ESRC research projects
Skills for sustainable communities
Queen's University Belfast
Dr Frank Gaffikin
- Aims to identify the priority skills, knowledge and abilities needed to make a sustainable community.
- Aims to identify good and bad practice in community-building in divided cities.
- Uses four case studies; communities are encouraged to ‘learn by doing'.
- Aims to translate lessons into recommendations and policy proposals.
Skills and competencies for building communities in which present and future generations want to live and work relate not only to the bricks and mortar aspects of good housing and quality environment. Sound and safe communities are places where people have a sense of belonging and fairness, a say in decision-making, and opportunity in education, career, and quality of life.
But, they are not places that work in isolation from, or hostility to, surrounding communities that are different in culture, race, religion or politics. Thus, good community living in our cities is about dealing with diversity and difference. Across the world, violent scenes bear witness to the disturbance and destruction that follows from failure to ensure that difference and disagreement do not end in bitter division.
This is the particular focus of this research project. It identifies the priority skills, knowledge and abilities needed to make communities thriving and safe in themselves, while at the same time connected to other parts of the city that are different to, and may be even hostile to, them.
To examine these issues, it takes the example of Belfast, where for nearly four decades communities living cheek by jowl have been in conflict and division. While there has been much good community development in the city during these difficult times, it often works to separate communities from each other. There has been community leadership. But, some of this is ethnic, tribal and partisan, rather than civic and uniting across religious frontiers.
This research identifies good and bad practice in community-building in divided cities. It invests certain skills and competencies in four selected communities, reflecting Protestant and Catholic working-class Belfast, and tests how these can be used to improve community action and links across the traditional ethnic turfs for the wider civic good.
Working closely with the communities concerned from the very start, the project builds on their native know-how and talent to develop further skills, and an ability on their own part to measure their progress. In this way, the intention is for the communities to 'learn by doing'. As we work with them to help create long-term plans for their well-being, they will be honing old skills and acquiring new ones.
The lessons learned from this will be shared with research colleagues at the University of Warwick, who have a lot of contact with, and experience of, local communities and local authorities in England. With their help, we will translate these Belfast lessons into a set of recommendations and policy proposals relevant to the English situation. In addition, a colleague from a US university, noted for his work in the field of divided cities, will offer comment, advice and support, to ensure that we take a broad view of this global issue.
The project will address the following research questions:
- What has been the differential development of these four communities during the period 1971-2001, exploring whether religion is a significant variable in accounting for any detectable difference?
- How do these communities currently compare in terms of: social need; social assets (community organisation and social capital) and in effectively accessing social programmes? This audit will be operated through an adaptation of the Egan indicators.
- How can a customised set of skills and competencies required for local strategic planning (eg inclusive visioning, breakthrough thinking, brokerage, partnership working, leadership and project management) be developed within such communities?
- Is the action-learning paradigm appropriate for this kind of exercise?
- How can such projects be best evaluated, distinguishing results, outcomes and impacts?
- Can the lessons of this Belfast project be transferred to the Community Cohesion Agenda in England, and thereby contribute to community sustainability in the most contested urban environments?
ESRC is the UK's largest research funding agency for social and economic issues.
