In preparing for what I was going to say this evening, I tried to think about what it was that had made me so interested in 'community'. My professional interest goes back twenty seven years to 1972, when I joined an organisation which was then called the Young Volunteer Force Foundation and has since become known as the Community Development Foundation. But I was also involved in community activities in the 1970s and 1980s on the Kings Cross council estate where I lived. This was the University of life, if you like, that challenged my more conventional research, contributed considerably to my knowledge and helped me to understand the experience of people in excluded communities.

But I am moving too quickly - because as I dug away at the roots of my interest, I found myself back in my childhood. My early years were spent in the South East, but we moved around quite a lot, until we came to rest when I was seven some thirty miles North of here, in Crawley New Town. The New Towns were, of course, part of the Brave New post-war world, building new communities 'fit for heroes', divided into neighbourhoods each with its purpose built community centre. But I learnt two main things about community from my time there. One was that you can’t just create ‘community’ out of thin air (or in this case, bricks and mortar and community centres); the other that community is as much about defining Them as defining Us.

Among the less 'community' like images that bedevilled Crawley’s early years, two remain in my mind. The first is of New Town Blues in the 50s - the isolation that many women experienced bringing up families away from family and friends. The second is of the reputation of the Town as a centre for drug abuse among young people in the 1960s. Both hit the academic as well as the more mainstream press and demonstrated the pitfalls on the road to community.

Crawley has undoubtedly moved on now. But the strongest memory I have of my early days there relates to the second point - about Them and Us. I remember being asked whether I was ‘Council’ or ‘Corporation’. I was aged seven at the time and I hadn’t a clue what this meant. What I was being asked, as it turned out, was whether I was in council or the obviously socially superior corporation housing. As it happens, our family rented the house over my father’s chemists shop and I belonged in neither camp. I certainly didn’t understand the finer points of this particular status distinction. But it did demonstrate how important these finer status distinctions are to people. As Ralf Dahrendorf has said: ‘borders, especially social boundaries, are always particularly noticeable to those closest to them’.

There have, of course, been much more positive reasons for my interest in community. I was a child of the 60s, when we were all supposed to love each other. I must say I found the 80s a very uncongenial time to live in, with the emphasis on individualism and Margaret Thatcher's famous pronouncement that there is 'no such thing as society'. The rediscovery of community in recent years has, to my mind, been a welcome step back from the brink - a recognition, as Tony Blair said when he set up the Active Communities Unit earlier this year, that society must not be allowed to degenerate into 'an atomised, individualised, selfish, computer-obsessed, lonely, soulless hell'. I must say that, compared with the 1980s language of cost centres, performance indicators, outsourcing and so on, I find the 1990s language of capacity building, civil society and social capital much more congenial - a welcome recognition that relationships between people are as important as individual wealth and skills or even individual consumer rights.

But that doesn't stop me from being critical. The problem with community - as opposed to some of the other subjects we have heard about in inaugural lectures - is we all think we know what we mean by it. We use the word community very prolifically - as an aerosol spray to give a haze of country freshness to all sorts of policies, services and opinions. This begs some pretty fundamental questions about its usefulness.

In fact, scratch the surface of community and there are all sorts of contradictions and tensions. At its most basic, community simply describes people who live in the same place or share certain characteristics. The problem comes when we assume that people in this kind of community share values and moral assumptions or will act to support each other. Or, even more, if we use the word community to sweep difference and conflicts of interest under the table. This makes it a particularly difficult word to use in the context of exclusion.

Let's explore some of the contradictions.

The first contradiction is that traditional ideas of community no longer reflect the way we live now. The strength of community is no longer in the strong ties and relationships between people that we associate with the past when everyone knew everyone else and, supposedly looked after each other. Most people in Western society now have a stake in a variety of overlapping communities: their work community; the geographical community where they live (and perhaps that of their second home as well); their children's school communities; their various leisure communities and so on. They move between different allegiances as it suits them - one sociologist has called them communities of limited liability. Another - Ray Pahl - talks of community as being a negotiated commodity for the middle classes - just something else we buy into.

But these looser networks make sense. Lots of weaker ties provide access to a greater diversity of resources than do stronger ties that are confined to a particular limited circle. If I only know a few people and they only know me, however well, my horizons don’t extend too far. A large number of weaker contacts gives me access to people who move in different circles to my own and can put me in touch with a wider range of resources. Strong but closed relationships, by contrast, can cut communities off from the wider society - whether the exclusion is voluntary as in some fundamentalist communities, or involuntary. They can also be oppressive.

The second contradiction is the one I started with. Community is exclusive as well as inclusive. By defining Us, community implicitly defines Them. I increasingly hear reference to the ‘drawbridge society’ that we live in. In the most affluent areas in the world, an increasing number of people choose to live in 'gated' communities, so that they can pull up a drawbridge between themselves and the threats they see in the world at large. It is no longer the Englishman's home which is his castle. As I think I read somewhere recently, it is the world citizen’s home, living in a capsule insulated from the rest of the world, transferring from the gated community to the bullet-proofed car, the first-class section of the plane, and to the five star hotel in some other anonymous town, perhaps taking in an equally anonymous shopping mall on the way.

In reality, of course, as a colleague of mine, Diane Warburton has argued, no-one is prescribing community to these people, or to bank managers and solicitors, although I suppose the old school tie still provides a fairly effective substitute. In fact, that’s not quite true. In his book Cocaine Nights, J.G. Ballard comes up with some pretty novel ideas for putting a sense of community back into the soulless gated communities on the west coast of America. His answer is to put crime back into these sanitised areas. But Tony Blair would never buy it!

So why is ‘community’ the answer at the other end of the scale? All the evidence suggests that 'community' can be a somewhat 'ironic' prescription for those groups in society who are becoming increasingly excluded from mainstream society.

Why is this? The first reason is that the loss of industry and jobs from many areas has destroyed the communities of the past. Driving through Wales last year, I was struck by the empty shells of those communities: the empty chapels and working men’s clubs; the deserted mineheads. I don’t want to over-romanticise the past or turn the clock back - as I have already suggested pointed out these communities of strong ties could also be very oppressive - there was not much of a role for women for instance.

But the problem is that nothing has replaced them. They do not have access to the sparser overlapping networks required of today’s world - the weak ties I was talking about earlier. Social exclusion means that people are isolated, physically, economically and socially. Many social housing estates are designed in ways which cut them off from the rest of town, with one road in and one out and every chance that once you get in, you’ll lose your way completely. There is no reason whatsoever for outsiders to go there or travel through. And for too many people who live there, the limits of community are defined - as one resident said to me - by the nearest bus stop. Even then, transport links are poor. This, combined with high unemployment, means that residents suffer from what DEMOS has called 'network poverty'.

Thirdly the communities that marginalised people live in tend to be imposed not chosen. I argued earlier that, for many of us, communities are chosen rather than imposed - Ray Pahl’s negotiable commodities. We now have choices about where we live and where our children go to school. Often these choices are associated with status and security. But the places where they live and send their children to school are not so easily negotiable for those excluded from the mainstream. Although there are undoubtedly exceptions, these are increasingly communities that people want to leave, even if they used to like it there. Indeed, for residents of what the social exclusion unit until recently called the 'worst' estates, the image of their communities are more likely to be defined through the crime pages of the local press than the des. res. of the local xestate agent.

Fourthly, exclusion breeds exclusion. It does this in two ways. Ralf Dahrendorf has argued that, because poverty and unemployment deny people the opportunities for participation which work and an income provide, they threaten the very fabric of civil society. Others have argued that the things that disadvantage people make it harder for them to participate in group activities. This is not apathy. The pressures of bringing up a family on a low income leave little energy for the responsibilities of communitarianism.

But Dahrendorf also draws attention to the fragmentation that can be born of exclusion. I quoted earlier his observation about social distinctions and their significance. Poverty is as likely to breed conflict and suspicion as community spirit. Negative images from the press and elsewhere are easily internalised and deflected onto neighbours, people who look different or the kids hanging round on the street corner. Identities can be created by exclusion, but the recent horrors of Denver, Colorado, Brixton or Brick Lane should warn us of the dangers of seeing this as a solution.

Paul Hoggett argues that the biggest paradox of excluded communities is the nature of the commodity - drugs - which has brought a perverse kind of self-regulation to many of these areas. In the most beleaguered estates, the community codes that do exist are as likely to be those of gang law as the more acceptable versions offered by the politicians and the media. Or alternatively, where people do show initiative and get together to solve their common problems through informal child care networks or helping each other out for cash, they attract unwanted attention in an increasingly regulated world. You don’t have to support benefit fraud to recognise that the benefits hotline introduced a couple of years or so ago was hardly a recipe for community cohesion in areas with high dependence on benefit.

For all these reasons, it seems somewhat perverse to offer recipes of inclusion and cohesion to the very people that mainstream society has excluded. Economic progress has destroyed their communities, market policies have offered them less and less choice about where they live, where they buy their food or send their children to school, and concentrated the people with the fewest resources into enclaves with few links to the rest of society. They find themselves labelled as the ‘worst estates’ and to get resources, they have been asked them to parade their disadvantage in competition with other areas in a parody of the competition of the market. At the same time the mainstream services on which they depend are further cut. Then we offer them ‘community’? There are undoubtedly some bonds born of the struggle to survive. But let's not get too romantic.

In fact, I am guilty of the very stereotyping which I criticise so much in other - but it is to make a point. Talk about excluded communities is always of needs and problems; rarely of the assets that, despite my bleak picture, are to be found in these, as much as in any other area. It is my experience, over the years, of seeing what people have achieved and talking to them about what can be done that fuelled my belief in community development, despite all the contradictions. And, of course, stereotyped talk of ‘the community’ masks the enormous and rich diversity - of experience and aspiration - of the people who live there.

In his first Reith lecture this year, Antony Giddens talked about ‘shell institutions’ - the nation-state, the family, nature, work. He argues that all these institutions had lost their familiar meaning with globalisation. He did not include community in that list. But what we need for the twenty first century is a new concept of community that reflects the way we live and the way we want to live now rather than as one writer put it dispatching those marginalised by globalisation to conjure up the charms of precapitalist ways of life.

I will come back to this later, but now I want to turn my attention to another of ‘those’ words: empowerment.

When I worked at the University of Bristol, I had a rather inventive spell-checking facility on my computer. It came up with some interesting variations on the names of colleagues and more eminent academics in the field. But it also had its own take on the whole concept of empowerment. Disempowerment it recognised in a fairly graphic way - disempower came out as disembowel. But it was equally cynical about empowerment. This got translated as embitterment.

The current government’s emphasis on community involvement in partnerships and consultation across the board is very welcome. But if it is to deliver anything, especially for areas which have seen a procession of new initiatives come and go from their areas, then it has to learn from the past. Because community involvement is nothing new. I started working in the community development field in 1972, against a background of initiatives which on the face of it were not so different from those we see today. For Education Action Zones read Education Priority Areas; for the New Deal for Communities read the National Community Development Project, or the Comprehensive Community Programme. The Urban Programme launched at that time and the later Inner Areas programme linked central and local government in programmes that were a precursor to those we have today.

Of course a lot has changed. Back in the early 1970s, the local authority was the undisputed key player - now there is a new institutional environment at local level with many more players and a language of governance rather than government. There also seems to be a recognition that new forms of governance are needed for the twenty first century. At the same time, there is a lot to learn from previous experience and a preoccupation with the new should not ignore this opportunity. This is neither pessimism, nor a preoccupation with the past. It is perhaps the ‘historical imagination’ that Sir David Watson spoke of in his Millennium lecture.

Four years ago, Murray Stewart and I were asked to do a review o f the literature over the years on community empowerment. We came to the rather depressing conclusion that little had been learnt from experience over the years. I was accused by one of my friends of being too negative and I have tried really hard to reach an alternative conclusion. But I still find people who are out there on the ground nodding in agreement when I lay out the evidence for this conclusion.

There has been progress. Researchers agree that community organisations are much more involved in policy implementation now. We must not underestimate the importance of this. It brings resources into communities, it involves lots of people, and makes the visible day-to-day differences that are vital to people living on the edge. But it is not really what the rhetoric of partnership promises. Community and voluntary organisations have been invited in from the cold, but the research suggest that, so far, they have been at most peripheral insiders, there for legitimation rather than real involvement. And if you are cynical, you could argue that, nowadays it’s easier to invite them in than keep them out.

The evidence is that many residents still feel on the margins of power, just marginalised in a larger arena than before. Some of you will have heard me compare community involvement with the Victorian marriages we see in all those costume dramas on television. In those days, marriage was the only route to status and power for many women. But once they got into the marriage they found out that it was not all it was cracked up to be. And heaven help them if they tried to get out with their reputation, let alone their property, intact. No wonder so many novels ended with the marriage! That’s pretty much the picture that comes out of research on community involvement in partnership. Words like arrogant, wasting time, window dressing, controlling , pepper the research that I and others have done.

Don’t get me wrong. I have met many people within public authorities who genuinely want change, who want to see government turn inside out. Some of them are here tonight. I also acknowledge the new broom that seems to have come with the New Deal for Communities. But there are number of factors that have made the community involvement in partnership that is a feature of today’s policies a much more difficult proposition than it sounds. I want to talk about four ? main areas tonight. If things are to change, it is these that need to be tackled.

The first I call the rules of the game.

Up to now, the rules of the game have nearly always been those of local or increasingly central government. And not only do they know the moves better than other participants, but they are also the referees. Often in the past, community representatives have summoned up the courage to make a point only to be made to feel they have said something stupid or told that it is at the wrong point on the agenda, or to be patronised because they don’t understand the complexity of the issue. Rarely has there any induction. Community representatives have had to hit the ground running. I sometimes wonder whether we were all supposed to have been born knowing how to run a committee meeting. (I certainly remember my first Partnership meeting. Papers two inches thick two days beforehand (and I was supposed to consult my community?); an agenda over 30 items long - we were there till after midnight; unintelligible prose and acronyms; an uninviting venue packed with council officers, even though we were, apart from the councillors the only voting members on the committee).

Things have changed now, but not enough. The complexity of many of the issues means that a huge commitment is required from community representatives in getting to grips with new programmes. The learning curve is immense. But community representatives have rarely been resourced for the task; there is little training and only rarely do they have access to their own officer back-up. Crucially, very little attention is given to the opportunities for informal networking that are so essential to decision-making and policy development. Many find themselves taking decisions by default as they struggle to catch up with long agendas, unfamiliar procedures and language.

For many, too, community involvement - so hard won - has turned into a mixed blessing as more and more partnerships are set up and their limited resources are stretched further and further. I recently heard someone comment at a conference on how power, in being expanded, has also been blunted and, although this may sound ungrateful to those who are making genuine attempts to work in different ways, I think I know what he meant.

There is a more fundamental problem behind this and it is about accountability. The very money that acts as an incentive for people to get involved brings with it procedural and accountability demands that drive out vision and imagination. Small wonder if all but the most determined community reps. lose interest and drop out. It seems that the committee structures, forms and procedures have always had to be sorted first - agreement on what the area wants and needs can wait.

Moreover, it seems to be in the nature of public money that each level takes the accountability demands of the level above, adds a few more to safeguard its own position and then passes them all down to the next level. By the time any initiative gets down to the community, it is weighed down with paperwork. Risk is pushed down to the lowest level. Only the most experienced need apply.

The problem is that new rhetoric is being poured into old bottles. While government ministers are tying their colours to the mast of social entrepreneurialism, innovation and initiative, I'm afraid that the civil servants back at the ranch are still designing the impenetrable forms, the impossible deadlines, the rules, the regulations and the hoops to jump through. I really hope I’m wrong this time and that New Deal will be different. But meanwhile - in the rest of the world - I understand that we have a new fashion now in government funding - called risk assessment - and my heart sinks at the damage that this might do to energies and ideas. While people at the top levels of government may embrace change, I wonder how much incentive there is for those below them to take risks? Or is there more incentive in an unstable environment to watch their backs.

If a culture of risk aversion is one problem, the drive towards consensus in many of our systems might be another. Any failure by residents to ‘deliver their communities’ by bringing a united view to the table is treated with impatience and any resistance to suggestions by other partners as obstruction. This failure to accept and work with difference can feel very disempowering to residents. And yet conflict can be a sign that partnership is working - an appropriate metaphor might be that of electrical resistance, which is essential to the generation of power, or the friction of which fire is born. Effective decision-making systems for the future will be those that find ways of working with disorder and mediating difference without suppressing it.

A digression here. I sometimes wonder whether money is part of the problem as well as the solution? I’ve already talked at length about the accountability issues it raises, but it also raises impossible expectations and sets up competition within the communities it is supposed to help. Jeffrey reports in her research that systems which generally worked well broke down when groups were in competition for grants.

even those good democrats she sayswho truly endeavoured to make themselves accountable confessed that they behaved differently when grants were to be prioritised.

This is not an argument for leaving marginalised people to fin their own way out of exclusion. But it suggests that advertising the advent of funds with a fanfare might not be the best way to start a move towards real change.

The third persistent problem is timescales for capacity building?

Perhaps because of the complexities of procedure and accountability, by the time initiatives have worked their way though several layers of government, the time left to involve the community has invariably been too short. And when strong vested interests have been developed by officers who have sweated their ideas through committee and burnt the midnight oil in doing so, it is not so surprising if these officers are then none too keen to have community representatives send them back to the drawing board.

If there is not time for communities to develop their own visions and to engage on a broad scale with new initiatives, two things happen. Firstly the power - or such power as there is - remains with those who know the rules, who have the time and the training to get to grips with complex accountability requirements. These are the professionals, the best resourced and most established organisations, the accountable bodies, not the ‘real’ community that government is so anxious to get to.

In saying that I acknowledge that those council officers may not themselves feel so powerful struggling to meet the accountability requirements above them in the chain. But comparatively speaking, they are. And yet all the talk about capacity building is about communities; we rarely hear anything about the need for capacity building within government, to support government officers in new roles, acting as interpreters and facilitators for communities and in turning their procedures inside out .

Secondly, it means that, within communities, only those who already know the ropes, the procedures and the language are likely to get involved.

This bring me to the third problem of representation.

There is considerable cynicism in both government and community circles about the ‘usual suspects’ - the people who turn up on all the committees. But if new people get involved they either give up after a few meetings which make little sense to them and seem to bear very little relationship to the future of their community, or they get sucked into the system themselves and run the risk of getting divorced from their communities. As more and more partnerships are set up, this problem is magnified. In many ways, communities find themselves the victims of their own success. Attending endless meetings is surely not a ‘normal’ thing to do?!!

Representation is a difficult issue. We all know of community leaders who have lost their roots in the community and seemingly forgotten their responsibilities to their constituencies - people, who once they have managed to climb up the ladder of participation pull the ladder up after them (to quote one of the MA students on the community development module), whose new found power seems to go to their head. It would be naive to say this wasn’t so - and after all why should people in excluded communities be any different from the rest of the world?

But in my many years of research, the majority of community representatives I have spoken to have been very committed and trying to do their best against pretty impossible odds. Being a representative can be a thankless task, criticised from above for 'unrepresentativeness', and from below for not delivering the impossible, as well as placing great strain on personal time.

But legitimacy is crucial to the full involvement of excluded communities. It is essential that, in new initiatives, ways are found to cement the links between representatives and their communities, in order to safeguard the interests of both. This requires time, resources, imagination and strategies which encourage a wide range of local organisations. It is not a good idea to put all your eggs into one basket unless it is woven from many different strands. We still have a lot to learn about the kind of community umbrella which can best feed into partnership - which can be this ‘basket’. But putting all the energy into one community institution will be counterproductive in the long run without a rich network of smaller organisations to feed into partnership in a variety of different ways, and to act as, what my US colleague, Carl Milofsky calls a Greek chorus, aware of what is going on and holding it accountable.

The fourth point is the fundamental issue about power:

I started this section with games and I will finish with them. Have communities been invited into the right game in the past?

Often community representatives have had the sneaking suspicion that they are not really in the arenas that matter - they are, so to speak in the wrong game. Writers like Marsh and Rhodes write about the ways in which policy is determined by stable policy communities, with few points of access, which seek to ride out change and contain its implications. Barbara Reid has distinguished between two network cultures: one entrepreneurial, exclusive and opportunistic; the other ‘collaborative’, more concerned with legitimacy but achieving a great deal less than the effort of the participants warrants. This distinction might explain the lack of real power felt by many community ‘partners’ in the past, drawn in to add legitimacy to partnerships but excluded from the entrepreneurial networks where the real action is.

I am very conscious that I have not painted a very optimistic picture. And it is possible to be a pessimist - to believe that changes of government mean little, that new policies are window-dressing - that in the end, community and empowerment will remain ‘spray on’ words to mask the relentless march of political and economic elites. The barriers come from above and below. From above, we are told that policy communities will ride out change...From below there is ever-increasing fragmentation - as excluded groups fight amongst themselves rather than recognising that they might have common interests. In the 60s the answer was the revolution. Now we might as well all pack up and go home.

But I hear New Labour accusing me of cynicism as I speak - of being trapped in history and definitely off-message. It is also possible to be an optimist. One of the premier social movement theorists - Sidney Tarrow argues that the most perilous time for an entrenched policy community may be the time when it seeks (or is compelled) to change its ways. The New Deal not only comes with permission to do things differently; it is an imperative. Certainly, it seems to have taken two lessons, at least to heart. The first is the need for joined up thinking, not only at local level but in Whitehall itself so that initiatives to regenerate communities do not fall at first base because of benefit regulations that discourage people from taking work or training.

The second and fundamental lesson that seems to have been learnt is the need for a ‘slow burn’ approach, to use the words of a senior civil servant. Regeneration is like a building. The elaborate and high profile flagship policies and initiatives that are put forward need to be put on a firm foundation or they will collapse. This means giving local communities the resources to develop their own ideas and initiatives before programmes are agreed rather than expecting them to come on board afterwards. (Although we still have much to learn about how to involve communities effectively, I hope that days when a local council for voluntary service is asked to sign a bid at the eleventh hour to demonstrate community involvement are long gone, along with the days when everyone’s idea of consultation was one or two large public meetings in a drafty hall at a time when most people would prefer to be at home watching Eastenders or getting the children to bed).

If the New Deal has learnt these lessons, it will be a major step forward. But it may be that once we have cleared this undergrowth, the more intractable tensions of partnership will become clearer. The research that I and others have done suggests that some of the other problems I have discussed will be more difficult to resolve.

Public accountability is not simply an unnecessary barrier put up by bureaucratic government officials. There are very real tensions between accountability for public money and the need to take risks. There are considerable dilemmas involved in securing the commitment at all levels of government to move from control cultures to a genuinely enabling role.

This will include giving attention to what counts. Developing community-based criteria for success can be a powerful tool for developing common agendas and an understanding of where different people are coming from. For community participants it can also turn the weary task of filling in other people's forms into a jointly owned enterprise and learning experience.

Partnerships need to find ways of engaging people which can reach well beyond the most articulate and committee-literate. They need to draw on the energies and ideas of people whom earlier programmes have not begun to reach. At the same time, complex and large-scale programmes will also require effective organisation and informed leadership - people who can 'hit the ground running'. Balancing participation with effective representation and entrepreneurial leadership will require dynamic, responsive and accountable community structures, which have the confidence of all parts of the community and can also deliver. There is still a lot to learn about how such structures can be built.

One of the contradictions of community is that it is the place where we want to have it both ways. We want social cohesion, but also the freedom to be individuals. (We want diversity but also a sense of commonality). This is not just a problem for excluded communities.

The central problem of democratic politics in modern society is to maintain the diversity within civil society while creating some measure of unity, of bindingness, of political authority.

One of the key challenges for the new forms of governance that people at the cutting edge are trying to forge is to accommodate - and celebrate - diversity and yet build the common bonds which we need to survive. It sounds wonderful. But nobody said it was easy. I have suggested that it is a bit unfair to expect cohesion and co-operation from communities which are defined by their exclusion from the opportunities in mainstream society. And the experience of the past has exposed real chasms of misunderstanding between communities and public authorities. Crucial to the success of regeneration partnerships will be their ability to work creatively with the diversity within communities, to bring positive energy out of conflict or mistrust and to build multiple links between run-down neighbourhoods and their wider localities.

So am I an optimist or a pessimist? Sidney Tarrow - after an analysis of social movements that highlights the pitfalls of co-option and fragmentation that I have also spoken about - feels that despite all these problems:

Social movements drastically shorten the distance between the present and the future.

But one of my colleagues in the Health and Social Policy Research Centre - Dr. Phil Haynes. He agrees that the future is getting better. But, he also says, it is also possible to observe at the same that there is pain in getting there.

I think this makes me a pragmatist. The very complexity of the policy world today works against rigidity and total control. Some of theories now being applied to policy making and implementation betray this very well - complexity theory, chaos theory and even 'garbage can' theory (I'm glad it's getting too late to explain that! Neither policy making nor even power is as neatly sewn up as some of the pessimists suggest. There are windows of opportunity and cracks in the system; there are allies in the most uncompromising institutions.

The key to the future has surely to lie in risk and diversity. Ideas of networks and social capital help here. Fortunately, social capital can’t be hoarded away and contained like other forms of capital. It’s dynamic - it’s about relationships.

In this scenario, empowerment means acknowledging the tensions and conflicts that I have been talking about rather than trying to find structures that regulate and minimise them. with lots of links and opportunities to engage, rather than the one all-powerful committee, and lots of bridges across the sectors, not just the one. Accepting, as complexity theorists argue, that disorder leads to a new and functional form of order. Which see risk and diversity as strengths and not weaknesses.

Sounds fine. But what does all this look like, I hear you say? This is where the change agent comes in - the community worker, the local government enabler, the business partner, even the social entrepreneur (although that's another term I am unsure about). Their role is that of a social relay - linking people into networks, finding allies and spotting the windows of opportunity. Putting as much work into the informal networks and links across the sectors as the formal ones. To borrow an electrical metaphor from a theorist called Stuart Clegg - switching on circuits of power within excluded communities and switching them into other more powerful circuits; creating what Carl Milofsky calls organisational intelligence - experience of organising in many different ways and networks which are loose enough to accommodate diversity but strong enough to call up a concerted response when it is needed.

This is not a blueprint. It is a challenge. And perhaps a triumph of hope over experience.

Two metaphors come to mind here. For one I am indebted to an MA student, John MacMurray, who as I was expanding on this approach, threw in the image of shooting the rapids: sometimes you go with the flow, sometimes you paddle furiously and nothing happens, other times you find yourself paddling backwards and yet making real progress.

Whitewater rafting is not exactly my thing. But music is and my second metaphor comes from there.

You were played in to the music of one of the masters of counterpoint - Johann Sebastian Bach, whose talent lay in weaving different voices and strands of melody together in a rich whole. But I want to end with another musical tradition, which has woven whole cultures together.

In an article for The American Heritage magazine the jazz musician Wynton Marsalis described jazz as a social invention. He saw in it both musical and non-musical elements. Here are some of the non-musical elements. The first is the desire to think about an issue in a new light, to play with an idea. Second he refers to the need to ‘make room’ - jazz is about participation, dialogue and reaction. His third non-musical element is respect for individuality, and I’ll quote him on this: ‘Playing jazz means learning how to reconcile differences, even when they’re opposites’. He calls it ‘dialogue with integrity’.

The musical elements make sense too. Jazz, says Marsalis, must have ‘blues’ - an optimism that is not naive. A willingness to work through that pain I talked about and move forward. Jazz, after all was a music born of oppression. Secondly, in those time-honoured words, it ‘don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing, this means ‘constant co-ordination, but in an environment that’s difficult enough to challenge your equilibrium’. This is about adapting to something that’s always shifting and changing. Thirdly, jazz is collective improvisation: ‘people getting together and making up music as a group’ - a risky business. Finally, there is syncopation: ‘you’re always prepared to do the unexpected’. Dialogue, respect for difference and a willingness to take risks together. Is that too much to hope for?

Thank you.