Community planning in Northern Ireland: learning from Scotland and Wales

Abstract

The research undertaken in this thesis presents an inquiry into community planning which is considered a new governance approach for improving public service arrangements. Northern Ireland is the last of the devolved administrations to introduce community planning with its introduction having taken place in April 2015. Community planning is a comprehensive approach that functions on the premise that enduring social problems are best addressed through assuming collaborative cross-sector partnership working arrangements. As such, it is subject to all the challenges of partnership working with the added challenges associated with participatory democracy – representation, inclusion and empowerment (Cowell, 2004). When this is taken in tandem with the actuality that governance arrangements in Northern Ireland are traditionally centralised and silo-like in nature, the scale of change required for engendering effective community planning is significant. Given its embryonic state, the research takes the view that community planning in Northern Ireland can be enhanced through drawing lessons from the experiences of its devolved counterparts.

The scope of the research is twofold. Firstly, it theorises the emergence of community planning and conceptualises the approach. Secondly, it employs new institutionalism as an organisational frame and applies the concepts of lesson-drawing (Rose, 1993) and policy mobility to draw holistic and practical lessons from Scotland and Wales. A multiple case study strategy is employed to investigate the governance, policy and practice of community planning with case studies from Northern Ireland utilised to ascertain the receptivity of the proposed lessons. The thesis reports on the transferability of the lessons and asserts those contextual differences in ideology, the institutional environment, knowledge and experience, and resources suggest that the scale of change required to import lessons is considerable.

Date of Award	Jan 2016
Original language	English
Supervisor	Greg Lloyd (Supervisor), Deborah Peel (Supervisor) & Stanley Mc Greal (Supervisor)