Future Local Lab
Local Government ExplainedSummer reading: our Chief Exec’s recommendations
Jonathan Carr-West
Looking for your next read? LGIU’s Chief Executive, Jonathan Carr-West, shares the books he’s enjoyed this summer and why he recommends them. From leadership and public policy to wider perspectives, explore his reading list and share your own book recommendations with the local government community.
Head North: A Rallying Cry for a More Equal Britain, by Andy Burnham and Steve Rotherham
So I’m not going to pretend I read this when it first came out (be honest, did you?), but it feels like it might be important to understand some of the thinking of our new PM – and judging by the long delivery time, I’m not the only one. You can read more about what we, at LGIU, think he should be focusing on in our recent open letter.
Left Behind: A New Economics for Neglected Places by Paul Collier
This is a bit of a cheat because it was on last year’s reading list, and I didn’t really engage with it. But I’m interested to see how this thinking about reviving left-behind communities through localism, civic renewal, and effective regional investment strategies does or does not resonate with the sort of ideas Andy Burnham is proposing.
How to Talk to AI, by Jamie Bartlett
How to Think About AI, by Richard Susskind
So yes, it’s a bit of a cliché to bang on endlessly about AI, but to use a fashionable Odyssey analogy, I fear we are always caught between the Scylla of obsessing too much about it and the Charybdis of not taking it seriously enough. If AI really does have the potential to change everything: the delivery of public services, the production and dissemination of knowledge and the space of democratic participation, then we all need to engage with it.
We’ve run several events recently at LGIU to do just that, and I am hoping these two books will also help me understand it a little better.
In the Long Run: The Future as a Political Idea, by Jonathan White
Can Deliberation Cure the Ills of Democracy? by James Fishkin
One of the themes I have heard a lot in recent months, in conversations about the future, is that, as well as all its other problems (money, demand pressures, capacity, workforce, structural changes), local government has a democracy problem: an ever-growing disconnect between how we do democracy and what we want it to deliver for us. This feeds a growing distrust of institutions (as we see clearly in our polling with Ipsos every year) and directly contributes to a decline in social capital just when we need more social capital to help us solve all the other problems.
We’ve talked and written a lot about this trust deficit over the past few years and have argued that one way to fix it is through building relational governance models that put participation at the heart of democratic institutions and put democratic institutions at the heart of participation.
I’m hoping that these two books will help deepen this thinking: the first exploring how ideas about the future frame the way people engage across political divides, while taking seriously the idea that democratic societies increasingly fear that time is not on their side. The second, from the man who invented deliberative polling, draws on decades of real experiments, like America in One Room and the French Climate Convention, to examine whether structured deliberation can actually remedy democratic dysfunction.
Civilisation and its Discontents, by Sigmund Freud
Finally, I’ve been having a lot of conversations recently about innovation. There’s so much of it in and around local government, and that’s something we should celebrate, but there’s also, I think, some anxiety about what it all adds up to and how “sticky” it is.
Mainstreaming innovation is normally framed as a problem of evidence, incentives or capability. But we know that even when these are aligned, change frequently stalls.
So, I’m interested in Freud’s insight that civilisation produces both dependence and resistance – through that lens, we would see innovation systems as sites of ambivalence: professionals are deeply attached to and depend upon the very structures they criticise. Does this help explain why innovation remains trapped in cycles of pilots and partial adoption? If so, then the challenge is not just to design better innovations, but to address the psychological investments that sustain the status quo. I’m not sure yet where this thinking is going or whether it even has legs. And there’s a whole tradition in this vein that came out of the Tavistock Institute, but I thought it might be fun to revisit the Master.
So that’s the reading list. Experience suggests that the temptations of leisure will (quite properly) make it as much an autumn list as a holiday list, but these are the books that will be weighing down my suitcase…
What are you reading?
Tell us your reading recommendation for the sector this summer.
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