What became of The Local State? Neo-liberalism, community development and local government
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.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.043 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".