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Fans of Ridley Scott’s dystopian classic "Blade Runner" are probably aware that the source novel was "Do androids dream of electric sheep?" by Philip K Dick. As often happens, much of the weirdness of the book got lost in the adaptation process, including a sequence in which Deckard, the bounty hunter, is arrested and taken to a police station he was previously unaware of:

"It makes no sense, he said to himself. Who are these people? If this place has always existed, why didn’t we know about it?" It soon transpires that the station is in fact run by fugitive androids: "a homeostatic enterprise…a closed loop cut off from the rest [of the city]"

At CWA our primary responsibility is to serve and represent our membership - after all, it was the membership that created us - but at the same time we’re well aware that the community woodland movement is part of a much larger body of what we might style asset-based community development - indeed, we have played a leading role in establishing Local People Leading as a gathering place for us and our sister intermediaries across the community assets sector. And wider still, there is the bigger world of the voluntary sector: SCVO and the CVSs, and the thousands of charities and voluntary organisations operating across Scotland.

So it comes as rather a shock to discover, from time to time, new and previously unsuspected bits of the landscape. Very often they are part of the curious parallel quango world, where community empowerment is a distinctly top-down process and sometimes rather hermetically sealed too: can you imagine a conference on sharing good practice in community development where there were no representatives from community groups? They do happen…

There’s a large chunk of the public sector that believes that the best way to do community empowerment is to employ a community empowerment officer…sadly, it appears as if the Lottery thinks so too - they can’t find the money to put land and assets into the control of community groups, but there’s no shortage of cash for quangos and public sector spin-offs to do "community capacity building". The most recent such awards (£1 million) were made last summer; 6 months on they are still "currently devising the systems and processes to identify eligible groups for the programme…"

In the world of Dick’s novel, animals have all but died out, and people care instead for replicas…maybe the community development quangos dream of a world of "electric" communities, which no doubt would be more biddable and grateful than the real thing. Until then however, we’ll continue to argue for bottom-up community ewmpowerment, and to campaign for a world where assets, resources and power can be transfered to genuine community groups and used to develop real sustainable futures.
Jon

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