Grassroots innovations in community-led housing in England: the role and evolution of intermediaries

ABSTRACT

The paper aims to take forward recent research concerning the development of grassroots innovations and sustainability transitions in housing. We introduce and empirically assess a multi-level, process-oriented framework informed by strategic niche management (SNM) and social capital theory. Drawing on qualitative data, the empirical part explores the emergence of community-led housing (CLH) in England as a grassroots-based housing niche which operates in a context of market dysfunction. The paper offers further conceptual development of the role of intermediaries in grassroots niche building. Our findings suggest an evolution from independent sub-niche umbrellas to broader-based intermediaries to leverage and consolidate different sustainability practices in the niche. The results question an unadapted application of the simplistic growth-oriented SNM approach advocating for strategic coherence. In particular, our analysis shows that the development of broader-based intermediary organisations is driven by short-term government funding and carefully preserves the diversity of approaches and identities within the niche.

KEYWORDS:

• Community-led housing
• sustainability transitions
• grassroots innovations
• niche development
• social capital
• intermediaries
• cooperative housing
• multi-level perspective
• strategic niche management

1. Introduction

Although the phenomenon of cooperative housing has a long tradition in many countries, in recent years, we have been witnessing a new wave of collective self-organised housing in Europe (Mullins and Moore 2018). These grassroots housing models address current challenges in urban development often discussed under the umbrella concept of sustainability, such as social inclusion and cohesion, environmental awareness, and affordability (Shirazi and Keivani 2017). Furthermore, they clearly exhibit the cooperative principle of democratic control by its members and residents, and often also by other stakeholders from the local community.

This paper focuses on the emergence of community-led housing (CLH), a grassroots-based housing niche in England.¹ While there is significant internal diversity and different historical trajectories within CLH, the current period is of particular interest for three main reasons. First, a range of organisations in CLH are currently attempting to create a unified response to the dysfunctional and crisis-ridden housing market, heightened by the 2008 financial crisis. There are several elements here including land banking and market domination by an oligopolistic house building industry as well as a longer ideological project to shift housing from a social to a private and financialised commodity (Immergluck 2011; Aalbers and Christophers 2014; Hodkinson 2015). Second, attempts to drastically roll out low carbon housing have stalled, thus bringing into stark relief the difficulty of attempting to tackle climate change through housing (Seyfang 2010). CLH contributes pro-actively to the environmental agenda, for instance, through creating low-energy living environments or the recycling of wasted empty homes (Tummers 2016). Third, there have been attempts to create more active forms of citizen participation since passage of the Localism Act 2011. This policy approach resonates with democratic governance as a defining principle of CLH in England. The cooperative housing model, for instance, traditionally puts great emphasis on tenant control and subsidiarity. So-called ‘secondary’ cooperatives, as registered providers, service a range of tenant-managed cooperatives (‘primaries’) with professional expertise but do not want to interfere with resident self-governance.

We are particularly interested in understanding this CLH niche through the multi-level perspective (MLP) approach and the role of social capital in scaling-up local impact that can alter regime practices. According to the MLP approach, opportunities for transitions can flourish where there are tensions and problems within the regime and uncertainties within the wider landscape. New socio-technical configurations that develop and mature in niches can then offer potential solutions to problems in the regime (Berkhout et al. 2003; Smith and Raven 2012; Gibbs and O’Neill 2015). This paper, therefore, is located in specific housing regime problems in England and the extent to which these are stimulating the emergence of a grassroots niche that is coalescing around CLH that can potentially influence regime-level actors. Notably, there is now a growing literature focused on studying the role of community-based housing actors in transitions (Seyfang 2010; O’Neill and Gibbs 2014; Gibbs and O’Neill 2015).

More specifically, the paper focuses on Strategic Niche Management (SNM) and the role of niche intermediary actors in scaling-up grassroots innovations (Hatzl et al. 2016; Smith et al. 2016). When exploring the issue of system transformations through innovations – both in terms of market-based but also social innovations – authors have applied the SNM approach (Kemp et al. 1998; Schot and Geels 2008). As a governance concept, SNM shows under which condition niches become robust and influential enough to eventually displace an existing system. It essentially advocates for strategic coherence in a niche based on social networks, aggregation of learning from individual projects, and shared performance expectations. While the role of intermediaries is said to be crucial for successful SNM, the exact conditions under which intermediaries can support niche development and the scaling up of grassroots innovations is still very little explored in the literature (Hargreaves et al. 2013; Seyfang et al. 2014; Sanders and van Bortel 2018). Drawing on some recent applications of SNM to grassroots transitions, the paper deploys a more critical application of SNM reflecting the context of grassroots and civil-society innovation (Smith and Seyfang 2013; Seyfang et al. 2014; Smith et al. 2016), and the role of different forms of social capital in understanding niche development (Caniëls and Romijn 2008). The social capital approach can refine the SNM concept by distinguishing between homogenous (‘bonding capital’) and heterogeneous social networks on the horizontal ‘bridging capital’ and vertical level ‘linking capital’ which can be facilitated by intermediaries (Lang and Novy 2014; Agger and Jensen 2015; Braunholtz-Speight 2015).

Against this background, the aim of the paper is to conceptualise the role of intermediaries in the multi-level actor-network of grassroots housing niches. Therefore, we integrate key insights from different literature streams into a conceptual model that should inform future context-sensitive research on grassroots innovations in housing and sustainable development. The study should help policymakers identify critical aspects related to CLH which can be addressed with tailored policy measures, and CLH actors to develop a clearer picture of their role in transitions towards sustainability which can be communicated to stakeholders.

The remainder of the paper is structured as follows. Section 2 introduces the key theoretical concepts underpinning the empirical analysis: the MLP and SNM frameworks and the key further insight from social capital. Section 3 describes the methodological approach. Section 4 outlines CLH and the extent to which it functions as a grassroots niche. Section 5 reports on the empirical findings of niche development in CLH in England. The concluding section 6 reflects on empirical and theoretical implications of the study for grassroots innovation, housing and sustainable development.

2. Conceptual starting points

2.1. The multi-level perspective (MLP) and strategic niche management (SNM)

The analysis is primarily situated within the well-established MLP framework which is used to study system transitions involving multiple actors and institutions at three main levels. According to Geels (2002, 2004)), the overall longer-term and relatively stable ‘socio-technical landscape’ (1) is the macro-level context and is comprised of shared cultural values, wider political and socio-economic trends and issues such as demographic change, political worldviews and longer-term macroeconomic orientations. While the landscape structures social practices and action, actors have no direct influence over change on the landscape level. ‘Socio-technical regimes’ (2) are where an interconnected set of rules, artefacts, institutions and relationships shape daily practices and use of technologies and frame what is possible. Regimes are usually slow to change leading to path dependency and lock-in, but can be dislodged and ultimately replaced through disruptive innovations. ‘Niches’ (3) are where innovation and learning occur, often at very localised and experimental level through single experiments or projects, or clusters of several experiments. It is at the niche level where social capital is developed that can support innovation. Niches are seen as nurturing new social and technological configurations that could ultimately grow to influence and displace establish regime practices when interactions occur between niche, regime and landscape levels (Geels and Schot 2007; Boyer 2015).

In this sense, windows-of-opportunity for transitions can appear when certain trends within the wider socio-technical landscape influence the regime level. Niche innovations can then offer potential solutions to problems or changing circumstances within the regime itself or the wider socio-technical landscape, and are taken up more or less successfully through strategies ranging from assimilation or confrontation (see Berkhout et al. 2003; Smith and Raven 2012). For the analysis in this paper, the levels of niches and regimes are mainly relevant. Bergman et al. (2007), for instance, apply such as multi-level analytical framework to explore transitions to sustainable housing and communities in the UK. They also include a scenario for a more radical shift that involves a community-based housing niche addressing different sustainability aspects (environmental, economic and social).

The well-established analytical tool of strategic niche management (SNM) helps us to understand how the transition of innovations from niche to regime level can be governed (Kemp et al. 1998; Schot and Geels 2008) and has been applied to studying grassroots innovations too (Witkamp et al. 2011; Seyfang et al. 2014; Hatzl et al. 2016). Therefore, this paper draws on the SNM approach to structure empirical accounts on the development of a CLH niche in England and efforts by niche-level actors to scale-up grassroots social innovations to influence the housing regime level. The analysis particularly emphasizes the niche intermediary level and its relation to the regime.

SNM encompasses the following three processes. (1) social networks refer to solidarity-based networks within the niche as well as a broad network of heterogeneous stakeholders. This network formation should be accompanied by (2) implementation of learning mechanisms among niche actors, and (3) formulation of expectations and visions. If these three processes are managed well, strategic coherence can be implemented within the niche that is thus more likely to replace an existing regime (Geels and Raven 2003; Hatzl et al. 2016).

In the context of SNM, the role of intermediaries becomes crucial to support the creation of a robust and coherent niche where knowledge aggregation and resource sharing across different local projects is institutionalised (Geels and Deuten 2006; Smith 2007; Sanders and van Bortel 2018). Furthermore, intermediaries act as brokers and coordinators for relationships to stakeholders beyond the niche and thus as facilitators for scaling-up grassroots innovations to the regime level, e.g. by translating disruptive practices into solutions palatable to regime actors (Hargreaves et al. 2013). However, the exact conditions under which intermediaries can support niche development and the scaling up of grassroots innovations are still little explored in the literature (Hargreaves et al. 2013; Seyfang et al. 2014). Previous studies suggest that government and policymakers have a strategic role in transition management by pro-actively involving grassroots niche actors, and by providing guidance and coherence through policy instruments, thus enforcing an important long-term perspective on managing transitions besides short-term objectives, such as grants (Rotmans et al. 2001; Boyer 2015).

2.2. Linking social capital and intermediaries

Incorporating insights from social capital theory into the analysis of grassroots niches helps expand our understanding in terms of the diverse nature of relationships between actors involved in the process of scaling-up grassroots innovations (Caniëls and Romijn 2008). Despite the lack of an established definition, there is consensus among scholars that on a generic level, the notion of social capital broadly refers to resources embedded in networks which can be mobilised through social interactions that can lead to potential benefits for actors (Brunie 2009). This definition of social capital corresponds with the three elements of SNM introduced earlier, as it distinguishes the network element from the resource exchanges. We can further deploy a tripartite classification of social capital between bonding, bridging and linking capital.

Bonding capital is considered as an attribute of homogenous social networks (such as in terms of education, income levels or place) and is also associated with trusting but inward-looking relationships that may constrain behaviour and flow of information. Niches are often described as ‘protective spaces’ where actors form ‘deep networks’ for knowledge development and exchange which suggests that they primarily exhibit bonding capital (Kemp et al. 1998; Geels 2002; Schot and Geels 2008; Gibbs and O’Neill 2015). Previous studies suggest that strong levels of bonding capital can be found in CLH, as intensive and intentional sharing is constitutive to CLH compared to collaborative living in conventional housing (Jarvis 2015; Ruiu 2016). In contrast, bridging capital is defined as outward-looking relationships which connect people with different socio-demographic and geographical backgrounds (e.g. outside a local community) but also social identities. It thereby provides individuals with crucial access to new information and resources (Poortinga 2012).

Finally, linking capital connects people vertically ‘across power differentials’ (Szreter and Woolcock 2004, p. 655). This type of social capital is related to access and mobilisation of critical resources from powerful institutions in society for community-led housing purposes (e.g. political legitimacy, consultancy, funding). Thus, vertical ties to institutional decision-makers help local communities leverage their own resources. However, it has to be noted that linking capital, like every form of social capital, can also have negative effects. Thus, privileged access to resources might lead to ‘nepotism, corruption, and suppression’ (Szreter and Woolcock 2004, p. 655). An understanding of linking capital is so important given that Schot and Geels (2008, p. 547) suggest that niche innovations ‘can only diffuse more widely if they link up with ongoing processes at regime and landscape levels’. This study specifically introduces linking capital into the debate on SNM. Intermediaries, such as umbrella housing organisations but also individual social entrepreneurs can establish these vertical linkages and related resource flows between local housing projects and resource holders on the regime level.

Despite this analytical focus, we argue that a combined analytical approach of the bonding, bridging and linking dimensions of social capital can deliver a more comprehensive picture of grassroots niche development and effective niche development (Osborne et al. 2016). In particular, as Smith and Raven (2012, p. 1026) argue ‘ideas and conceptualisations of how path-breaking innovations escape their protective spaces and interact with wider regime change processes are still poorly developed’ (see also Gibbs and O’Neill 2015). Therefore, we enrich the MLP and SNM frameworks with a social capital approach which considers the wider institutional context, in contrast to over-individualistic and localised approaches to social innovation (O’Neill and Gibbs 2014). This avoids neglecting the multiple factors at work in socio-technical transitions and includes the role of stakeholders and intermediaries at the national, local and niche scales.

Figure 1 displays our conceptual multi-level network model of a grassroots niche which integrates the social capital approach to explore niche innovation across four separate but interconnected levels. Level 1 represents five CLH sub-niches (cohousing, cooperatives, self and custom-build, self-help housing and community land trusts), each of which are constructed from loosely associated clusters of individual niche projects. This confirms insights that instead of innovation in CLH being contained within a single-networked niche, it is made up of ‘a series of nested niches’ (Gibbs and O’Neill 2015, p. 138) or sub-niches (Kemp et al. 1998). Typically, learning, networking and the development of expectations occur between sub-niche projects through substantial bonding capital, i.e. trusting and inward-looking relationships (represented by continuous arrows). Bridging capital, i.e. outward-oriented interactions to access comparative knowledge and resources exists between the sub-niches on Level 1.

Figure 1. The interplay of forms of social capital in community-led housing. (Source: Authors adapted from Agger and Jensen 2015; Geels 2002).

Note: CLTs = community land trusts; CLHA = Community-Led Housing Alliance; UKCN = UK Cohousing Network; NCLTN = National Community Land Trust Network; CCH = Confederation of Co-operative Housing.

Level 2 is the focus of our analysis in this paper and comprised of sub-niche intermediaries – umbrella organisations which represent the sub-niche groupings of projects on Level 1. Thus, in the conceptual model, intermediary actors are also part of the niche innovation arena and located between niche projects (Level 1) and the regime level. However, these intermediaries appear to be closer to the niche than to the regime level in the MLP terminology. Previous research has highlighted the crucial role these intermediaries play in establishing links between niche actors and regime resource holders in the multi-level institutional environment (Lang and Novy 2014; Agger and Jensen 2015; Braunholtz-Speight 2015). Intermediaries support niche projects by reaching out to the regime level through linking capital which facilitates and scales up the impacts of niche innovations (e.g. through consulting, mediating or leveraging resource access). Bridging capital also exists between the sub-niche intermediaries on Level 2 as they learn, network and develop expectations between each other. Level 3 represents a broader niche-wide intermediary. This is a kind of intermediary that is more commonly represented at the niche level, and is able to undertake a broader role in terms of coordinating learning and network opportunities, coalescing expectations and articulating them externally. In the case of CLH, this is a relatively new role and takes the form of an emerging Community-Led Housing Alliance (CLHA) which will be explored below.

Above all these the analytical framework (see Figure 1) shows a patchwork of regime actors such as local authorities, housing associations, funders and builders. The interesting point to note is that there are multiple upward and downward connections between the regime and these three interconnected niche levels. So, for example, vertical linking capital exists between local projects in various sub-niches on Level 1 and their respective sub-niche intermediary organisations on Level 2, but also directly between a local project on Level 1 and the larger niche-wide intermediary on Level 3 as well as with people in positions of influence and power in formal regime institutions such as resource holders in local authorities. As Boyer (2015) shows in a study of ecovillages, the engagement with outsiders and diffusion practices can be very different among projects of the same CLH sub-niche.

3. Methods

CLH is still a relatively new and under-researched phenomenon in England. Thus, a qualitative research strategy is applied, and an abductive approach pursued. This process starts with developing hypotheses from case studies, and moves to relating evidence to the analytical frameworks of MLP, social capital and SNM, and then successively refines the analytical elements (Sayer 1992; Dubois and Gadde 2002).

The paper draws on a large data reservoir established by the authors and in particular, makes use of two waves of fieldwork in 2013/14 and 2015/16 which generated an evidence base of 60 semi-structured qualitative. Apart from interviews with housing experts, case studies of organisations were selected from the main housing models in the CLH niche (see Table 1) and interviews contrasted perspectives from different levels (see Figure 1). Particularly relevant for the analysis in this paper are interviews with representatives of CLH intermediaries, such as umbrella organisations and secondary cooperatives, and with stakeholders on the regime level, such as representatives of government bodies or charitable foundations (see Figure 1). These interviews helped reconstruct interactions and resource flows, whereby interviewees were always encouraged to provide concrete examples of networking. Potential research participants were identified through network contacts of the authors, membership databases of umbrella organisations, e.g. the ‘National Alliance’ database by the community foundation Building and Social Housing Foundation (BSHF), internet searches and snowball sampling. Interviews were taped, transcribed and complemented by participation in and observation of umbrella body meetings, analysis of secondary sources (including government papers, internet and media sources) and field observations of housing sites to increase contextual and content related plausibility of the empirical data. Qualitative content analysis helped structure the empirical material from interview transcripts, observation protocols and documents seeking to discover central concepts and relationships in the data in order to address the research aim (Mayring 2010).

Table 1. Characteristics of CLH sub-niches as grassroots innovations (Source: Authors based on Seyfang and Smith 2007; Hatzl et al. 2016; Heywood 2016).

	Cohousing	Cooperatives (including mutuals and tenant management organisations)	Self-Help Housing	Self- and Custom Build	Community Land Trusts (CLTs)
Context (Dominant institutional housing contexts in which CLH initiatives operate)	Private home ownership, cooperative rental	Non-profit social (rented) housing	Private rented housing	Home ownership	Non-profit social (rented) housing
Driving force (Main motivations of participants)	Mainly ideological values: alternative lifestyle, intentional community, environmental awareness	Mainly social needs: affordability; good housing quality; member /community democracy	Mainly social needs: affordability, housing quality; capacity building; work integration; poverty alleviation	Place making; alternative lifestyle, architectural innovations, local control of production	Mainly social needs: affordability; place stewardship; local resilience
Organisational form (Legal aspect)	Range – private, cooperative, community – some include CLT status	Member / community cooperatives, housing associations	Range including community benefit societies, community interest companies, companies limited by guarantee, cooperatives, charities, CLTs	Range – mainly private but also some collective custom build using community interest company or member cooperative	Range including private, cooperative, community, all include CLT status to lock in asset for community benefit
Organisational form (Governance)	Typically bottom-up, resident self-management	Bottom-linked governance: mix of local resident self-management and top-down professional management by secondary cooperatives	Typically local project-based partnerships led by sub-niche intermediaries, incl. social enterprises	Typically developer-led with resident participation	Bottom-linked governance: mix of local community self-management and top-down professional management by CLT umbrellas and/or housing associations
Resource base (Financial resources, revenues, operating resources)	Mainly self-financed, in-kind contributions and commercial bank loans; some early stage public grants	Public grants, social business model, voluntary work, cooperative member resources	Public funding, voluntary work, cross-subsidising from social enterprise activity	Funding channelled through commercial developers; commercial loans, government grants	Early stage public grants, external support from large private builders and housing associations, voluntary works
Size (sector and project)	14 completed schemes with over 40 in development in England Average project size: clusters of homes 15–30	836 organisations across the UK, about 169,000 units, 91% of cooperatives based in England Average project size: individual homes to clusters >50	110 organisations by 2015, bringing about 1297 properties (3025 bedrooms) back into use between 2012 and 2015 Average project size: usually individual homes	Individual self-builders represent around 10% of all new builds in England Average project size: one off homes to large clusters >100	About 160 projects around England Average project size: small clusters of homes 5–30

Participatory observations at intermediary level included meetings, consultations and learning events organised by BSHF, Confederation of Co-operative Housing (CCH), HACT (Housing Associations’ Charitable Trust), Mutual Housing Group (MHG), self-help-housing.org (SHHO), and UK Cohousing Network (UKCN) between 2013 and 2016. Our understanding of strategic niche management has continuously been updated between 2017 and 2019 through active engagement with developments in the field, including engagement by one author in a CLH regional enabling hub and an only recently created umbrella body UKCT (UK Cohousing Trust). Furthermore, a workshop at a CLH conference (‘Hope for Housing’) at Birmingham University in July 2018 allowed us to test and validate emerging explanations using Figure 1 as a discussion tool.

4. Community-led housing: an emerging grassroots niche?

Urban development in England is characterised by a range of ‘wicked problems’. These include building stocks that are energy inefficient, as well as the growing energy and water consumption, and waste generation in cities. Further challenges are related to increasing unaffordability and undersupply of homes while at the same time, there is a shortage of available building land, also linked to land banking and speculation by private developers. Moreover, changing demographics mean a rising number of older people and individual households will risk social isolation and higher environmental impact. Although greater environmental consciousness has been noticed on the housing regime level, policymakers as well as the mainstream builders, planners and property owners have so far not adequately acknowledged and addressed the abovementioned problems in urban development (Bergman et al. 2007; Seyfang 2010; Gibbs and O’Neill 2015). Recent housing-related welfare reforms in England, such as the bedroom tax, have not produced expected positive outcomes in terms of addressing social sustainability (Gibb 2015). Furthermore, housing is still mainly considered as a commodity and individual good, and not as a process which enables the residents to adequately address their needs and promotes community (Jarvis 2015; Boyer and Leland 2018).

In response to problems and tensions at the housing regime level, England has witnessed the emergence of particular types of grassroots housing innovations corresponding to more or less established groups of local initiatives under the label ‘community-led housing’ (HCA 2011; BSHF 2014) which can be defined as ‘housing shaped and controlled by a group that represents the residents and/or the wider community that will be served by the housing’ (Heywood 2016, p. 12). Similar grassroots niches can be found across Europe (Tummers 2016; Czischke 2018) and in the US (Jarvis 2015; Boyer and Leland 2018) with ‘collaborative housing’ emerging as an umbrella concept that is ‘wide enough to encompass all international variations’ (Fromm 2012, p. 364).

While the community-led niche is in its infancy, and numerically remains an insignificant part of the overall UK housing stock (less than 1%), there is a growing appetite for alternative housing provision.² Advocates claim a number of benefits for CLH in terms of socio-economic and environmental sustainability. It can deliver affordable, low impact and socially cohesive housing that can empower communities and offer substance to the localism agenda based on equality and fairness through building social capital and active citizen engagement. These community-driven innovations have high levels of social relevance as collective responses to the multiple housing problems outlined above (Chatterton 2013; Lang and Mullins 2015; Heywood 2016). In light of these positive aspects, a recent study suggests that the limited diffusion of CLH is not related to low public interest but related to CLH not yet being accessible enough for the broader population (Boyer and Leland 2018). Besides regime-level barriers, for instance, connected to the planning and housebuilding industry, diffusion has also been hampered by the increasing fragmentation of knowledge and information pools. This is reflected in the growing number of umbrella networks and intermediary organisations that have emerged over recent years not only in England but also in other countries, such as the Netherlands (Sanders and van Bortel 2018).

Rather than representing one unified niche, there are five identifiable sub-niches in CLH in England: community land trusts (CLTs), mutuals and cooperatives, cohousing, self and custom-build, and self-help housing. In reality, these are relatively messy and blurred, although some coherence has been imposed by the sub-niche intermediaries. In fact, regime actors also impose a demand for a more structured field when, for instance, launching specific funding streams.

For the purposes of this paper, these various CLH sub-niches are conceptualised as grassroots social innovations which primarily pursue social objectives and ‘[…] respond to the local situation and the interests and values of the communities involved’ (Seyfang and Smith 2007, p. 585). Grassroots social innovations emerging from civil society can be distinguished from market-based technological innovations in terms of context (orientation towards third/public sector provision and cooperative, not for profit and social housing), driving force (social, ideological and needs-based orientation), organisational form (a bias towards community-led organisations such as grassroots associations, cooperatives, community development organisations, community-public partnerships which are bottom-up or at least bottom-linked), resource base (with a bias towards public grant funding, voluntary work, member capital or pump-priming by small-scale innovative developers). These four aspects can be used to outline the major contours of the five sub-niches (see Table 1).

In line with Seyfang and Smith (2007), the five sub-niches of CLH can be considered to be part of the social economy context where one finds initiatives primarily pursuing social aims, focused on serving local community needs. This is in contrast to the mainly profit-seeking initiatives in a market economy context. However, such a simple dichotomy (market vs. social economy context) does not help much to understand the messy nature and practices of grassroots innovation in English CLH and the institutional environment in which they operate.

In particular, given the limited institutional completeness of CLH, it makes more sense to conceptualise CLH and its sub-niches in relation to the dysfunctional mainstream housing institutions to which these grassroots innovations respond (e.g. non-profit social housing, private renting, commercial volume builders, home ownership) (see ‘context’ in Table 1).

In practice, grassroots initiatives often have a hybrid nature (Hatzl et al. 2016), weaving together market, state and community context, similar to social enterprises (Defourny and Nyssens 2013). For example, while many organisations involved in CLH have a strong grassroots, even activist, character and align themselves less with the formal non-profit housing sector (such as housing associations) and private market actors (e.g. custom builders or private letting agencies), others are more closely aligned to market actors, emerging from innovative small and medium-sized architectural and building enterprises. Moreover, all grassroots niches are in some way embedded in institutionalised housing fields of the non-profit and private market sector through its regulators, funders, builders, architects, consultants, etc.

5. Strategic niche management in community-led housing (CLH)

In this section, we empirically assess our multi-level network model of the grassroots niche (see Figure 1) drawing on data from CLH in England. Furthermore, we apply a process perspective on SNM which identifies three distinct phases of niche building in CLH in England. For each phase, we are exploring the role of intermediaries in facilitating niche-building activity, i.e. social networking, learning, and expectations’ alignment. The results are summarised in Table 2 below and discussed in detail in the following sections.

Table 2. The process of strategic niche management in CLH in England. (Source: Authors).

	Period
	Public promotion and stagnation of cooperative housing (late 1960s to early 1990s)	The re-emergence of CLH and blossoming of intermediaries (2006–2014)	Towards integrated CLH intermediaries (2014-date)
Key developments on the regime level	Urban renewal programmes promote cooperatives as alternative to housing clearance Housing Act of 1974: registered cooperative providers can apply for grants Co-operative Housing Agency (1976–1979): specialist government intermediary providing infrastructure and funding to cooperatives Housing Act of 1988: focus shifts to mixed funding and large housing associations	Global Financial Crisis in 2008 Conservative party manifesto for election in 2010 Coalition Government’s ‘Big Society’ and ‘Localism’ agenda leading to small-scale funding programmes, such as Empty Homes Community Grants Programme (2012–2015) 2011 Housing Strategy for England leading to national self-build register and pressure on local authorities to release land for (community) self-build	‘Community Housing Fund’ announced by Central Government in November 2016 Large national third sector funding organisations (Unltd, Locality and Power to Change) launched dedicated programmes for CLH in 2017
Strategic Niche Management (Levels 1–3)
Strategic Niche Management Aspect 1. ‘Forming new vertical networks with intermediaries’	Individual consultants and professionals start raising awareness for the cooperative idea among residents Emergence of first intermediaries in the cooperative sub-niche (Level 2), so-called secondary cooperatives (‘secondaries’) in certain places (e.g. Birmingham, Liverpool, London) ‘Secondaries” formalise personal linkages to regime-level actors, such as Housing Corporation, local and central government to secure public funding for new projects on Level 1	Emergence of new sub-niches (Level 1) and respective regional and national intermediaries (Level 2): UKCN (2007), NaCSBA (2008), Self-help-housing.org (SHHO) (2009) and NCLTN (2010) These sub-niche intermediaries initially pursue independent upwards linking to access small-scale regime level resources and distribute to their sub-niche groups on Level 1 New intermediaries SHHO, NCLTN and NaCSBA are more closely aligned around Central Government priorities in housing compared to incumbent intermediary CCH	Incorporation of the charity BSHF (now ‘World Habitat’) into the MHG (2014) on Level 2 Emergence of first integrated niche intermediaries (Level 3): ‘Community-led Housing Alliance (CLHA)’ (2014–2018) and later ‘Community Led Homes’ Lobbying led by NCLTN in Westminster for a ‘Community Housing Fund’ and also for support from foundations which should eventually benefit different sub-niches
Strategic Niche Management Aspect 2. ‘Learning and dissemination practices involving intermediaries’	Formalised ‘secondaries’ promote the concept of cooperative housing and facilitate the emergence of individual (‘primary’) cooperatives on Level 1 ‘Secondaries’ provide moderation, mediation and access to finance and management for tenant communities in ‘primary’ cooperatives (Level 1)	Sub-niche intermediaries serve as central knowledge and information pool for their sub-niche projects on Level 1 through websites, newsletters, handbooks and events for advocacy, promotion and competence building CCH Mutual Housing Commission in 2009 results in joint promotion activities of CLH options to (potential) Level 1 groups (e.g. ‘Getting it built’ co-organised by UKCN and NCLT in 2012)	Major learning event at Windsor castle in 2014 facilitated by BSHF BSHF sought promotion with central government and provided guidance and advice on CLH for over 40 local authorities Nationwide Foundation provides grant funding to strengthen actor links within the CLHA, commissioning launch of website and research reports to create evidence base Emergence of regional enabler hubs (such as Leeds Community Homes)
Strategic Niche Management Aspect 3. ‘Expectations’ alignment among intermediary actors’	Upwards fitting: one group of cooperatives aligns more around vision of professionalisation and growth to strengthen legitimacy among regime-level actors (e.g. BCHS, RCH) Downwards fitting: another group aligns more around vision of resident self-management, independence and loose connection to ‘secondaries’ to strengthen legitimacy among local communities (e.g. Radical Routes network) National cooperative federation (CCH) formed in 1993 after various attempts	Messiness due to multiple sub-niches labels and intermediaries each driven by unique contextual factors, priorities and ambitions Some projects on Level 1 still establish vertical links to regime without support from intermediaries (e.g. CLTs to housing associations) Attempts of umbrellas to represent other parts of the niche, e.g. by SHHO Mutual Housing Group (MHG) from 2010–2014: Loose coordination body of all sub-niche umbrellas on Level 2	Closer alignment of expectations and joint attempt to create sustainable income streams for the niche ‘Establishment of “community-led housing” as a term…widely used across the media, housing sector and beyond’^a Community Housing Fund leads to sub-niche intermediaries agreeing to take responsibility for different aspects of strategic niche building: training and accreditation (CCH), common website as single-point access (UKCN), support for regional and local enabler hubs (NCLTN), small grants programme (Locality)

^a http://www.nationwidefoundation.org.uk/projects-we-fund/funding-2013-16/building-and-social-housingfoundation-bshf/ [accessed November 14, 2018].

5.1. Public promotion and stagnation of cooperative housing

The first period of strategic niche building in CLH, involving significant intermediary activity, took place in the cooperative housing sub-niche in the 1970s and 1980s. Although this period of public promotion of cooperative housing seems quite distant now, its legacy were governance units which still exist today as well as housing activists and consultants who, as intermediaries, have influenced more recent niche-building activity in CLH.

5.1.1. Key developments on the regime level

In the late 1960s, local governments in major English cities, such as Birmingham, initiated urban renewal programmes and area-based initiatives (ABIs) that eventually promoted the cooperative model as an alternative to housing clearance. Cooperative housing was proposed as an organisational model that could contribute to the common good by acquiring and improving poor quality private rented housing as an alternative to large-scale council housing. The Housing Act of 1974 represented a window of opportunity for advocates of the cooperative niche because it promoted housing rehabilitation instead of clearance, and enabled formal housing cooperatives, such as co-ownership and self-help cooperatives, to apply for grants with the Housing Corporation, the government intermediary body and regulator of housing associations. The Labour Housing Minister’s personal support even led to the creation of a specialist intermediary called Co-operative Housing Agency which from 1976–1979 operated in parallel to housing associations, providing infrastructure and funding to individual cooperatives. A cooperative resident and former social activist describes the urban regeneration and housing policy approach in Birmingham at that time:

‘[…] housing cooperatives were endorsed by the city council through its urban renewal programme which was in fact quite a radical policy for Birmingham City Council to form local multi-disciplinary project groups to work in particular areas of the city […] they were looking to revive local community by offering improvement grants and helping them refurbish their houses’ (Resident Representative of Small Heath cooperative, 2 June 2016).

5.1.2. New vertical network formation

A consulting group of young architects and planners was commissioned by Birmingham city council to facilitate the set-up of six housing cooperatives between 1977 and 1988 in Small Heath, a part of Birmingham, just beyond the large-scale clearance areas where residents were concerned about possible demolition of their homes. The same cooperative resident remembers how he got involved with the urban renewal project group and in setting-up his own housing cooperative:

‘I came as a professional to the area, so I got a dual kind of resident and professional and got involved in a local residents’ association […] we had one project team based in an old school in our neighbourhood and then the people from this team approached me and said ‘we’re thinking of setting up a housing coop in your street. Can you get involved and make it work?’. So I joined that group and we went knocking on doors in this street and said ‘we’ve got money to renovate your old houses, what do you think?’’ (Resident Representative of Small Heath cooperative, 2 June 2016).

In contrast to top-down government intermediaries, such as the Cooperative Housing Agency, the first place-based intermediaries, also called ‘secondaries’, emerged from the bottom-up cooperative housing movement, such as Birmingham Co-operative Housing Services (BCHS, established in 1979) and CDS Co-operatives in London (established in 1975). A Liverpool branch of CDS was established in 1977, detaching itself from London as an independent organisation (Thompson forthcoming). Over the years, other place-based cooperative intermediaries, like Redditch Co-operative Homes in the West Midlands (RCH, established in 1998) and North West Housing Services (NWHS, formed in 2006) in the Liverpool area, have developed stable vertical linkages to key regime actors, including local authority professionals and political leaders, which has facilitated access to building land and funding streams.

5.1.2.1. Learning and dissemination practices involving intermediaries

These intermediary organisations provide services to local tenant-managed cooperatives in their areas, also called ‘primaries’. Their focus is on supporting the volunteer committees with professional tenancy management, such as rent accounts and maintenance, but also providing legal advice and support with financing. Furthermore, managers of ‘secondaries’ facilitate community building among tenants and establish mechanisms for conflict resolution.

However, not every housing cooperative was convinced that being part of a secondary cooperative was beneficial, as the following statement shows.

‘We are an autonomous coop, we are a legal entity, we manage our own affairs, so why do we need a secondary coop? […] There was a time when the secondary coop was providing services to the primary coops […] it turned out that in this particular coop they weren’t happy with the service they got. And maybe other coops began to feel the same thing, and the secondary coop had its own problems of survival’ (Resident Representative of Small Heath cooperative, 2 June 2016).

5.1.2.2. Expectations’ alignment among intermediary actors

Indeed, regime-level opportunities for housing cooperatives already began to disappear in the mid-1980s, when the Housing Cooperation increasingly perceived cooperatives as a non-efficient option to improve the quality of housing, of a belief that the tenant governance approach became too resource intensive. With the Housing Act of 1988, public funding was much harder to secure for smaller non-profit providers, including the housing cooperatives. The focus of the Housing Corporation shifted to mixed funded (public and private) projects by larger non-profit housing associations (Murie 2008). This practically diminished the perceived legitimacy of housing cooperatives among key institutional actors on the regime level, and limited opportunities for serious attempts of new cooperative housing developments up until the mid-2000s.

Since the 1980s, less cooperative housing organisations have chosen to become registered providers. Some tried to grow through mergers in order to better compete for regime-level resources, such as BCHS. But this approach of scaling-up turned out to endanger the tenant management approach:

‘There’s always a danger when you have a secondary that’s setup above primary organisations that it too will take more control than it perhaps ought to […] and BCHS was also part of a big housing association, so in a sense BCHS itself was being disempowered […] consultancy and tenant management work reduced […] So it was stagnating in the same way as the coops’ (Housing consultant and former executive of BCHS, 9 August 2016).

However, we also find the exact opposite practice among more radical cooperatives, some represented by the Radical Routes umbrella since 1992. These cooperatives initially emerged from the informal squatting movement for local authority acquired housing, left empty following the IMF financial crisis of the mid-1970s. Instead of turning upwards to the regime level, they decided to strengthen links to local communities (see Level 1 in Figure 1). This created the roots for the re-emergence of the self-help housing sub-niche in the early 2000s (see below).

Only in 1993, a stronger national intermediary body for housing cooperatives was formed, the Confederation of Co-operative Housing (CCH) (Rowlands 2009), but it already found fewer opportunities to build vertical linkages to central government. By that time, the window of opportunity for scaling-up cooperative housing to the regime level had already closed.

5.2. The re-emergence of CLH and blossoming of intermediaries

5.2.1. Key developments on the regime level

The recent resurgence of civic action around housing in England, but also in other European countries, coincidences with the Global Financial Crisis in 2008 (Mullins and Moore 2018). However, as shown in the previous section, CLH models and especially the cooperative model, have been around for much longer and niche-building activity, involving intermediaries, already started in the 1970s. Nevertheless, the re-emergence of CLH as a niche in the 2000s was stimulated by emblematic events on the regime level. The Coalition Government’s localism agenda was an opportunity for the cooperative model to be rediscovered and for new CLH sub-niches to get more political attention as innovative, alternative forms of housing provision that can respond to social problems (DCLG 2011a; Lang and Mullins 2015). While the Government’s localism agenda only materialised in small-scale funding programmes, a representative of the national cooperative intermediary CCH acknowledged that it created a positive discursive environment for their models:

‘To be fair to this government, there has perhaps been more talk about our kinds of models of housing – whether we call it community-led housing or cooperative housing – over the last two to three years than I can remember in any government, which is quite astonishing’ (CCH representative, 30 April 2013).

5.2.2. New vertical network formation

Besides the longstanding cooperative intermediary CCH, five more sub-niches developed their respective regional and national intermediary bodies. This blossoming of intermediaries started in 2006 with a national CLT demonstration programme which eventually led to the formation of the National CLT Network (NCLTN) in 2010.

The different sub-niche intermediaries developed their own linking strategies to align with regime-level actors. While discourses on tenant-controlled housing emerging from the cooperative movement still aligned less with central government priorities on housing, the younger sub-niche intermediaries acted more pragmatically, especially the UK Cohousing Network (founded in 2007), the NCLTN and the National Custom & Self Build Association (NaCSBA) (founded in 2008), and have been more effective in mobilising short-term state support. They managed to provide practical substance to the abstract political ideas of a ‘big society’ and ‘localism’, already mentioned in the Conservative Party manifesto for the election in 2010. These intermediary actors demonstrated the relevance of their models to regime actors by offering practical solutions to ‘wicked problems’ on the ground. Thus, CLTs successfully addressed the crisis of rural, and later also urban housing affordability and second home ownership. This engagement with dominant political discourses helped new CLH intermediaries to gain the needed legitimacy for modifying institutional rules and resources in their favour. NCLTN even established a statutory definition of CLTs, which modified regime practices in their favour.

Self-help housing (SHH) is a further example of a sub-niche able to develop effective linking capital. One community-led housing activist from the 1970s founded the intermediary self-help-housing.org (‘SHHO’) and managed to knit together different organisations under this umbrella – with a more positive, collective framing of cooperative housing ideas among participants and external actors. He managed to mobilise some government funding and increased links with other sub-fields within the CLH niche. He also established a discourse to legitimate SHH as a way to address various social problems, such as empty homes, homelessness, employment and training, and fear of crime (see also Mullins 2018). The founder of SHHO explains how the emergence of his and other CLH sub-niches in the 2000s is linked to the development in the housing associations sector:

‘So what’s happened is the housing associations have moved away from this community-led housing space […] from the 1990s right through to the 2000s – because they’ve become much bigger and asset rich and scaled up’ (Founder of SHHO, 10 May 2013).

The distinctive aspect of this sub-niche is the absence of a formal intermediary but rather the presence of a small number of highly influential and vertically linked advocates who have supported both individual projects and sub-niche development through peer to peer networks. This strategy enjoyed a similar level of success to CLTs in securing £50 m in public grant (2012–2015) under the empty homes community grants programme. Further support was leveraged from banks, social investors and charitable foundations at the regime level and this continued after the grant funding ended. The linking strategy in this sub-niche also builds on long-standing place-based organisations established in the 1980s and 1990s including Canopy, Community Campus ’87, Latch and Giroscope, in Yorkshire and the North East of England. The founder of SHHO summarises the approach of his sub-niche as follows:

‘My main interest is mobilising people to make use of empty properties for anyone who hasn’t got access to housing […] and you get some training and employment opportunities as people learn how to build things […] and the beauty of this is you don’t need much money, only enough to do it up […] these empty properties in the North are cheap. You can maybe afford to buy them. Or maybe the council gives them to you’ (Founder of SHHO, 10 May 2013).

In particular, NaCSBA has aligned itself very closely with government policy targets to increase housing supply. It has been involved in a number of – positive evaluations of – custom-build houses in England, to the extent to which it renamed itself to include the term custom-build. It specifically gained traction at the regime level through the 2011 Housing Strategy for England which set out a custom-build homes programme to double the size of this sub-niche over the next decade. NaCSBA was able to engage with regime actors to modify institutional rules and resources, for example, the requirement for local authorities to setup self-build registers and make sites available under the Self-Build and Custom Housebuilding Act in 2015. In the words of a CCH representative, the self-build niche was well-positioned for grants ‘[…] because this government likes the idea of individuals going out and building their homes’ (CCH representative, 30 April 2013). This quote, however, also indicates that NaCSBAs main focus was on individual rather than community self-build, distancing it from the other CLH sub-niches.

5.2.3. Learning and dissemination practices involving intermediaries

CLH actors often regard themselves more as social activists rather than merely housing providers and hence build up deep bonds of affinity between group members. What emerges from this is a desire to transfer learning between similar projects, but also to advocate to a wider group of stakeholders (e.g. from other CLH sub-niches) their unique, albeit small, contribution to resolving the housing crisis. This is particularly noticeable within cohousing and cooperative projects which usually have an organisational commitment to sharing learning.

With growth and diversity of sub-niche intermediaries, an increasing commitment to capturing and sharing this learning developed. For example, every sub-niche intermediary has developed its own website and associated reports and tools advocating for how to form projects from the perspective of their sub-niche. However, what is evident from the review of these learning tools are significant overlaps in terms of features promoted such as land stewardship, place making, low carbon building, social connection, and affordability which actually span various sub-niches. Notably, learning started to increasingly occur across sub-niche intermediaries. For example, in 2012, the CLT and Cohousing networks worked together to undertake a joint roadshow entitled ‘Getting it built’. In the case of self-help housing, the very lean support structure of one part-time coordinator and a website suggests a high reliance on peer learning and sharing of experience across the sub-niche through formal regional meetings and less formal local networking.

5.2.4. Expectations’ alignment among intermediary actors

The third factor that underpins effective niche-building concerns expectations, especially in terms of the ability to develop shared and specific visions, aims and goals. However, there is a certain degree of messiness in the overall niche due to the presence of multiple sub-niches and vertical networking strategies each driven by their unique contextual factors, priorities and ambitions. Given their distinctive historical trajectories, bridging capital has not naturally developed between the different sub-niches in CLH which include more pragmatic advocates of individual self-building and aspiring owner occupation as well as more politically motivated cooperative and intentional cohousing community representatives. While CLTs, for instance, have an excellent network of regional umbrella organisations which link up to a national umbrella, individual CLT projects still attempt to directly create vertical partnerships with larger stakeholders in the regime, especially with housing associations, but also on isolated occasions with central and local government. However, neither this direct linking approach nor the sub-niche intermediary organisations managed to create a critical mass of projects. The former has lacked organisational capacity and financial resources and has shown the limits of self-help. The latter has struggled to create generalizable organisational and business models underpinned by participation and resident empowerment.

Some sub-niche intermediaries, such as SHHO, have tried to reinvent themselves as wider bodies to represent other parts of the entire niche, mainly to ensure greater financial stability, and this has been effective in extending bridging capital on the intermediary level (see Level 2 in Figure 1). However, none were able to gain the legitimacy and resources required to undertake this role. The question remained whether a cohering logic to CLH sub-niches could be brought to the fore that can ultimately scale-up and reshape regime practices? Thus, the absence of a more integrated niche intermediary that could effectively communicate niche-wide expectations upwards to government actors was increasingly recognised as a gap that needed to be filled. In this context, individual sub-niche strategies were brought together. The forerunner was the Mutual Housing Group (MHG). This was a loose alliance of the umbrella bodies operating in each of the main sub-niches which met regularly between 2010 and 2014. It was founded following the CCH Mutual Housing Commission in 2009 and a CLH umbrella representative explains the reasons for setting up as follows.

‘We [the sub-niche intermediaries] all work together because it has been a problem for our sector, with all these different names and titles we have confused everybody […] we have initiated this relatively informal group called the Mutual Housing Group, which brings together all the different bodies that work in the field to come out with a common approach for how we’re going to do things and make some sense with government’ (CCH representative, 30 April 2013).

Although, the different umbrella organisations did not fully want to merge identities into a single CLH intermediary, they were committed to search for an external partner with capabilities to provide common support resources.

5.3. Towards integrated CLH intermediaries: addressing the niche coherence problem

5.3.1. Key developments on the regime level

The most recent significant event on the regime level was the UK government’s 2016 budget announcement to establish an annual £60 m ‘Community Housing Fund’. It invited several CLH sub-niche intermediaries to work with the government’s Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) to develop a strategy for the niche. Moreover, three large national third sector support and funding organisations with a wider remit than housing (Unltd, Locality and Power to Change), in turn, launched dedicated programmes for CLH in 2017. This indicates growing recognition of the potential of the niche and its potential to influence regime actors.

5.3.2. New vertical network formation

The successful bid for the ‘Community Housing Fund’ was initially made possible through the incorporation of a new actor, the charity BSHF (now ‘World Habitat’), into the MHG already in 2014. BSHF actively supported the MHG to get government support, and in turn, received financial support from another foundation, Nationwide, to strengthen sub-niche links and build the so-called ‘Community-led Housing Alliance’ (CLHA), the first integrated niche intermediary in CLH. CLHA was born at a major learning event in May 2014 on ‘scaling up community housing solutions’. This was followed by close working and negotiating efforts led by NCLTN at the regime level, involving Government ministers and officials³, eventually resulting in the £60 m Government Community Housing Fund to support CLH projects. In spite of the significant and ongoing task of creating a more unified niche for CLH, CLHA represented a step-change in the development of vertical social capital in the niche.

5.3.3. Learning and dissemination practices involving intermediaries

With the facilitation of BSHF, there were more recent attempts to develop and consolidate niche-level learning among umbrella organisations. This included two research reports supported by Nationwide Foundation in 2015 alongside its funding for CLHA on how to deliver and scale-up CLH,⁴ and a Commission in 2016 on CLH led by the Co-operative Council’s Innovation Network.⁵ BSHF provided guidance and advice on CLH for over 40 local authorities. Moreover, CLT, cohousing and cooperative intermediaries have formed a formal partnership to unify learning messages for upward dissemination to regime actors. Since 2018, there has been a closer cooperation between these three sub-niches through a common joint venture known as ‘Community Led Homes’ which succeeded the CLHA (see Lang and Mullins 2019). A new sub-niche umbrella, UK Cohousing Trust (UKCT), also emerged with a broad research, policy and learning brief.

5.3.4. Expectations’ alignment among intermediary actors

The crucial learning event in May 2014 on ‘scaling up community housing solutions’ built shared understanding of the overlapping aims and models that sub-niches represented, and their approaches to scaling up. While CLHA is an attempt to resolve the coherence problem and to create a niche-level intermediary, its effectiveness relied on continued support from and productive engagement with sub-niches and their own regime level linking strategies. One of the early tasks of the CLHA was to help create a statutory definition for CLH, using the following conditions: providing accommodation to the local community; that the local community have the opportunity to become members and also provide the majority vote on resolutions; that any profits will be used to benefit the local community; that the accommodation let to individuals is owned and/or managed by the stated body. Each of the individual sub-niche identities such as cohousing, CLT, cooperative or self and custom-build were deemed insufficient labels to build a national movement. This has resulted in a smoothing out of sub-niche identities within CLHA to maximise opportunities for vertical linking with statutory agencies and funders. Meanwhile, at niche project level 1 (see Figure 1), we had already seen the emergence of hybrids that cross sub-niche boundaries.

Since the successful proposal for the Community Housing Fund in 2016, new governance arrangements emerged on the intermediary level 3 (see Figure 1). The collaboration between the three umbrellas NCLTN, CCH and UKCN, and Locality, an umbrella organisation for development trusts, has been more formalised. While preserving the sub-field identity, each umbrella agreed to take responsibility for different aspects of niche-building such as training and accreditation (CCH), a common website platform as single-point access (UKCN), support for regional and local enabler hubs (NCLTN) and small grants programme (Locality). As the Community Housing Fund will end in 2020, it is too early to tell what its impact will be on niche building and scaling-up CLH.

6. Discussion and conclusions

This paper has explored grassroots niche development in relation to CLH in England in order to provide further conceptual development of SNM frameworks as applied to the field of grassroots innovations, especially through the lens of various forms of social capital. The presented framework and the empirical support provided should facilitate understanding and further systematic investigation of the role of intermediaries in niche building. However, future studies need to test our framework on a broader empirical basis. By way of conclusion, a number of key points for future research emerge from this work.

First is the issue of inter-organisational relations. The paper offers a more multi-level understanding of the grassroots niche innovation arena in which can be identified local projects grouped together in distinct sub-niches (Level 1 in Figure 1) supported by different niche-level intermediary organisations (Levels 2 and 3). These compete and cooperate for scarce resources, and thus pursue parallel vertical linking strategies with the regime (see Figure 1). Similar to Gibbs and O’Neill (2015) study on the green building sector, our study shows that the CLH niche is far from being a homogeneous network characterised by bonding capital. We identified diversity in terms of goals, values, ideologies and networking strategies of its niche actors on different levels. This suggests a complex co-presence of linking, bridging and bonding capital in the niche.

From the SNM logic, the creation of the CLHA and later the Community Led Homes joint venture makes absolute sense – a single niche-level intermediary that fosters stronger coordination and integration of existing sub-niche intermediaries to create a coherent niche. However, as already experienced in other grassroots niches (Seyfang et al. 2014), this attempt needs to account for differences between the nature of market-based and civil-society-based innovations (Witkamp et al. 2011). Too close alignment of expectations and visions among grassroots and civil-society actors and implementation of a niche-wide intermediation infrastructure turns out to be difficult. This can be observed with the recent government stimulus from the Community Housing Fund which did result in closer alignment of expectations among existing sub-niche intermediaries, but the new niche-wide intermediary Community Led Homes carefully preserves the sub-niche identities. Bridges have been built across core principles that key actors in sub-niche intermediary organisations agree on. Their opposition to the current housing regime provides elements of this. But beyond this, there is limited agreement on a joint growth strategy for the niche.

The paper also introduces a dynamic perspective on SNM to understand niche development as a long-term process. It shows how earlier attempts of strategic niche management – even if not successful – need to be considered to make sense of more recent moves towards greater niche integration. Thus, our analysis reveals that cooperatives used to be a legitimate housing model for urban renewal already in the 1970s in England, leading to the creation of intermediary structures, called secondary cooperatives, which still exist today. In the early 2000s, a new window of opportunity for CLH opened on the housing regime level. Some actors who had already been involved in promoting community-led forms of housing in the 1970s and 1980s, re-engaged and played an active role in the recent wave of niche building. An example is the founder of self-help-housing.org who engaged in skilful networking practices to knit together organisations from different CLH sub-niches under his umbrella and mobilised state support for bringing back empty homes into use.

This leads us to a second issue of impact. While CLH generally supports socially and environmentally sustainable lifestyles (Sanguinetti 2014), individual projects and sub-niches are often putting an emphasis on either socio-economic (e.g. cooperatives) or ecological aspects (e.g. cohousing) (see also Table 2). The creation of a broader-based intermediary – the CLHA and later Community Led Homes – is an effort to enhance and consolidate these different sustainability practices in the CLH niche and influence regime actors towards more integrated sustainable development (Bergman et al. 2007). Furthermore, Community Led Homes engages with intermediaries from the wider sustainability and community development field, such as Locality, which raises the prospect of a broader transition to a local foundational economy of which CLH forms part (Bowman et al. 2014).

However, we often simply assume first that grassroots actors actively want to change regime practices, and second, that they always have the capacity to instigate change in their immediate environment (Middlemiss and Parrish 2010). On the one hand, this study suggests that CLH umbrella organisations do play an important role in developing local capacity for transitions to sustainable development, e.g. through promoting learning between CLH projects, and leveraging local community resources through vertical linkages to regime-level resources (mainly short-term funding). On the other hand, we find evidence of CLH actors in local projects and even intermediary bodies who are more concerned with consolidating their local initiatives through mutual support rather than aiming to influence regime practices. Thus, our findings question an unadapted application of the simplistic growth-oriented SNM approach. Grassroots innovations do not necessarily seek wider regime change whereas SNM implies that market-based niche innovations ultimately want to break through to the regime level (Seyfang and Smith 2007). This reinforces the wider point made by Nicholls and Teasdale (2017) that social innovation often fails to transform the macro-context to which it responds and instead may perpetuate ‘neoliberalism by stealth’.

As mentioned earlier in text, successful transition management would additionally require the strategic long-term support and guidance by policymakers and government actors (Rotmans et al. 2001; Boyer 2015). However, what we found in the case of CLH in England were state actors who provided only temporal support to the CLH grassroots niche, such as the grants provided by the Co-operative Housing Agency in the late 1970s or the small-scale funding streams related to the Coalition government’s localism agenda (2012–2015). It needs to be seen whether the recently announced Community Housing Fund, which currently ends in 2020, will enable a more structural embeddedness of CLH models in housing policy and urban development, similar to cities in Austria (Gruber and Lang 2018; Lang 2019) or Switzerland (Balmer and Gerber 2018).

Third, there are key issues of democratic control related to potential negative effects of linking capital. As niche-level intermediaries, such as Community Led Homes, become information brokers and gatekeepers of resources for local projects, there needs to be meaningful democratic involvement from sub-niches in governance to maintain legitimacy amongst grassroots actors. Checks and balances are required against too much corporate influence and to ensure that sub-niches do not lose their radical and transformative aspects for the sake of being palatable with current regime conditions (Smith and Raven 2012; Gibbs and O’Neill 2015).

A key lesson from international experience is that powerful central umbrella bodies as well as state promotion of community-led forms of housing can lead to isomorphism tendencies and undermine if not completely replace the traditional values of grassroots housing, such as solidarity, self-help and self-organisation (Bengtsson 1992; Lang and Novy 2014). It is in the nature of the cooperative movement that local communities invent and experiment with new organisational structures and also with intermediaries and umbrellas. Local authorities and housing regulatory bodies should thus explicitly encourage diversity of governance models and provide spaces for community-led experimentation in housing, as this is a crucial basis for social innovation which can permeate into official policy. In that sense, the new niche-wide intermediary Community Led Homes should co-exist with, and empower, individual sub-niche umbrella bodies. Intermediaries embracing openness and diversity of approaches lead to more engagement and are more beneficial to diffuse innovation (Sanders and van Bortel 2018).

Nevertheless, more empirical research is needed to explore whether being part of a wider grassroots intermediary might pull niche participants away from their local project objectives. Future studies should also explore how niche intermediaries promoting sustainable housing and communities can connect with supporters and potential beneficiaries of their activities who have not so far been attracted on any significant scale, e.g. the victims of the housing crisis. Such issues point towards new critical agendas and directions for those interested in niche innovation and sustainability transitions, especially if the aspiration for a more socially and ecologically just future society is to be fulfilled.

Acknowledgement

We are grateful to participants in the community-led housing field in England who engaged in various ways with this study and shared their insights and experiences with us. We would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors. The involvement of one author in the development of a regional enabler hub and as a trustee of UK Cohousing Trust after the main fieldwork period is declared.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the FP7 People: Marie-Curie Actions [Marie Curie Intra-European Fellowship, Grant Number 622728]; Austrian Academy of Sciences [APART-fellowship, Grant Number 11696]; Economic and Social Research Council Impact Acceleration [Grant 2017-9, ‘Community Led Housing and Empty Homes’].

Notes on contributors

Richard Lang

Richard Lang is Assistant Professor at the Institute of Innovation Management at Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria. He is Honorary Senior Research Fellow at the School of Social Policy at University of Birmingham, UK, where he previously held a Marie Curie Fellowship. Richard holds a Ph.D. from WU Vienna University of Economics and Business, Austria.

Paul Chatterton

Paul Chatterton is a writer, researcher and campaigner. He is Professor of Urban Futures in the School of Geography. His recent books include Low Impact Living (Routledge) [http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415661614] and Unlocking Sustainable Cities (Pluto Press) [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Unlocking-Sustainable-Cities-Manifesto-Geography/dp/0745337015].

David Mullins

David Mullins is a researcher and social change advocate. He is Emeritus Professor of Housing Policy at the University of Birmingham, a Trustee of UK Cohousing Trust, and a board member of Birmingham Community Homes, Accord Housing and Cluid Housing.

Notes

1. The paper focuses only on England rather than the UK as Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have different legislative contexts for housing.

2. A 2011 YouGov poll commissioned by the Building Societies Association suggested that one in two people would consider building their own home if they felt that they could (DCLG 2011b).

3. See http://www.communitylandtrusts.org.uk/article/2016/12/23/government-unveils-60-million-annual-community-housing-fund [accessed 14 November 2018].

4. See Heywood (2016) and Cadywould and O’Leary (2015).

5. See http://www.councils.coop/case-studies/launch-of-the-ccin-housing-commission/ [accessed 14 November 2018].