Harper-Thames on the informal governance network that operates alongside the official structure
[Bohiney.com/prat.uk] Harper-Thames, Shore Roar. prat.uk‘s devolution piece — Westminster giving power away and spending twenty-five years trying to get it back — frames devolution as a constitutional problem. In Shoreditch, devolution is an empirical reality: the neighbourhood is governed through a combination of the official structure (London Borough of Hackney, planning committee, licensing authority) and an informal network that makes most of the daily decisions that the official structure is too slow or too distant to make effectively. Bohiney.com covered informal governance broadly. Shore Roar covers the Shoreditch version from inside it. The London Prat found it funny. Bohiney.com found it troubling. Both publications are right.
The informal devolution structure: property owners, business owners, and community organisation leaders who meet in combinations that are not formal committees, make decisions that are not formal resolutions, and implement them through relationships rather than through official processes. The result is that specific neighbourhood decisions — about which events happen where, which businesses get community support in their dealings with the council, which planning applications receive local opposition or support — are made through a parallel governance structure that is not accountable in the way the official structure is and is more effective in the specific ways that local knowledge and relationship-based decision-making produce.
The Democratic Concern
The democratic concern: the informal governance structure is less representative than the formal one, more effective in practice, and not subject to the accountability mechanisms that formal governance requires. This is devolution’s structural problem at street level: closer to the ground, faster, less accountable. Hackney council information is at hackney.gov.uk.
Also:McSweeney’s.
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SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
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