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This chapter returns to the New Deal for Communities (NDC) initiative with a reflective discussion of the utility of evaluation. It notes that evaluation is seen as a process of knowledge generation that can inform policy development and policy implementation. It considers the evaluation discourses for stakeholders in NDC evaluation in terms of the implementation structure of evaluation, preferred forms of knowledge, attitudes to institutional learning, and change and geographic tactics for knowledge acquisition. It concludes that if NDCs are to develop the capacity for institutional learning then national evaluation must play a key role, addressing both the current crisis in utilising evidence from evaluation as well as disseminating findings effectively at all levels.

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This chapter discusses debates on the generation and flow of knowledge in neighbourhood renewal. It concentrates on the ‘academic’ debates on the use and value of evidence and in particular research-based evidence in policy processes and sets out the policy-centred debate. It also concentrates on the New Deal for Communities (NDC) programmes by first considering the programme as a whole and then considering how knowledge has impacted on the activities of two case study partnerships. It explores the processes by which knowledge is generated within the NDC programme which captures some of the tensions inherent in the efficiency versus participation debate for local government more widely.

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English

Over the last two decades, the cultural sphere appears to have gained a more central role in urban policy and urban governance. This article gives an outline of the changing cultural policy landscape in the UK over the last decade, and then explores the significance of this changing landscape from the standpoint of one of the country's main regional cities. It argues that there has been a growing congruence between national and local cultural policy discourses, but that a number of deep-seated issues remain.

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This chapter considers the importance of engaging core mainstream service providers within neighbourhood partnerships as the preferred mechanism for getting resources to neighbourhood renewal. It notes that one central element of contemporary urban regeneration is that exceptional funding is not enough on its own to tackle area-based disadvantage. It plots the state of mainstream agency engagement in neighbourhood renewal and considers the degree to which this demonstrates the limitations of neighbourhood governance to act. It asks the question whether mainstreaming is an effective agenda for the delivery of the neighbourhood management of core public services.

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This chapter draws on concepts of neighbourhood governance in terms of ‘sites’, ‘spaces’, and ‘spheres’ to examine its realities. It brings together key issues raised by contributing authors in order to examine the potential place of neighbourhood governance in a new settlement between central and local government, community and citizen. It explains that in doing so, it does not claim that neighbourhood governance is the answer to all the challenges of a complex society — it also addresses the limitations of neighbourhood governance — but it argues for an understanding of its proper place in a complex polity. Hence, this chapter examines the importance of context in shaping developments in neighbourhood governance, the place of the neighbourhood within multi-level governance, and the assumptions about democracy that underpin these new forms of governance.

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Neighbourhood governance in contemporary urban policy

“Disadvantaged by where you live?” distils lessons from work on neighbourhoods carried out within the Cities Research Centre of the University of the West of England over the past seven years. It offers a major contribution to academic debates on the neighbourhood both as a sphere of governance and as a point of public service delivery under New Labour since 1997.

The book explores how ‘the neighbourhood’ has been used in policy in the UK; what the ‘appropriate contribution’ of neighbourhood governance is and how this relates to concepts of multi-level governance; the tensions that are visible at the neighbourhood level and what this tells us about wider governance issues.

The book explores and reflects on the notion of neighbourhood governance from a variety of perspectives that reflect the unique depth and breadth of the Centre’s research programme. Neighbourhood governance is examined in relation to: multi-level governance and city-regions; local government; mainstreaming; cross-national differences in neighbourhood policy; community and civil society; diversity; different conceptions of democracy; and, evaluation and learning. In doing so, the book identifies useful conceptual tools for analysing the present and future contribution of policy to neighbourhoods.

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This chapter offers an overview of the development of neighbourhood policy in the UK and an introduction to a decade of New Labour policy on neighbourhoods. It also introduces key New Labour policies and some key academic debates on the nature of governing and being governed. It explores the idea and practice of neighbourhood governance, which frames the key issues and themes throughout this book. It notes that the different aspects of the new governance can be argued to have created room for the emergence of neighbourhood governance as an important component of a multi-level and multi-actor environment. It suggests that the emergence of neighbourhood governance can be understood in terms of sites, spaces, or spheres, each with distinctive characteristics but also with potentially overlapping rules, structures, and processes.

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This chapter introduces the main topics covered by this book. The initiation of a new cohort study of approximately 18,800 UK babies born in the Millennium provides the opportunity to reflect on the circumstances of children in Britain at the start of a new century. This book focuses on the information collected in the new Millennium Cohort Study of these babies covering the period from pregnancy through to nine months old. However, it also offers a perspective from earlier generations in selected respects, to show how circumstances and experiences differ. The book focuses on particular aspects of starting out on life in the 21st century; these include pregnancy experiences; birth experiences; child health; growth and development; parents’ health; household structure; socioeconomic circumstances of parents; employment and education of mothers and fathers; childcare arrangements; household income and attitudes to parenting and employment.

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It is widely known that police recorded crime data provides only a partial picture of the true extent of crimes, with surveys identifying a large number of ‘hidden’ victims. Often referred to as the dark figure of crime, this gap between police records and ‘true’ level of crime has been attributed to a range of influences, including an unwillingness for some victims to report their experiences to the police, coupled with selectivity in police recording practices and errors in the translation of police records into official statistics. Studies have also demonstrated the potentially severe implications of failing to account for these hidden crimes for the veracity of models of crime data. Comparing police records against victim surveys presents us with a potential framework to generate corrected model estimates. But to date we know little about the nature of under-reporting and recording at the local area level, with victim surveys generally only suitable for regional or broad police force-level comparisons. In this chapter we explore a novel solution to this problem, using a synthetic population dataset to examine the extent to which police recording practices vary systematically across England and Wales. Designed to match the UK population on basic demographics as measured by the census, and with each resident given a victimization profile derived from the Crime Survey for England and Wales, this synthetic population enables an examination of the extent of crime undercounting at a range of spatial scales.

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