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Abstract
This paper challenges “Big Society (BS) Localism”, seeing it as an example of impoverished localist thinking which neglects social justice considerations. We do this through a critical examination of recent turns in the localist discourse in the UK which emphasise self-reliant communities and envisage a diminished role for the state. We establish a heuristic distinction between positive and negative approaches to localism. We argue that the Coalition Government's BS programme fits with a negative localist frame as it starts from an ideological assumption that the state acts as a barrier to community-level associational activity and that it should play a minimal role. “BS localism” (as we call it) has been influential over the making of social policy, but it also has implications for the achievement of environmental goals. We argue that this latest incarnation of localism is largely ineffective in solving problems requiring collective action because it neglects the important role that inequalities play in inhibiting the development of associational society. Drawing upon preliminary research being undertaken at the community scale, we argue that staking environmental policy success on the ability of local civil society to fill the gap left after state retrenchment runs the risk of no activity at all.
Notes
1. It should be noted that this paper refers to UK policy but essentially deals with the approach of UK central government. Due to limitations of space, we are unable to examine the experience of devolved administrations in the UK.
2. It should be noted that in the period up to November 2011 only 0.5% of solar PVs installed under the feed-in tariff scheme were defined as “community” schemes with 98.1% defined as “residential”(Ares et al. Citation2012, p. 10).
3. While the Green Deal will be mainly focused on the scale of individual households, DECC (Citation2011d) has indicated the potential for neighbourhood-level delivery and forms of community partnership.
4. Due to limitations of space, our focus here is restricted to wards in Newcastle-under-Lyme.