Global and Geopolitical Challenges in a Changing Europe conference, Prague, 14 – 15th March 2024.

In March, Professor Joyce Liddle of Policy&Practice, organised this event with fellow members of the conference series’ committee: Professors Martin Pělucha, Prague University of Economics and Business; John Shutt and Ignazio Cabras, Northumbria University; Dr John Gibney, University of Birmingham, and Professor Markku Sotarauta, Tampere University, Finland. The conference was one a series of events held across Europe which will culminate in a final event in Birmingham in April 2025.

Place leadership has been the subject of extensive academic discourse for many years. Debates took place at a pivotal geopolitical moment, resulting from war in Ukraine and its political and economic consequences – not least of which is an acceleration of Europe’s migration crises. The confluence of unprecedented challenges led participants to call for a dynamic and adaptive approach which requires leaders to redefine strategies, adapt decision-making processes and exercise agility in fast-evolving circumstances.

Professors Liddle, Shutt and Gibney’s contribution identified several challenges facing sub-national leadership. These focused on how to respond to inter-related challenges of Brexit and cross-border cooperation and how to counter challenges to local democracy and enable a sub-national voice?

Many of the contributors in this series of events will prepare articles for a special issue of the journal Regional Studies which will be published in 2025/6 edited by John Gibney, Joyce Liddle, John Shutt and Markku Sotarauta, entitled: Leadership in city and regional development: new perspectives from within and beyond borders.

The long running triennial Third Sector Trends survey will return in 2025 for the sixth time. While still in the early stages of developing project themes for its next round, it can now be confirmed that the project will go ahead thanks to funding provided by  our long-standing and principal partner Community Foundation Tyne & Wear and Northumberland.

This is the largest and longest running study of the voluntary sector in England and Wales, culminating in six core reports on sector structure, dynamics, purpose, influencing, energy and impact in 2022-23.  Data were then explored further to look specifically at the contribution of the voluntary sector to public health in three separately funded but integrated reports in Yorkshire and Humber, Cumbria and Buckinghamshire, Oxfordshire and Berkshire West.

While negotiations continue with other potential contributors to the project, confirmation of renewed support for the study has also been secured from Millfield House Foundation for a second time to look at campaigning and influencing in the voluntary sector. To secure a strong response in Wales, support has also been provided by Wales Council for Voluntary Action and will allow for more in-depth analysis that was possible in the 2022 study.

Announcements on the participation of other partners in the project will be made in the early new year.  If you would like to see more detail on the study, its methodology and its publication of findings, please click here: Third Sector Trends in England and Wales.

Professor Joyce Liddle of Policy&Practice welcomed Colombian doctoral student, Santiago Rodriguez Tabaquiro to our North East region for a three-month research visit between September and December 2024. She is jointly supervising his PhD research at the University of Aix-Marseille, France, where she led the research centre for Public Management, Governance and Regional Development (IMPGT) between 2011-2017.

Santiago is focusing on ‘Shared mobility solutions in public transportation networks’, with a special focus on car pooling, car sharing, car clubs and other micro-mobility solutions to urban and rural transport. His chosen case study here in the UK is the Newcastle and Gateshead metropolitan area which he will compare with his findings on the Aix-Marseille Metropolitan.

He will be undertaking a series of interviews with senior policy personnel and politicians in urban and rural governance across the wider North East region. In particular he will meet with those shaping transport policies in NEXUS, North East transport authorities, local authorities and the Mayor’s Office at the North East Combined Authority. Santiago is working in collaboration with researchers at Insights North East (INE), a University-wide research collaboration of which the University of Durham is a key member.

Santiago is happy to share his findings with other researchers, and if time allows before he returns to France, he will join us at St Chads to discuss his research work

Left to right: Dr. Ahmad Aizuddin Bin Md Rami, Professors Sarah Banks and Fred Robinson

Dr. Ahmad Aizuddin Bin Md Rami, Faculty of Educational Studies, University Putra Malaysia visited members of Policy&Practice to discuss the role of leaders in the voluntary and community sector in the UK. Aizuddin is a visiting scholar in the Department of Sociology at Durham University for the whole of 2024 to undertake this comparative study of principles, practices and systems surrounding community development in the UK and Malaysia.

In a wide-ranging debate, focused mainly on County Durham, Professors Fred Robinson, Sarah Banks and Tony Chapman shared their observations based on many years of research work in the North of England with Dr Bin Md Rami – with a more specific focus on the way that voluntary and community sector leaders support young people from less advantaged communities to make successful life transitions.

This is the first joint meeting among academics at St Chad’s and the Department of Sociology on this study, but plans have now been made to explore the local situation in comparative context in the coming months.

Findings from Third Sector Trends research on the role of the voluntary sector in supporting local health and wellbeing has been published in three inter-related reports by Dr Jonathan Wistow and Professor Tony Chapman (see further news stories below).

Analytical reports are the product of in-depth statistical enquiry and by their nature tend to be quite long. This limits the extent to which key messages are disseminated more widely. Interest in the research has, however, led to a number of opportunities to speak at events to debate key local findings.

In November 2023, Tony Chapman was invited to speak at three events. The first, in Highland, was hosted by Highland Hospice for the local thirds sector. The purpose of the conference was to critically explore the current extent of partnership working within the third sector and between charities, the local public sector and the NHS.

A second event took place in Chelmsford where findings from a discrete report on the situation of the third sector in Essex was commissioned by Essex Community Foundation. This well-attended event was the first major conference for the local Third Sector Forum on issues surrounding local health and wellbeing. The report can be downloaded here: The Structure, dynamics and impact of the Third Sector in Essex (November 2023)

The final event was held in Kendal, organised by Cumbria CVS. In addition to Tony’s presentation, speeches were delivered by public health directors from the newly established councils and chief officers from the two NHS Integrated Care Systems operating in Cumbria.

In the new year, further dissemination of findings is planned, together with an updated report on key messages for all local areas in England and Wales.

Over the past year Professor John Mawson (St. Chad’s College, Durham University) and Dr David McGuinness (Northumbria University) have been exploring how far, from a leadership and management perspective, a £350 million regional development investment was secured for an area straddling the Anglo-Scottish border referred to as Borderlands. This case study is an input into a wider international Regional Studies Association seminar and research programme on cross border development.

The current case study is seeking to shed light on these issues through an analysis of management, networking and local and regional leadership processes. To date, interviews have taken place with relevant Council Leaders and senior officers, politicians from the different political parties, civil servants from the Scottish and UK Governments and other relevant stakeholders. Attention has focused on how partners were initially brought together, common aims were established, agreed place based narratives were developed, key projects and programmes were identified and common negotiating positions were established for engagement with civil servants and Ministers.

Research has also focused on how the Partnership mobilised the support of national politicians and Ministers in focusing on Borderlands as a funding priority and exercised a degree of influence over the content of the final deal. Clearly in drawing wider conclusions from s single case study there can be no single best practice approach given geographical, structural and temporal variations in specific situations, rather the research has been to identify key considerations and issues which need to be addressed and could potentially be tackled.

The Borderlands Inclusive Growth Deal is a negotiated agreement between two principal funders: the UK and Scottish Governments, and a local authority cross-border partnership. The Borderlands Partnership comprises: Dumfries and Galloway; Scottish Borders; Northumberland; Cumbria; and Carlisle councils. The Deal process was initially developed by the UK Government in England and transferred to Scotland in 2014, when it was gradually modified to accommodate the distinctive geography and policy priorities of the Scottish Government in the form of so called Inclusive Growth Deals.

The Borderlands Deal was one of the later versions and is unique in being the only rural cross border economic development programme in the UK. Covering the size of Wales with a population of around 1 million it comprises largely geographically dispersed market towns, former mining and industrial settlements, and coastal communities with a mix of agriculture, forestry, tourism, textile and other related industries.

This area suffers from an ageing population and a comparatively low skilled and poorly paid workforce. It experiences limited inward investment, new firm formation alongside pockets of severe deprivation in some towns and in Carlisle, the largest urban centre.

St. Chad’s research involvement in this policy issue began in 2012-13 when Fred Robinson and Jonathan Blackie, working with Keith Shaw (Northumbria University) and Frank Peck (Cumbria University) were commissioned to produce a report entitled: Borderlands: Can the North East and Cumbria Benefit from Greater Scottish Autonomy?

This provided an initial vehicle to foster collaboration between the 5 councils in developing a Borderlands Initiative and Partnership with the objective of securing for the first time, some long-term and large-scale regional development funding. The research was highlighted by the Scottish Government and the Scottish Affairs Parliamentary Select Committee and ultimately led to a successful funding proposal in 2021.

The formal process of negotiating the Deal with government departments and Ministers took over four years but when taking into account initial research, partnership building, strategy development and lobbying, nearly a decade. This challenge of developing cross border regional development in rural and more peripheral regions involving alignment of different geographical and funding arrangements is of increasing interest both in the academic world and in the fields of policy and practice.

Interim findings have been presented at two RSA national conferences in Newcastle and London with the aim being to produce a final report next summer once a further round of interviews have been completed.

New report: Third Sector Trends in England and Wales 2022: shaping social change through campaigning and influencing

Following months of political controversy, the Charity Commission has clarified that charities are allowed to campaign robustly and engage in political debate providing that such actions align with their mission and has the backing of trustees.

This is welcome and reassuring news after a series of statements from prominent politicians and senior members of the Charity Commission earlier in the year that led many commentators to believe that challenging the right of charities to engage in political discourse could have a ‘chilling’ effect and stifle charity campaigning and influencing.

This report shows that many charities (73%) do ‘steer clear of political issues’, but this does not mean that they stop campaigning, participating in formal public consultations or debates or lobbying behind the scenes to effect changes in local social and public policy – indeed, only one fifth (21%) of charities abstain from all of these forms of influencing.

What are the characteristics of charities that campaign?

Some charities are much more likely to engage in campaigning and influencing than others – depending on where they are situated and what they do.

• Organisations situated in the poorest areas are almost twice as likely to engage in political issues (39%) than their counterparts based in the richest areas (21%).
• Micro TSOs are much less likely to engage with political issues (80%) than the biggest organisations (57%).
• Those organisations which work only at a neighbourhood or village level are more likely to avoid political issues (81%) than those which work at a wider level (70%).
• In metropolitan areas, only 65 per cent of TSOs avoid political issues compared with 77 per cent in town and country areas.
• Organisations which work entirely on their own are more likely to eschew political involvement (82%) than those which work with others (70%).
• Older organisations are more reticent about getting involved in politics (79%) than the newest TSOs (67%).

Those organisations which are keen to shape local social and public policy tend to do so using a range of approaches. For example:

• 17 per cent of organisations campaign, lobby and engage in formal consultations.
• 25 per cent of charities campaign and engage in formal consultations but do not lobby.
• Amongst the 47 per cent of charities that do campaign, fewer than 10 per cent of them limit their activity just to campaigning.
• 32 per cent of charities attend consultations or lobby behind the scenes but do not campaign.
• Only 21 per cent of organisations abstain completely from campaigning, lobbying or engaging in formal consultations.

Why are politicians’ interventions unlikely to have much impact on campaigning and influencing?

The objectives of charities, this report shows, are usually achieved with a mix of practical action and influencing,  This strongly suggests that threats from politicians to limit the third sector’s campaigning and influencing activity is unlikely to impinge significantly on the way that local organisations make decisions about what they want to achieve, how they garner resources and how they work – it is just one factor amongst many other considerations.

As autonomous entities, charities enjoy a higher degree of autonomy than many other types of organisations, especially in the public sector, but this does not mean that they are free to act entirely as they choose in ‘an ideal world’.

Instead, their actions are constrained by their ability to attract trustees, volunteers, employees and beneficiaries; the requirement to raise sufficient funds to achieve their practical objectives and decisions they make about working alone or in a complementary or collaborative way with other organisations.

Keeping all these balls in the air requires dexterity and diplomacy – not least, because organisations work in a crowded social marketplace within which they compete for resources and attention. To do that, they must tell a compelling story about what their values are, what they want to achieve, for whom, and how they will do it.

In this sense, all organisations in the third sector are continually engaged in a campaign to champion their chosen cause and convince others that investing in them is worth their while. If they stop doing it, their chances of survival would be slim in a highly competitive civil society environment.

Political pressure at a national level on the way charities campaign or lobby has proven to be an unwelcome intrusion in established sector culture and practice. As the report author, Professor Tony Chapman, concludes:

“Future government ministers may tinker around the edges on the limits of charitable activity, but it seems unlikely that many would choose to mount a sustained political attack on the realm of civil society. To do so would be hard to justify, constitutionally, because civil society is so ancient and deeply rooted in our institutional heritage, culture and identity that its operation has come to be seen as ‘how things are’ – an inalienable right. To threaten that would bring some very unusual alliances out from the woodwork.”

“Because the freedoms to speak out, associate and campaign feel like they are such a ‘normal’ part of life in the UK, it is easy to forget that this is not the case elsewhere. In recent years, state actions in many countries have dramatically undermined democratic processes, civil liberties and civil association together with heightened state control over campaigning by NGOs, media autonomy and freedom of speech.  And so, even in the UK, it would not be wise to take our eye off the ball.”

Laura Seebohm, Chair Millfield House Foundation, commenting on the commissioned report  said:

“Millfield House Foundation believes strongly in the value of the campaigning and influencing work undertaken by charities large and small. We are reassured to see organisations continue to prioritise this critical role within their wider work, amplifying the voices of the people they work with. Charities campaigning and influencing work has been at the heart of social change throughout history and has never been needed more as we collectively grapple with the challenges of the 21st century. This thoughtful paper will generate conversations amongst both charities and funders.”

The full report can be downloaded here. Third Sector Trends – Shaping Social Change through Campaigning (November 2023)

A shorter summary of the findings published by Civil Society can be found here: Tony Chapman: Are charities feeling the political chill? (civilsociety.co.uk)

Press stories on the report were published by Third Sector, UK Fundraising and Charity Times