Local government’s role in place-based work
In a guest post for New Local, co-founder of Stories of Change, John Hitchin, shares his thoughts on the future of place-based work.
Local government is all about work in a place, so it’s easy to imagine that everything local government does is place-based. However, we are pushing for deeper thinking. In our new taxonomy of place-based change, we argue that the term ‘place-based’ becomes useless if it becomes a catch-all for ‘everything local’.
We have identified five broad categories of place-based work – and suggest that local government must make active choices about how to support this work in its area. In doing so, local government can be a partner and strategic leader for a radical rethinking of how we support, build and work with communities and places, at a time when fiscal and governance pressures dictate that something significant needs to change.
The problem with place
Too often in the social sector, language gets ahead of itself. In the 2010s, everything was innovative. More recently, everyone is doing systems change. Place has fallen into this challenge a little. People have good feelings about it, but it can be a little amorphous, a little vibes-based, and a little unhelpful for policy design, practical decision-making, and clarity on what to do if you have a strategic or commissioning or policy role. In work supported by Place Matters, Michael Little, Anna Waldie, and I trawled through many examples of place-based working and found significant variation and significant challenge in defining it. We picked apart the core characteristics of place-based change – what we called ‘dimensions’. We then grouped these back together to identify the different mechanisms for how place-based work achieves change. These are our five distinct categories.
These categories are distinct in that they all:
- Centralise different ways of achieving change in places
- Operate at different scales and with different approaches
- Require different partners
- Draw upon different types of evidence to measure their success
Here is a quick summary:
In continuous local social change, individuals drive change through connection, relationships and social action. Sometimes that means a charity, but often it’s unconstituted groups collectivising, campaigning, meeting, organising and leading their places.
In civil society organisation-led change, it’s the hubs and centres and strength of local governance that’s important, investing in these creates the platforms to grow social capital, social assets, manage physical assets and enable community innovation and leadership.
Whereas state and civil society relations are all about how specific issues or problems can be tackled in a place by rethinking the relationship between the state and the community. That can look like collective impact models to end homelessness, or innovative services that influence how communities work in preventative ways to reduce demand for early help and social services.
Market interventions are more those that look at how the hyperlocal scale is given space and capacity to innovate and lead on issues like employment, health, housing, and that connects to a strategic authority (local or combined) change how they work to influence the macro conditions that can’t be influenced at the hyperlocal scale. It’s not local work with no influence, and it’s not top-down regeneration – rather, it’s the interplay between micro and macro levers of change.
Finally, rebalancing state, civil society and market is work that often starts with philanthropy and takes an ambitious look at a system from a new angle, centring the community in big questions like wellbeing, birth, dying or connection.
These categories give the field of practice of place-based work some structure. It moves beyond the shorthand of ‘local people know best’, or ‘anything local is place-based’, and it’s certainly not ‘organisations delivering standard work in a new geography’.
A note on confidence
This is just the start, rather than the end of the journey. We hope that this work evolves as the field of place-based working matures in the UK, and as it does, our understanding of these categories is likely to shift. That said, based on evidence and early testing, we can see these categories hold and can offer new insights into ways local government can work with and support place-based work.
What does this mean for local government?
Those working in local government don’t need me to tell them how challenging the last 15 years have been, and how hard the years ahead look in terms of funding and governance changes. However, there are clear opportunities.
When I think about how this government is working with place, it is doing it in three ways:
- Governance – the English Devolution Bill is cementing a move to strategic authorities, single tiers of local government and new community governance ‘below’ that. How these different qualities, rather than tiers of governance, work together will dictate so much of how places experience the coming years.
- Thematic – a variety of policy areas, whether that’s the Best Start Hubs or the Neighbourhood Health work, have place and neighbourhood practice and hubs baked into the assumptions of policy delivery. How those thematic policy agendas are knitted together in places will determine the success of those policies.
- Targeting – through Pride in Place, the Community Wealth Fund and a variety of other tools, the government is looking to give money directly to places, in partnership with local government, and hoping to see a range of outcomes from this work for places, building on the learning from approaches like the New Deal for Communities and Big Local.
Earlier this year, New Local highlighted the opportunities afforded by the English Devolution Bill to re-think and re-set the core purpose of local government to be fit for the challenges of the 21st century.
Collaborate CIC have also done some really important work in setting a lot of this out in relation to local government reorganisation (LGR).
All this, for me, means that local government needs to think about what role it wants to play and how it sees its place changing.
If they have Pride in Place money coming in, then perhaps working with the civil society-led change category of work could help them enable organisations to use their governance to build networks and social capital to take on building and regenerate high streets with external funding. There are examples of this practice, and local government can use its convening power and property portfolio to work with communities, and it can get out of the way of these models, not trying to lead when community leadership exists.
If it’s interested in a specific challenge in an area, maybe it could look for partners that understand the state and civil society mechanisms to develop a collective impact approach to that issue, such as homelessness or child poverty, pulling together and managing the complexity of shifting systems. If it’s working with a strategic authority, it can look at models such as Live Well in Greater Manchester that use the market interventions approach to empower places and connect up to regional economic scales.
Our work doesn’t tell you how to work in your place. It doesn’t tell you which mechanism is right for different communities, and whether you should use collective impact, community wealth building, community organising or asset transfers. It is designed to give you a way to think about different approaches to working in place, and where there are examples of practice and approaches to evidence.
Applying them to the challenges of 2026 is a huge opportunity and should enable local government to think very differently about its role, what’s possible, what success looks like and crucially, how to work well with communities and partners on different approaches to change.
- Read more about New Local’s work on LGR and the Art of the Possible here.
- To find out more about John’s work, please email him or follow his Substack.
Image Credit: Illustration by Anna Magenta on Unsplash
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