What became of The Local State? Neo-liberalism, community development and local government
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 1977, Cynthia Cockburn published The Local State, a critique of the relationship between community development and corporate management in local government. This work prefigured wider and continuing attention to how depoliticized forms of community development can assist in the implementation of neoliberal agendas, particularly by focussing responsibility for social provision away from the state. However, community development has largely lost sight of the role of local government which is a serious problem because it sponsors and shapes so much community development practice, and is an institution through which wider social reform may be pursued. The implications of overlooking neoliberal localized control agendas for community development are explored via a case study from Victoria, Australia, where local government has become a principal vehicle for promoting participative ‘community planning’. As in other countries and contexts, close analysis reveals that what is represented as inclusive and empowering community engagement is effectively about containment and control. Community development needs to address the nature and implications of such policies and programmes, as well as the evolving nature of the local state and the opportunities for change that may be available. It would then be more likely extend beyond its marginalized status in local government, to try to use the institution as a whole in the pursuit of social justice.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it