Decentring Urban Governance: Narratives, Resistance and Contestation by Mark Bevir & Kim McKee & Peter Matthews

Author:Mark Bevir & Kim McKee & Peter Matthews [Bevir, Mark & McKee, Kim & Matthews, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781138229372
Google: STt3AQAACAAJ
Goodreads: 34498508
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2017-09-21T00:00:00+00:00

In this way, the duty empowers different service sectors to understand their value regarding a wider government agenda. This gives them the ability to resist other government narratives that rub against their beliefs. Similar narratives emerged from other play leads interviewed, particularly in relation to linking the Play Sufficiency Duty with the new Active Travel (Wales) Act 2013 and the Wellbeing of Future Generations (Wales) Act 2015. This suggests future scope for local actors to resist wider elite narratives around austerity, in pursuit of protecting other purported government agendas they support. Indeed, on a more strategic scale, this statutory duty challenges UK Government directives that brush against Welsh Government’ priorities and may provide future dilemmas for elite actors. This could increasingly become the case with divergence in commitments towards human rights across the various UK nations, and ongoing tensions between reserved and devolved competencies.

Resistance in Scotland took a different form, generally exercised continuously by the play sector pushing for a more rights-based approach, but also seeking to keep play on the elite agenda, even if this means playing to its instrumentalisation. Despite a less bleak overall funding landscape, the playwork sector does not receive the same support as that in Wales, and the interviewed officer from Play Scotland therefore stated:

Play Scotland has a toolkit – Getting It Right for Play – and we have the tools to establish in a local community play sufficiency – is there enough?, is it good enough?, and is it accessible? And the children’s voices lead in that.

However, while there is a commitment: ‘It’s not dependent on any money, because we don’t have any! The Play Strategy has a very small targeted fund, so play initiatives have to be self-sustaining and cost effective’ (officer, Play Scotland). This highlights the assertion of Russell and Lester (2013: 6) that:

The relationship between social policy and play is not straightforward. Play is not only an activity that takes place in discrete spaces and at prescribed times; it is not something that can simply be ‘provided’ by adults, but is an act of co-creation that emerges opportunistically from an assemblage of interdependent and interrelated factors.

In the case of Scotland, the playwork sector is keen to take a similar approach to Wales, but the assemblages are not aligned in a way that frames children’s play as a vital consideration of planners. This constrains their ability to take a rights-based approach, but playworkers continue to resist and assert the potential technology of power that is the UNCRC. The narrative power this holds could instead empower planning professionals, who seek to protect the public interest, to resist from the bottom up. However, for this to happen, there would need to be a wider awareness of the UNCRC and its relevance to their practice.

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