Chris Pond

I wrote this article for the Local Government Chronicle a few weeks back and got a very small amount of blow back on Twitter from a reader who felt that it de-emphasised the transformative potential of CWB in favour of interventions that could be seen as tinkering round the edges. I'm not going to name the critic but they sent me a very lovely and considered email this weekend which made me think more about CLES's approach to navigating the tricky waters of creating change in and through institutions. I've put an edited version of my response to that email below. *** In all honesty, on a personal level I agree with much of your argument – the danger of enabling tinkering round the edges, rather than pushing local authorities (and others) into more transformative action is one we’ve always been conscious of at CLES. On the whole, when we work with councils, we encounter officers and members who are more enthused by the potential of either (I’ll let you make some guesses about which group tends to favour which although there are no hard and fast rules and often we are surprised!). Our job then becomes to manage both groups into a place where they can do something practical and “value demonstrable” (like procurement or employment, for instance) whilst maintaining that spirit of transformative potential and the relationship to enable future work which comes closer to that ideal. We have mixed successes, but the reality is that, were we to go in all guns blazing to every meeting we would be shown the door more often than not. That’s the spirit in which this article was written – to demonstrate to those who might previously have considered CWB, at first glance, to be too far out of their comfort zone, by tying it specifically to the new government’s agenda. The aim would then be, potentially, that we could get in there and make the case for why, in what way and how CWB can transform their local economy. I’ll be completely honest and say that I have had a few dark nights of the soul where I have considered whether this is a mealy mouthed approach, and whether staying closer to our ideals and banging the table louder would be ideologically better but, as in many cases, I return to the belief that sacrificing the potential for change – no matter how small scale, or incremental – is a naïve act. This at least applies to CLES: for who we are, what we do and the role we play with our partners, although I absolutely don’t think it’s the case for many other organisations whose work I gladly champion. I hope that gives you some insight and thanks again for writing. *** Interested in people's thoughts.

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