Is place-based systems change getting harder?
Shifting our approach as the system changes
The question: is place-based systems change getting harder? has been coming up frequently in our work with places, people and partnerships.
This question helps us consider how the wider context for the place or system that we’re trying to change might be changing and how these shifts in context impact our work. Without doing this, there’s a risk that our approach to place-based systems change becomes stagnant. Taking a dynamic approach to change means recognising we might need to adapt our thinking and do things differently as the system changes.
Place-based systems change work is generally designed with a set of assumptions or hypotheses about how the external environment will respond to the work you are doing. So when there are significant changes in that external environment – it can mean we have to update the hypotheses we hold.
Over the past year we’ve been hearing place-based partnerships reflect that their work is feeling more challenging. This has been particularly felt by those partnerships trying to embed their initiatives and impact in the wider system to ensure its sustainability. Interrogating what could be driving this, we’ve found that many of our previous assumptions about how an initiative (and its impact) would become sustainable no longer hold. Particular trends driving this include:
- Continued extreme financial pressure on local government with risk of declaring bankruptcy remaining high
- Many organisations, or parts of organisations, are facing funding reductions (with cuts to aid funding, local government finance, funder pauses and impact of increased running costs and NI costs), leading to significant redundancies and threats of closure across the VSCE sector
- Increased reliance on community organisations to meet basic needs, as social security and statutory services are not sufficient to respond to rising cost of living, mental health crisis, housing crisis etc.
- Continued demand of ‘more for less’ in statutory commissioning of service delivery, where VCSE organisations are required to deliver more work without any increase in contract budgets, and are increasingly used as referral partners without funding to support this
These trends are making it increasingly hard for staff to dedicate time and resource to work outside of commissioned or funded service delivery, which leaves less time for the relationship building and rewiring of processes and institutional attitudes that is essential to systems change. These shifts are also leading to a reduction in flexible local funding (e.g. from the Local Authority or an established VCSE organisation) that might have been able to sustain a place-based systems change initiative in the long-term if external funding comes to an end.
How can we best understand this in our work?
We’ve been exploring how we think about our forces of influence, and our forces of resistance, within any local system:
These forces of resistance are often a result of trends and policies that are shaped at a national level. When designing place-based systems change initiatives we have to account for how we exist within a larger system and think about how to work against and with forces of resistance that are coming from a larger system than the one we are trying to influence.
We often use the iceberg model as part of the design of systems change initiatives. The model is a useful way to interrogate the root causes of an issue, through surfacing the structures and mental models that hold it in place. But the iceberg was not designed to explore the differences between trends at a national and place-level – which can hold back its utility where national level trends are driving rapid and major shifts to the way we can approach change.
At the our April meeting of the Place Based Systems Change Community of Practice, we explored the forces of resistance that members were experiencing by posing the question: is place-based systems change getting harder? Trying to name the changes in forces of resistance, while also sharing how these impacted us, helped us better understand why it is feeling so hard to influence change in the current system.
For the group, these forces of resistence included:
- Demand is increasing while resources remain stagnant or decreasing: There is an increased reliance on voluntary sector to meet basic needs, coupled with rising running costs and commissioning processes that ask organisations to deliver more for less money.
- These pressures are leading people to have more fear of change. This in turn is driving more top down leadership and monitoring from public/statutory funders. It is leading to a prioritisation of short-term survival over long-term change.
- The insecurity of jobs in the voluntary sector and in Local Authorities (many of whom are going through restructures) is leading to high staff turnover – making it hard to build the relationships needed to support PBSC work.
- Some are experiencing community disengagement, where individuals are turning away from services due to over-consultation and “broken promises” as they face the same increasing financial pressures in their home that organisations are facing in their budgets.
- Alongside all of these forces of resistance, some members felt that there is a sense that the overlapping crises we are facing could drive systems change. We are already seeing central government recognise that the current system is not working, and begin exploring how to devolve power as a way to change it. The group was excited to see what opportunities this could bring, and this energy was leading many of them to continue attending network meetings and learning spaces like ours to build solidarity despite increasingly limited resource.
While this left us with a shared sense of some of those forces of resistance, it leaves us also with an open question about how we make and sustain change in the current system. As part of our ongoing inquiry into the sustainability of place-based systems change we are exploring this question in depth, supported by a number of partners interested in the same questions. We’ll also be building more tools that can support places, people and partnerships to account for a shifting national context in the design of their systems change initiatives.
Want to be part of our latest inquiry into sustaining place-based systems change?
Reach out to Beth or Kezia below if you’d like to get involved in our inquiry.
We’ll also be continuing the conversation at our next Community of Practice meeting, which is in-person in London on the 24th June from 11am-3:30pm. Sign up on Eventbrite to join us.
- Contact Kezia Jackson-Harman on:
- 2045244916
- k.jackson-harman@renaisi.com
- Contact Beth Stout on:
- 020 7033 2651
- b.stout@renaisi.com
