This piece was written by Dr Jody Aked, an associate of Ideas Alliance, drawing on her work alongside communities and local government across the UK. In it, she reflects on the often unspoken cultural divides that shape how collaboration does and does not happen, and what it might mean to take those differences seriously when thinking about the future of our places.
It’s the end of 2025 and I am finishing up some work with Ideas Alliance. We’ve come to the end of a final workshop for a programme of work on the future of the place we live, and my colleague Helen turns to me and says:
“It’s the same story I see all across the land: the culture of community action is different from the culture of government”.
This stops me in my tracks because of course at one level I know this – as consultants we’re brought in to help people work more effectively together. But on a deeper, more foundational level we’ve ignored this. We’ve never once mentioned the word culture; we’ve never interrogated the differences in how we understand the world and our role in it; we’ve never treated culture as something that is interfering with how communities and local government work together.
Of course, the differences in cultures have been implied. Communities feel affronted when their emergency response is not met by flexible and responsive funding, while local government wants communities to formalise their working practices so community action can more easily dock into democratic, institutional and funding processes. While communities feel dispirited when their ideas and requests for support are met by silence, local government want communities to see the wisdom – and become cheerleaders of – their carefully thought-out strategies and organisational plans.
To over-simplify the culture of community action, connection precedes content. Who we are, who we are in relationship with and how we feel in those relationships comes before questions about what we will do together. In the culture of local government content precedes connection.
This polarity is something community members performing local government roles themselves reflect upon. As one local government worker pointed out: Spring won’t comply with the May elections. The land needs volunteers in Spring, but we can’t recruit them because it is deemed too political. It doesn’t work to mobilise people in the winter for work that needs to take place in five months’ time. Pressing ‘pause’ once people are mobilised around a common cause is not the culture of community action, and nor is it the seasonality of the land.
When local government asks me to work with them, so that they can work more effectively with community, it so often feels as though the unspoken question I am being asked to answer is: “why do communities act how they act?”. The more important question local government could be asking is “why do we in local government act as we act?”
This is a big question. It is a question that requires the courage to turn inwards. Helpfully, scholars are articulating the histories and complexities of our institutional and governance cultures in new ways. A recent editorial from the Journal of Awareness-Based Systems Change highlights the work of Vanessa Machado de Oliviera. Her thoughtful examination of western modernity suggests we need to hospice and let go of ways of knowing and being that limit what we see and what we take accountability for. To dismantle the house that modernity built, she argues we need practices that develop collective capacities to hold painful realities without disengaging and denying, and to remain in relation even when difference persists. The work of Bayo Akómoláfé foregrounds the importance of fugitivity, which he describes as a form of refusal, a conscious turning away from the logics of mastery and extraction that underpin modern life. He explores “a way of moving without destination, of being in relation without resolution”. These critiques ask us what and who we should really be accountable to: processes and systems we once made up, which have excluded and oppressed, or the human energy that we find before us?
Community action is a culture alive to the moment. This makes it vital and, frankly, a lot less boring than the logical processes, election cycles, funding forms, reports and tick boxes through which local government sees the world and acts in it. Reflecting on his work with communities about the future of their neighbourhoods, Peter Block says the being together “doesn’t work half the time … and that’s why I trust it”. Why does he trust it? I think it might have something to do with the unpredictable, but generative nature, of human connection. As David Whyte reminds us in his poem Santiago, we may be “more marvellous in your simple wish to find a way than the gilded roofs of any destination you could reach”.
“It helped me to recognise success even if it wasn’t the way I thought success would look. It helped me recognise myself as part of a larger whole.”
– Councillor Sharon Sluman on her contribution to Lancing: now and into the Future, facilitated by Ideas Alliance
For local government actors seeking to work more effectively with communities, an important first step is to let go – of control, of certainty and a pre-determined idea of what a result will look like. It is about welcoming the “inconvenience” of cultures that refuse to “fit” the logics of the systems western modernity built – not as a problem we wish would go away, but as an invitation into a deeper inquiry about the ways we have been taught to serve and govern.
If you’re working in or alongside local government and want support with co-production or co-design that takes culture seriously, we’d love to explore how we could work alongside you. Click here to get in touch.
