Alternative Futures: Who Decides? The honest inclusion of community voices in decision-making

The following report is a call to action. It describes the outcomes from a research partnership between “The Ripple Project”, a Community Centre serving Restalrig, Lochend and Craigentinny, and the “Binks Hub”, a research group based at the University of Edinburgh.

This collaboration has highlighted both a strong desire for improvements in core areas – such as community and green spaces – and demand from the community that their voices be heard on their own terms. Community members feel excluded from decision-making processes, despite prior engagement attempts from local and national government. They feel that lip service is paid to their local knowledge and lived experience, but they are not able to set the foundational terms on which policies are formed.

Our work shows that different ways of working together are possible: ways that allow community knowledge to be brought to the forefront and which deliver more efficient outcomes that will have a much greater positive impact on the communities being served.