Community anchor housing associations : illuminating the contested nature of contemporary governing practices at the local scale
Abstract
In a period of fiscal austerity the mobilization of the voluntary and community sector has been pivotal to neoliberal public policy reforms. This is reflected in the emergence of a ‘new localism’, which seeks to encourage place-based communities to take responsibility for their own welfare through the ownership and management of community assets. In the UK these political narratives are encapsulated in the Prime Minister’s Big Society agenda, which has been influential in the housing field, and has underpinned an emergent policy discourse constructing housing associations as community anchor organizations. Drawing on the case study of the community-controlled housing association sector in Scotland, this paper illuminates the centrality of localism to contemporary technologies of neoliberal governance. Through an analytical focus on the agency of front-line housing professionals it also adds to debates on ‘ethnographies of government’, which emphasize the situated messiness of projects of rule and the struggles around subjectivity.
Citation
McKee , K 2015 , ' Community anchor housing associations : illuminating the contested nature of contemporary governing practices at the local scale ' , Environment and Planning C: Government and Policy , vol. 47 . https://doi.org/10.1177/0263774X15605941
Publication
Environment and Planning C: Government and Policy
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
0263-774XType
Journal article
Rights
© the Author 2015. This work is made available online in accordance with the publisher’s policies. This is the author created, accepted version manuscript following peer review and may differ slightly from the final published version. The final published version of this work is available at https://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0263774X15605941
Description
This project was funded by a small grant from the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland.Collections
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