The Community Leadership and Place-shaping Roles of English Local Government: Synergy or Tension?

‘Community leadership’ and ‘place-shaping’ embody the outward-facing

orientation of English local government to engage local communities in

deliberative governance. The apparent synergies between them suggest they

might be complementary roles yet one emphasizes ‘sense of direction’ while

the other stresses ‘sense of place’. What do they mean in practice? Evidence

of the impact of community leadership since 2000 suggests the engagement

of communities into community governance spaces such as Local Strategic

Partnerships (LSPs) has been partially successful. Rather than empowering

participation in governance spaces, community power has been concentrated

into the hands of political and managerial elites. Policy statements since 2006

have emphasized a need for councils to exert strong local leadership. Do

community leadership and place-shaping provide a complementary governance

framework, or does place-shaping indicates a shift away from a normative and

problematic model of community empowerment? Using Bourdieu’s notion of

the social space, this article considers the nature of ‘governance space’ and its

role in a changing model of community governance.