partner-

ships and forums for projects that had been identified through public

consultation and drawn together in the form of a community plan, the

Council had in effect endorsed an alternative model of community

development to the development trust model favoured by IWEP.



8/13

promote community grass-roots understanding of the

council.

Ostensibly, the Islands voluntary and community sector

displays considerable institutional thickness with 5000

full-time employees, 827 registered charities plus a further

1000 estimated local groups and some 260 social enter-

prises employing over 2700 people (Rural CommunityCouncil, 2005). However, our research suggests that the

apparently strong grass-roots institutional presence of the

sector masks an opportunistic pattern of growth in

response to grant-funding opportunitieswhich has pre-

sented problems of longer-term sustainabilityas well as a

weak pattern of alliance building and strategic networking

that has made the sector a problematic partner in

regeneration. In particular, our interviewees alerted us to

a history of mutual suspicion between the two main

organisations representing the sector: the Rural Commu-

nity Council (the Islands Council for Voluntary Service)

and Island Volunteers, a training and support organisa-

tion. But our attention was also drawn to the absence of a

clearly articulated philosophy of community development,

in either the statutory or voluntary sectors.

An external audit of community venues and spaces in

Ryde, commissioned as part of the successful SRB VI bid

(CLES Consulting, 2001), found that there was, at the

time, no specific community development strategy for Ryde

and that information and networking within the voluntary

and community sector were poorly co-ordinated and

connected. The sector was described as traditional: formal

statutory service delivery was the norm, with very little in

the way of niche provision by local voluntary and

community bodies. Furthermore, despite considerablepotential, there was a poorly developed social economy

in Ryde.

These factors have clearly influenced IWEPs approach

to the design and delivery of the Islands regeneration

programmes. We are aware from our evaluation of the

RDP and Island-wide SRB programmes that a number of

community capacity building interventions in rural areas

have been well targeted (particularly where the impetus for

the project came from the parish council and/or commu-

nity partnership), but it was put to us by programme

managers that there had been very little community

involvement in their development. These were described

not as strategic programmes, underpinned by a coherent

theory of community development in the organisations

responsible for project delivery, but as a series of more ad

hoc interventions intended to build the capacity of the

existing, fragmented system of voluntary and community

sector organisations.

5. Findings and analysis

5.1. The development trust model: Cowes and Ryde

The SRB IV bid was strongly influenced by a desire on

the part of IWEP to support the activities of the

traditional voluntary and community sector organisations

in Cowes; but also by a commitment, within the corporate

management framework for the Island, to promote broad-

er-based partnerships with a responsibility for developing

and coordinating local initiatives. Accordingly, IWEP

worked with (separate) groups of individuals wanting to

encourage the regeneration of Cowes and East Cowes, toexpand their membership to include representatives of the

key political, business and voluntary organisations within

the two towns, including the town councils and the

business associations. The SRB IV bid anticipated that

the Cowes and East Cowes Community Partnerships

would identify projects that met the criteria for SRB IV

funding, and the bid earmarked an element of SRB funding

to support the partnership members in their role as project

commissioners.

By this time another community capacity building

project was already under way in East Cowes, with

financial support from SRB II. The purpose of this project

was to support a local East Cowes-based organisation as a

prototype delivery agency for the two fledgling community

partnerships.

The North Medina Community Development Trust was

established in 2002, with pump-priming funding from the

Town Councils of Cowes and East Cowes and SRB IV, in

response to the perceived failure of the prototype

organisation to develop into an effective delivery arm of

the two partnerships. RDP continuation funding was

secured to support the project for a further 12 months.

These sources of funding enabled the NMCDT to acquire

its own building in East Cowes and to renovate it as a

community resource centre. The Trusts principal objec-tives are to work in partnership with the local community,

voluntary sector, business interests and public agencies to

promote the regeneration of Cowes and East Cowes, and

to drive the development of the social economy within the

two towns.

The NMCDT Board has a wider membership than its

predecessor, including five members from the communities

of Cowes and East Cowes in addition to representatives

from the two town councils and two community partner-

ships. However, it is important to appreciate that the

primary function of the Trust is to be the delivery agent for

projects that are prioritised by the Town Councils and

Community Partnerships. It was envisaged that in its early

developmental (and grant-funded) phase, NMCDT would

focus upon building the capacity of those involved in

regeneration in the areaprimarily the community part-

nerships.

But the Trust was also intended to have a broader

community development remit: through the provision of

accessible community-managed resources and services, it

was expected to engender an environment where local

people felt sufficiently empowered and informed so as to

enable them to take control of the future of their

community. This next phase of development was to

coincide with the Trusts transition from a primarily

ARTICLE IN PRESS



9/13

grant-funded to a primarily income-generating organisa-

tion. During this phase, NMCDTs core business would be

to assist local organisations in fundraising for and delivery

of community development-related projects. In most cases

the business arm of the Trust would charge a fee for

managing projects that would in turn be financed from the

(matched) funds raised by the Trust on behalf of thatproject. This revenue source would be supported by the

selling of information and support services designed to

build community capacity, such as survey research and

local needs assessments, as well as by rental and bookings

income from the community resource centre.

However, our research indicates that the political

compromises implicit in the Trusts institutional design,

allied to its difficult gestation and operating context, have

limited its effectiveness in practice. Reviewing, firstly, the

problematic historical and geographical context, the area

covered by NMCDT comprises two mutually antagonistic

communities separated by the river Medina. Access

between the two communities is by chain ferry or by road

via Newport, a distance of some 10 miles. The two towns

are very different in their socio-economic fabric. Both have

pockets of deprivation, but whereas East Cowes is an

industrial town, (West) Cowes has been more reliant on

tourism and yachting for its income. Historically, the two

towns have been the full 10 miles apart with regards to

working together collaboratively, although only separated

by metres of water (RDP appraisal document). NMCDT,

then, is best understood in the context of a long and

politically fraught developmental process of bringing the

two councils and community partnerships together.

Secondly, it seems to us that the Trusts institutionaldesign has acted more as a constraint than an opportunity.

This is because in practice it has been difficult for the Trust

to reconcile its primary function as a project delivery agent

of the two town councils and partnerships with its more

strategic community development and social enterprise

roles. Put simply, the Trust has been unable to assert its

own political identity or lay claim to its own economic and

managerial space. More prosaically, the time demands on

the Trusts single full-time paid co-ordinator of project

initiation, development and delivery in a politically charged

context were underestimated. Again, because the elected

politicians on the Board have wanted their own organisa-

tions to be seen to be taking the credit for new projects, the

Trust has found it difficult to establish a strong public

profile in its own right.

At the time of writing, the NMCDT has failed to

establish itself as a primarily revenue-funded community

development organisation. However, it has worked effec-

tively to build alliances and networks. It is a member of the

Island Infrastructure Group, the organisational develop-

ment arm of the Islands voluntary and community sector

which is seeking to strengthen the sectors sustainability

through rental income and service delivery. It has

established its own links with SEEDA with a view to

consolidating itself as the key vehicle for community

consultation in the context of the emerging AIF master

plan for Cowes Waterfront. In this connection, it has

developed a strategy for community capacity building

based on pride of place and public art themes.

Ryde Development Trust was established as a company

limited by guarantee in September 2002 and gained

charitable status in June 2003. As an emerging develop-ment trust, it received approximately 250,000 of SRB VI

grant funding in January 2002. It is an independent Trust

working to sustain the regeneration of Ryde, to champion

its needs and to build the aspirations of the people living,

working and playing there. Its Board of Trustees is made

up of community members, a representative of Ryde

Community Forum (Partnership), a representative of Ryde

Business Association and an Isle of Wight councillor from

one of the three most deprived Ryde wards. The principal

roles of the Trust are to oversee the delivery of the Ryde

Regeneration Strategy (which was developed prior to the

SRB VI bid) and to undertake direct delivery of some

aspects of the strategyi.e. project development and

management.

There have been two distinct phases in RDTs develop-

mental trajectory. During the first phase (2002early 2005),

the Trust was to all intents and purposes a managing agent

of IWEP responsible for the co-ordinated delivery of the

SRB VI programme. New project ideas were discussed at

the Trusts four sub-groups and, if supported, put forward

for consideration by the Board. The current, social

enterprise phase dates from the (premature) withdrawal

of SRB revenue funding in March 2005. During this phase,

the work of the sub-groups has been condensed into a cycle

of meetings whose agendas alternate between businessdevelopment and community items of business.

Membership of RDT is open to any individual (or

organisation) with an interest in the future of Ryde. As a

charitable company, the Trust has a wide-ranging brief to

improve Rydes physical environment; foster new and

existing businesses; expand job opportunities and raise the

quality of training; provide learning opportunities for

community members of all ages; promote leisure and play

facilities; develop affordable transport initiatives; enable

access to primary health care and support healthy living;

and stimulate artistic and cultural activities throughout the

town. This means that RDT must necessarily work in

partnership with public agencies, business interests and the

voluntary sector, as well as local residents. Staff members

are based at the RDTs offices in Ryde: some are direct

employees of the Trust; others are attached to the Isle of

Wight Councils Arts Unit.

RDT has evolved from the Ryde Regeneration Partner-

ship, which was formed during the development of the SRB

VI bid to stimulate partnership working and to co-ordinate

and oversee the delivery of the Ryde Regeneration

Strategy. The initial composition of the Partnerships

executive group, and in particular the presence of a

number of elected councillors from Ryde wards (signifi-

cantly, Ryde does not have its own town council), made it

ARTICLE IN PRESS



10/13

prone to the pursuit of personal and political agendas.

Agreement was therefore reached by the Executive in late

2001 that the Partnership should become a development

trust (and in doing so be bound by the DTAs 20 per cent

rule: i.e. elected council members have to make up less than

20 per cent of the whole Board). We may regard this

constitutional containment of elected Ryde members,along with the absence of a second political constituency of

elected town councillors, as decisive factors in granting the

RDT a licence to organise from below. A continuing

legacy of that decision, however, has been the unresolved

tension between the Trust and the Ryde Community

Forumand by extension the Isle of Wight Councilover

their respective claims to represent the needs and aspira-

tions of the local community.

RDTs achievements to date are impressive. It has

succeeded in levering in significant amounts of external

funding through the activities of the various projects that it

has developed. It has established itself as a hub for joined-

up regeneration and partnership working in Ryde, and it is

generally perceived to have been influential in helping to

break down some of the barriers that exist between

statutory agencies and the local community, particularly

through its extensive programme of community consulta-

tion, its play development activity in deprived neighbour-

hoods and its work (in partnership with the Isle of Wight

Council) in drawing up Rydes public realm strategy.6 This

was actively championed by RDT and has opened up new

spaces of political debate and decision-making in relation

to the streetscape and physical regeneration of the town.

The Trust has been instrumental, in partnership with the

Isle of Wight Councils Arts Unit, in developing andmarketing the towns carnival and arts festival: together

these events have made Ryde a niche tourist destination

and they are a major contributor to the towns economy, as

well as pivotal to the achievement of community involve-

ment and learning objectives.7 RDT supports its commu-

nity development activity by letting out its office space to

other organisations and community groups. It is consoli-

dating this work by continuing to promote the organisa-

tional development of the voluntary and community

sector, which now includes a sustainable community

enterprise cluster. It is the lead organisation on the Island

for progressing the Change Up agenda, the government

programme for building the capacity and infrastructure

framework of the voluntary and community sector.

Necessarily, an assessment of RDTs prospects of

supporting itself as a sustainable community economic

development organisation, as opposed to an umbrella or

holding company for short-term grant-aided projects, is

somewhat speculative. However, it is currently generating

sufficient income from letting its desk and office space and

from selling its consultancy services to local authorities andother organisations to enable it to cover the costs,

including salaries, of core projects previously funded by

SRB VI (construction training, the arts festival, the

development and management of play facilities). We

encountered considerable optimism during our field work

concerning RDTs future financial prospects, based on a

positive assessment of the likely impact of a number of

recent and current developments that should enable the

Trust to support future planned expenditures through

increased revenue generation from rents, trading income,

management fees and additional consultancy work.

Putting its future prospects to one side, we would want

to argue at this point of time that RDTs impact as a

political institutionits success in asserting a place-based

identity, in establishing structures of local accountability

and in forging a broad-based coalition in support of

community-based regenerationis itself part of the process

of creating an empowered community (DeFilippis, 1999).

What has been more difficult to determine is the contribu-

tion of the community, as opposed to the professional or

topocratic members of the Board and its sub-groups, in

driving the organisation forward: in the final analysis we

would regard the strategic leadership of the Trusts chief

executive officer as critical to the success of institution

building.

5.2. The rural partnership model: Sandown, Shanklin and

Ventnor

Our findings in respect of the three MTI partnerships in

Sandown, Shanklin and Ventnor can be stated rather more

succinctly. Firstly, the composition of the partnerships

ensures that existing organisations and community leaders

are responsible for managing the process of community

engagement. There is a common format which prescribes

three categories of membership: Isle of Wight councillors,

(nominated) Town Councillors and a somewhat larger

number of individuals or representatives from existing local

organisations or groups to be invited/co-opted by the

Partnership. In practice, these groups and individuals have

put themselves forward following well-publicised public

meetings. This process has undoubtedly helped to induct

new people into local political networks. The new recruits

have tended to come from the ranks of the self-employed or

public sector professionals, but there is also some evidence,

particularly in Ventnor where there is an active voluntary

and community sector, that representatives of traditionally

excluded social groups, such as tenants of social housing

organisations, have become involved in the work of the

partnerships.

ARTICLE IN PRESS

6The public realm strategy for Ryde has since been adopted as

supplementary planning guidance and forms the basis of the Isle of Wight

Councils current approach to community consultation in land use

planning.7A study of the impact of the 2003 Ryde Carnival commissioned by the

RDT found that it brought upwards of 1 million into the local economy

by way of additional spend. RDT estimates that by supporting retail

development and creating new niche markets around local carnival and

festival activities, arts-based regeneration has created some 125 new,

sustainable jobs.



11/13

Secondly, the majority of the projects that have emerged

from the health checks and action plans are concerned with

renovating the fac-ades of public buildings, enhancing the

streetscape or improving access to transport facilities. A

number of the remaining ones, classified as social and

community projects, involve the provision or refurbish-

ment of recreational facilities and/or the installation ofCCTV cameras. The partnerships selected the projects,

prioritised and costed them, and negotiated their mode of

financing themselves. All may, however, be regarded as

relatively conventional projects; all have required

matched funding and/or working in partnership with

statutory and other agencies; and all were subject to

appraisal by IWEP. IWEP was also responsible for

recruiting the partnership co-ordinators.

Thirdly, in Sandown and Shanklin this pattern of

projects and membership may be said to have given rise

to a politics of place centred round local development

themes, where the community partnership operates in

something like a growth coalition (Molotch, 1976) mode.

One clear reason for this is that expectations have been

raised by the existence of a Regeneration Strategy for

Sandown Bay, commissioned by the Isle of Wight Council

and the regional tourist agency (Tourism South East) but

currently in limbo following SEEDAs decision to prioritise

investment in the Cowes Waterfront project. In the case

of Ventnor, the social and community category of

projects has been rather more prominent, notably a

proposal for a local cafe that is now running as a successful

community enterprise. Here the community partnership

seems to have been rather more responsive to the needs and

concerns of local voluntary and community, as opposed tobusiness, organisations.

Both these forms of micro-politics are far from con-

flict-free but they do little to challenge existing struc-

tures of power at the level of the local or regional state.

Rather, the significance of the three MTI partnerships

lies in their reinvigoration of the community scale of

governance through the process of incorporating new

(un-elected) representatives in a way that does not

threaten the interests of those in existing leadership

positions.

Whether these findings are interpreted as an exercise in

creating fit partners (i.e. as an exercise in governmental-

ity) (Ling, 2000) or as an exercise in community empower-

ment seems to us to be a rather sterile debating point.

We have no reason to believe that the members of

the community partnerships whom we have met have

internalised the discourses and values of locality or

regeneration management. Rather, we found a pragmatic

but far from unreflexive acceptance that bureaucracy is

part of the price needed to gain the support of larger

constituencies and more powerful partners. We also

encountered considerable frustration at the resulting delays

in project authorisation and start-up, which effectively

reduced the period of MTI funding to little more than

18 months.

5.3. Discussion of the two models

In the case of the two development trusts, our findings

can be summarised as follows: despite sharing a common

philosophy of community development closely linked with

IWEP, NMCDT and RDT have had different starting

points and developmental trajectories, leading to what wewould regard at the time of writing as the relatively weak

institutionalisation of NMCDT and the correspondingly

stronger institutionalisation of RDT within the Islands

regeneration policy community. How are we to account for

this finding of internal variation in the development trust

model?

Certainly, there are a number of contextual factors that

help to explain the rather more successful developmental

trajectory of the RDT, compared with that of the

NMCDT. These include the larger unit of resource, in

the form of SRB grant funding, available to Ryde

compared to Cowes; the cohesive sense of place of Ryde

residents and small businesses; and the greater degree of

interface with strategic partners and mainstream service

delivery agencies implied by the Ryde Regeneration

Strategy, in comparison with the strategic focus of the

Cowes SRB bid on Building a Community Bridge to

Employment. Another important factor has been the

support given to the Trust by SEEDA, including its role in

brokering periodic disputes between the RDT and its

partner organisations. These context-specific factors have

presented a rather different set of constraints and

opportunities for the RDT than those faced by the

NMCDT.

We believe, then, in keeping with the attention paid innew institutionalist writing to the significance of history,

timing and sequence in explaining processes of social and

political change (Hay, 2002, p. 11), that much of the

internal variation in the development trust model can be

attributed to processes rooted in the particular geographies

and histories of the two gateway towns, which have

influenced the practical working of the two institutions.

However, it seems to us that part of the variation must also

be accounted for by the differential ability of particular,

strategically placed actors to organise from below in the

two locations.

In the case of the three MTI towns, our findings are

consistent with the existing literature on rural partnerships:

partnership funding has helped to reinvigorate the com-

munity as a scale of governance whilst at the same time

reaffirming the legitimacy of those in established leadership

positions and the continuing role of the central and

regional state in initiating, structuring, financing and

regulating partnership working.

Interestingly, discussion with relevant IWEP officers

suggested that two forms of calculative behaviour could be

found at work in the MTI partnerships. One has been to

maximise the partnerships claim on the available (SEE-

DA) grant funding. This is the approach that has been

adopted in Ventnor, Shanklin and (to a lesser extent)

ARTICLE IN PRESS



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Sandown. The other approach, evident in the case of the

Brading and Wootton Bridge partnerships denied access to

continuation funding, has been to settle upon a strategic

vision and seek out alternative sources of regeneration

funding in the manner implied by the health check and

(village) action planning processesa strategy, in other

words, of organising from below. In both Brading andWootton Bridge, the success of this strategy, which is now

being emulated in Sandown, can be largely attributed to

the vision and leadership of the respective town clerks.

To the extent that effective, strategic community

involvement in the delivery of action plans is more

apparent in the case of Brading and Wootton Bridge, it

can be argued that lack of access to SEEDA funding has

had the effect of transforming these MTI partnerships into

strategic and resourceful bottom up institutions.

Recasting our findings in terms of new institutional

theory, what we observe in the case of the MTI partner-

ships is a set of place-based organisations engaged in a

process of institution building, and subject to wider

institutional constraints in the manner of their counter-

parts in Cowes and Ryde at a comparable phase in their

evolution. The difference, perhaps, is that, given the

uncertain fate of the Sandown Bay proposals and the

absence of post-MTI continuation funding, the Sandown,

Shanklin and Ventnor partnerships are operating in more

of a strategic vacuum than was the case with the

development trusts.

6. Conclusion

These findings are consistent with new institutionalistaccounts of organisational and policy performance which

emphasise the importance of contextual variation and

locally specific processes of institutionalisation, rather than

formal organisational structures, in determining outcomes

(Lowndes, 2001). Our Island case study confirms that the

opportunities for change associated with implementing a

new institutional design, whether mandated from above or

community-owned, will necessarily be constrained and

shaped by its interaction with existing, embedded institu-

tional frameworks and their underlying values, logics of

appropriateness and distribution of political resources. In

practice, it is clear to us that both the development trust

and the partnership model reflect the structuring effects of

central, regional and local steering of the Islands

regeneration policy community.

Further, we should recognise that in many ways the

RDT and NMCDT are less the outcomes of an authentic

civil society movement than institutions manufactured by

IWEP (Hodgson, 2004). We also need to recognise that

state-sponsored regeneration partnerships have been used

to develop and support a similar range of capacity-building

projects, often employing the same professional staff, as

those currently managed under the auspices of the RDT.

Taken together, these capacity building projects have

produced cells of people on the ground with a good track

record of putting together successful funding bids, who are

capable of self-evaluating their performance. Politically,

they form a lobby that can and does put pressure on

council officers and members to find ways of continuing to

support their projects (interview with senior Isle of Wight

Council officer, 2004).

Finally, our Island case study highlights the limitationsof treating the content of an institutional design or model

as a single independent variable that determines commu-

nity involvement outcomes. Initially manufactured and

then embedded in a wider institutional framework, only

later and in one location have we observed a development

trust effect in terms of a capacity to organise from below

and to stimulate new forms of sustainable community

enterprise.

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