Purpose
In Scotland, the Community Empowerment (Scotland) Act represents a significant development towards greater localism in the way public services are designed and delivered in Scotland. This also represents a different approach to that adopted in the rest of the UK. The purpose of this paper is to explore the stakeholder perceptions of localism within a council ward.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper is based on an in-depth exploratory case study of a single council ward in East Scotland. The fieldwork involved 61 in-depth interviews with multiple stakeholders including local councillors, public service managers and residents.
Findings
The findings highlight that, whilst the discourse of community empowerment represents policy divergence, there remain some significant structural and social barriers to meaningful community empowerment in practice. Finally, it is argued that there are three key factors to consider when developing community empowerment: a shared strategy, shared resources and shared accountability.
Originality/value
The research draws on extensive data from an in-depth case study to explore the realities of community empowerment within a single local authority ward. In doing so, it provides a rich contextual narrative of how the rhetoric of community empowerment is perceived within a council ward setting.
This article summarises contributions to an ASEN-Edinburgh (Association for the Study of Ethnicity and Nationalism, Edinburgh Branch) symposium held the day after the 2017 Catalan referendum on independence. Daniel Cetrà describes a referendum disputed between legal and democratic legitimacy and grounded on competing visions of nationhood. Elisenda Casanas-Adam argues that there are alternative interpretations of the Spanish constitution which could accommodate Catalan request and highlights the questionable legality of the Spanish authorities’ forceful response. Mariola Tàrrega argues that the Catalan referendum reveals a worrying context where news media become political advocates of opposing worldviews and politicians attribute to news media an overstated capacity to shape nation-building projects.
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