The UK Government has recently implemented large-scale public-sector funding cuts and substantial welfare reform. Groups within civil society are being encouraged to fill gaps in service provision, and ‘social innovation’ has been championed as a means of addressing social exclusion, such as that caused by worklessness, a major impediment to citizens being able to access money, power and resources, which are key social determinants of health. The aim of this article is to make the case for innovative ‘upstream’ approaches to addressing health inequalities, and we discuss three prominent social innovations gaining traction: microcredit for enterprise; social enterprise in the form of Work Integration Social Enterprises (WISEs); and Self Reliant Groups (SRGs). We find that while certain social innovations may have the potential to address health inequalities, large-scale research programmes that will yield the quality and range of empirical evidence to demonstrate impact, and, in particular, an understanding of the causal pathways and mechanisms of action, simply do not yet exist.
Since the early 1980s the concept of Participatory Budgeting (PB) has developed in various forms internationally and subsequently has been adopted and adapted into local policy and political contexts. Yet, the underlying objective of PB remains the same, to empower local communities to have a direct say in how and where public funds can be used to shape public services and their delivery (Gomez et al., 2016).In seeking to integrate community participation into local resource allocation decision-making, via this policy, requires a transformation of the relationship between citizen and state. In the implementation and delivery of PB, local government must engage in equality analysis so to meet the requirements of the Equality Act 2010 and the Public Sector Equality Duty (PSED). Thereby, this paper aims to combine the framing of mainstreaming equalities through the PSED in the development of PB activities.This article contends that the institutional engagement and analysis required, to effectively integrate the requirements of equality legislation into PB processes, requires a transformational approach. Equality processes appear to exist in parallel with PB activity rather than being operationalized as integral to the objectives and character of PB activity at local level. This article proposes that PB and the PSED share a transformative intent and potential but that this is undermined by siloed thinking on equalities reflective of compliance and enduring discriminatory behavior and practices. The paper concludes with propositions for extending the conceptual links between equality and community empowerment, and thereby participation in local financial decision making in practice.
Democracies are under pressure and public administrations must evolve to accommodate new forms of public participation. Participation processes may reproduce or disrupt existing power inequalities. Through a multi-method empirical study of “Participation Requests,” a new legislative policy tool to open up public services in Scotland, this article addresses an empirical gap on governance-driven democratic innovations (DIs). We use Young’s distinction of external and internal inclusion and find Participation Requests replicate the pitfalls of traditional forms of associative democracy. We contend that DIs should be co-produced between institutions and communities to bring a participatory and deliberative corrective to temper bureaucratic logics.
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