DTA Scotland Blog
Posted on: Thursday 04th April, 2024
DTAS Policy: Reflecting back on the Democracy Matters 2 consultation
Local democracy, and the idea of devolving power closer to communities, has been talked about for many years. Much has been written reflecting on the centralisation of Scottish politics, contrary to the original intentions of devolution at the end of the last century. Scotland (and the UK) has found itself as an outlier amongst other European nations in how distant people are from the people who make decisions about their communities and places, and it’s in this landscape that development trusts have often tried to fill the gap. They are democratic, community led and owned organisations, advocating for and delivering on the projects people in communities want to see happen, filling the gaps when the system fails in some way, and trying to give people voice and agency in their community. Other countries, with more developed systems of local democracy have less need of these kinds of third sector organisations so the strength of our own community sector is, to some extent, a response to the absence of the state at the community level. Whilst politics debates how much the state should have a role, and how it should be funded, development trusts just try and get on with doing what needs done, often driven by volunteers, with very little funding.
This phase of the Democracy Matters process tried to tease out what local democracy in Scotland might look like. This was a big ask and an exercise for the imagination to think about how it could work in “our” place. DTAS hosted a series of in-depth conversations on this in Carluke, Mull, Duns, Udny and Easterhouse, as part of an SG funded partnership with SCDC, to help communities in each place tackle some of the issues, and feed their thoughts into the consultation response. These conversations have been helpful in shaping our own thinking and are reflected in our response published here.
Pamela Barnes, who hosted each of these conversations said:
“the conversations were really rich, and while there were themes in common, there were often differences in how people wanted to see this happen in their community. Communities were energised by the idea of having more say, but wary of more responsibility without more resource or capacity.”
The ball is back in the court of the Scottish Government now, to consider what comes next. Whatever the proposals are for democracy at the most local levels, they must be part of wider political system change to ensure that democracy becomes more participative at all levels, to tackle the disempowerment and disillusionment we came across in so many of our conversations. With last year’s consultation on a potential Community Wealth Building bill highlighting the need for more local economic democracy, we must also look at how changes in local democracy link with economic development, as well as issues such as land reform, climate emergency response and regeneration. We need whole system change!
Our CEO, Pauline Smith said:
“local democracy is what our movement is built on, and we want to keep the momentum going after this consultation. Our members are in touch with what their communities want and want to be part of shaping new models of local decision making. The disillusionment with the way things are just now is quite stark and means we must keep pressing the Scottish Government for change and working with them to help achieve that.”