Empowered or over-powered? The real experiences of local participation in the UK's New Deal for Communities

The notion of ‘participation’ has growing currency at many levels of social policy in the UK where the Labour government uses it to denote the engagement of ‘local people’ in decision-making about the services and structures which affect their daily lives. In particular, local participation is given as the distinctive feature of the UK government's flagship initiative for neighbourhood renewal, the New Deal for Communities, but there is little known about what this means in practice for the ‘local’ people it affects.