Social services and the politics of needs interpretation

Fraser is well known for her reformulation of social justice in terms of economic redistribution, cultural recognition and political representationFootnote ¹ . However, we are more concerned here with her older work on the ‘politics of need interpretation’ (Fraser, Reference Fraser1989: chapters 7 and 8) to analyse the political-discursive dimension of social service reform. According to Fraser (Reference Fraser1989: 161), ‘in late capitalist welfare societies, talk about needs is an important species of political discourse’ which mediates claims for policy reform. Needs are not pre-given, nor should we take public discourses that authorise certain social needs at face value. The definition of needs is instead negotiated and debated; it is this ‘interpretative justification’ that captures Fraser's interest (1989: 146). She distinguishes three moments within the process of politicising needs by actors with unequal discursive power. The first ‘moment’Footnote ² is concerned with the struggles aimed at giving public legitimacy to a certain need, i.e. mobilising support for the idea that a public rather than merely individual responsibility exists for a particular need (cf. Newman and Clarke, Reference Newman and Clarke2009 on ‘publicness’). The second moment revolves around the question of who defines and interprets the need that has received public legitimacy. The third moment encompasses struggles and debates about how this need can be addressed and which resources should be allocated for that purpose.

Fraser further distinguishes three ideal-typical discourses that are involved in need politics. An oppositional discourse promotes a need that is hitherto sealed into the domestic, economic or professional sphere to an open public debate. Fraser's labelling of this discourse is very much wedded to her involvement in second wave feminism (see Fraser, Reference Fraser2013); she regards public discourses that politicise private needs as inherently progressive and democratising (understood as opposing social domination). As we will show, developing a public discourse on the perceived needs of a particular social group may have the opposite effect. We therefore broaden the term to include all discourses that make an issue (or a needs claim) visible and public. The second type of discourse involves re-privatisation and aims to de-legitimise need claims made public and to refer them back to the domestic, economic or professional sphere, with or without incorporating new arguments and interpretations in the process. The third discourse, the expert discourse, uses ‘professional jargon’ and knowledge in order to translate politicised needs into ‘administrable needs’, objects of bureaucratic state intervention. The legitimacy of this ‘expert status’ is of particular interest to our discussion: research on public participation has often emphasised how contentious the distinction is between ‘laymen’ and ‘experts’ (or between ‘authenticity’ and ‘expertise’), and how it can potentially stand in contradiction to declared policy aims of democratisation and emancipation (see Davies et al., Reference Davies, Wetherell and Barnett2007; Newman and Clarke, Reference Newman and Clarke2009).

Recognising the crucial importance of power relations, Fraser (Reference Fraser1989: 164–65) emphasises that different groups dispose of different ‘sociocultural means of interpretation and communication’ to engage in the discursive struggles of needs politics. Such means include, amongst others, narratives and conventions on group identities and deviancy, vocabularies that instantiate ‘organized idioms’ like administrative or therapeutic vocabularies, ‘paradigms of argumentation’ like the shine of objectivity around numbers and science, and established relations with influential institutions, networks and representatives. Such means are both plural (a heterogeneous, ‘polyglot’ field of possibilities) and stratified (i.e. their distribution reflects ‘patterns of dominance and subordination’). In Fraser's view the emancipation of excluded groups implies a redistribution of sociocultural means of communication and interpretation.

Fraser (2003) later proposed the notion of ‘parity of participation’. A corollary to the analytical framework of the politics of needs interpretation, it captures the position of different groups, especially those whose needs are under discussion, in public debates. For the authors, this derives from the principle that all adult members of society must be in a position (i.e. have the opportunity) to interact with one another as peers, and constitutes ‘a radical democratic interpretation of equal autonomy’ (Fraser, in Fraser and Honneth, Reference Fraser and Honneth2003: 229). The concept draws attention to the welfare state's paternalist potential, i.e. tendencies among service professionals to define the needs of target populations without taking into account the target group's capacity to voice their own needs (cf. Davies et al., Reference Davies, Gray and Webb2014).

The Roma's relationship with welfare institutions is an interesting case, since public discussions of Roma needs and identity are characterised by a noticeable absence of mandated Roma representatives (Matras, Reference Matras, Åkermark, Bloed, Hofmann, Malloy, Marko, Packer and Weller2013). Indeed, a growing number of (‘expert’) actors make claims on behalf of the Roma, while the Roma themselves remain underrepresented in many key positions and platforms with little control over their public image (McGarry, Reference McGarry2014). Cases have been described in which NGOs and social workers ‘colonise’ needs interpretations on behalf of the Roma (Trehan, Reference Trehan and Guy2001; Timmer, Reference Timmer2010; Matras et al., Reference Matras, Leggio and Steel2015). Fraser's framework is therefore useful for our investigation. While it does not prescribe which actors or discourses have legitimacy or responsibility to intervene in the process of needs interpretation, the notion of ‘parity of participation’ offers a tool to ground the analysis in a normative concern for equality and autonomy.

Local social inclusion schemes that pursue ‘participatory parity’ are thus concerned with how reforms and social work support individuals’ and groups’ opportunities to reshape societal structures and value patterns (Davies et al., Reference Davies, Gray and Webb2014). It is true that larger ‘structures’ like welfare and fiscal policies ‘are largely dependent on top-down, political commitment and are therefore far from the marginalized groups’ reach’ (Kostadinova, Reference Kostadinova2011: 164). However, at a more immediate level, parity of participation demands that marginalised groups have the opportunity and means of interpretation and communication to name and claim their needs as being potentially different from those that underpin social interventions and welfare reforms. Expressions of needs imply that claims are put forward as to what is required in order to participate in and contribute to society. In contemporary welfare societies, needs discourses and the ‘politics of needs interpretation’ mediate entitlements to support, as well as distribution of responsibility and allocation of resources and social rights (cf. Fraser, Reference Fraser1989; Dean, Reference Dean2015).

We propose to apply this approach to an ‘extreme case’. According to Flyvjbjerg, ‘extreme cases often reveal more information because they activate more actors and more basic mechanisms in the situation studied’ (Flyvjberg, 2006: 13). Extreme cases are those that often give rise to tensions and conflicting views that are more clearly articulated and might therefore be considered more dramatic. While we would not necessarily subscribe to the label ‘extreme’, the case of Roma immigrants from Romania in Manchester is exceptional in that it triggered an unusual response from the local authority and public services, as we shall describe below.

The emergence of a public concern

Between early 2009 and early 2015 two episodes of ‘politics of needs interpretation’ led to the emergence and development of Manchester City Council's ‘Roma Strategy’. The first episode shows how this strategy came about and how a body of knowledge was collected and used to mediate between the community of Roma migrants and service providers in Manchester. The second episode revolves around the question of whether issues of safeguarding of young girls and notions of ‘early marriage’ should be addressed as a specific ‘Roma problem’. We will show how different strands of Roma engagement in Manchester crystallised into alliances of actors each claiming to have relevant expertise. We address the question of whether local social policy in general, and specific social interventions that target the Roma in particular, enable or impede ‘participatory parity’.

Roma migrants from Eastern Europe began to settle in Manchester in the mid-1990sFootnote ⁷ . Public services (mainly in the education sector) were aware of their presence in the city but the City Council did not coordinate any targeted approach. Coordinated institutional engagement with Roma migrants in Manchester began in 2009, targeting a very specific, relatively small community of mostly Pentecostal Roma originating from Ţăndărei in South-Eastern Romania. They had settled in a small cluster of streets in and around the Gorton South area of the city, some arriving as early as 2000 but most of them, however, after Romania's accession to the EU in 2007 (MigRom, 2015). At the time, the community comprised around 300–400 individuals, some two-thirds of them children. The focus of Manchester's Roma Strategy on this rather small group of Roma migrants allows us to examine the factors that trigger a view of the Roma as a ‘problem’ and a challenge to local policy and service provision. It shows us how the needs of a group are interpreted and how a variety of actors assume an active role in the process of needs interpretation.

Issues of safety, security and of public image triggered Manchester City Council's interest in this particular Roma community. The local police had recorded isolated acts of violence against Romani homes in the spring of 2009, and there was a serious concern about an escalation of ethnic violence. At the same time, public opinion and the views of some local politicians may have also been influenced by national press coverage of the London Metropolitan Police's Operation Golf which investigated allegations of child trafficking specifically by Roma from Ţăndărei. In the spring of 2009 a petition was submitted by an opposition councillor to Manchester City Council on behalf of a small group of residents, accusing the Roma of littering, truancy, anti-social and criminal behaviour. This led to the setting up of a ‘Roma Strategy Group’, consisting of middle-level management from various services and chaired by the City Council's Deputy Chief Executive. There was no precedent for such explicit coordination of a policy to address a particular ethnic group.

Supported by a representative of the local opposition party, residents thus effectively used pre-existing narratives on the Roma as a ‘deviant’ group, and their procedural knowledge of local politics (a petition and questions to councillors) to develop an oppositional discourse that opened the first episode of needs interpretation by turning a hitherto ‘hidden’ issue into a matter of public concern. However, contrasting with Fraser's canonical approach, bringing the issue to the public was not instigated by a marginalised group asking for equal opportunities but rather by those demanding action to contain and control a newly arrived population. Manchester City Council, however, did not take all the complaints at face value. For over a year its Roma Strategy Group engaged in a process that involved formulating problems, targets, indicators and desired outcomes with a view toward ultimately embedding engagement with the Roma community into the city's regular, mainstream procedures. To that end, it elicited ‘expert discourses’ from front-line officers as well as from academics in order to counter residents’ discourses and to de-politicise their mode of presentation.

The Roma Strategy Group flagged a variety of issues for investigation and engagement. On the one hand, its minutes reflect a wish to contain and control the Roma population:Footnote ⁸

They also show a desire to change the Roma's alleged behaviour, in particular in relation to work ethics:

Minutes also flagged favourable reactions by residents to supposedly ‘heavy-handed’ initiatives such as a police raid (in the first quote) and a door-to-door campaign to collect council tax specifically from the Roma (in the second):

On the other hand, the minutes demonstrate an effort to ensure equal access and the Roma's active engagement with services:

The City Council was also conscious of the need to actively counteract negative perceptions among residents:

The City Council had thus accepted the fact that the presence of Roma migrants in Manchester had become a matter of public concern and public discussion, but it drew on its various means of interpretation and communication to re-frame the issue. The City's approach, involving a variety of agencies, was flagged as an effort to ensure, in the expert discourse of City Council officers, ‘community cohesion’; this became the official interpretation of the overarching need shared both by the Roma and other residents in the area. The Roma Strategy Group continued to collect information on the community by asking for reports from specialised services. At the same time City Council officers held regular public meetings with residents to reassure them that their concerns were being addressed. From our observations and conversations with the officers involved we know that no Roma were invited to attend these meetings (Interview: Regeneration). The Roma (who at that point lacked policy representatives and experience with relevant procedures) thus remained outside the debates that were initiated by others.

This changed gradually when the City Council, following the recommendations made in the University report (Matras et al., Reference Matras, Fabeni, Leggio and Vránová2009), embarked on a targeted engagement strategy with the Roma community in early 2010. Initiatives were taken to encourage the Roma to attend neighbourhood events and to access local youth activities, and steps were taken to assist Roma parents in the school registration process and to enforce equal access by signalling to schools that denying Roma school places was not acceptable. The City Council also drew on government funds for the inclusion of Eastern European migrants to introduce a temporary outreach programme that specifically targeted the Roma community from Romania. That work was outsourced to a voluntary sector organisation, the Black Health Agency or ‘BHA for Equality’. Drawing on close links and some personnel overlap with the City Council's own International New Arrivals team within the education department, the BHA also launched an intervention in local schools to raise awareness of the Roma. In due course it was to receive additional grants for this programme from Manchester City Council as well as from the EU's Lifelong Learning Programme. The joint projects produced a series of public events, face-to-face and written reports to City Council committees, school induction materials and teacher training packages, as well as published reports and appraisals commissioned from academics (for details see Matras et al., Reference Matras, Leggio and Steel2015; MigRom, 2015: 32ff.).

The first episode thus illustrates how needs were politicised and carried into the public domain. This triggered an institutional response in an effort to identify needs more systematically, drawing on a variety of information sources. The process gave rise to a bundle of expert discourses, with various actors involved in the process and a growing body of written documents crystallising into a narrative on the Roma and their needs. While the ambition was to see the Roma participating as peers, it was recognised that the way to achieve this was to capacitate a number of actors to mediate between the Roma community and institutions. The process of identifying and supporting bridging figures and community representatives was accompanied by a debate on whether the Roma must modify their own behaviour in order to benefit from equal access to services (as documented by the RSG quotes), whether they require particular skills and empowerment to do so, or whether the delivery mode of services requires some modification in order to accommodate the Roma. The core issue was thus the balance between maintaining dedicated intervention that targeted the Roma specifically, and the ambition to apply mainstream procedures to the Roma. We will see in the discussion of the second episode how a split emerged within the expert discourses regarding the role of mediation and its contribution to participatory parity, and how this split continued to be framed through a debate on identifying needs.

Two strands of Roma engagement

In its evaluation of the Roma Strategy (Mills and Wilson, Reference Mills and Wilson2013), Manchester City Council offered an overall positive assessment of its interventions. It flagged that many of the tensions were the result of perception and that, where progress could be measured, indicators of success had been met. The move to downscale and abandon the Roma Strategy, which the report announced, was primarily justified by the view that the strategy had served its purpose by alleviating tensions and showing that mainstream services were able to engage with the Roma. However, this coincided with the introduction of austerity measures after 2010, which had significant consequences for local authority budgets (cf. Lupton et al., Reference Lupton, Burchardt, Fitzgerald, Hills, McKnight, Obolenskaya, Stewart, Thomson, Tunstall and Vizard2015). According to some of the actors involved, the effort to ensure that the Roma used mainstream services was partly motivated by a need to discontinue dedicated support for budget reasons (Interview: INA). A further response to austerity was to rely more on self-organisation. As residents were expected to make more use of online services, communities who were unable to communicate specific needs risked missing out on participatory opportunities:

By the end of 2011, cuts and changes in budget allocation to schools threatened the scope of INA-BHA activities:

The team began to flag the expertise that it had developed on the Roma in an attempt to secure the continuation of funding. The 2012 BHA report to Manchester City Council said:

The INA-BHA partnership developed a discourse arguing that the Roma have distinct support needs arising from their culture which require a dedicated and targeted intervention. As part of a project funded by an EU grant, the team drafted a special ‘Admissions and Induction Protocol for Roma Children’.Footnote ⁹ It proposed that schools should record, among other information, Roma pupils’ readiness for learning, whether they wear their uniform regularly and whether the pupil ‘knows that words convey meaning’ (Murphy, Reference Murphy2013: 69). In an effort to raise awareness among teachers of (alleged) Roma-particular behaviour, their reports alluded to the Roma's supposed inability to sit still and to listen without talking, and to distinct memorising skills and a tendency to ‘negotiate the world without need for reading and writing’ (ibid.: 34). To consolidate their expert role in alleviating these supposed needs of the Roma community the team sought support from academic researchers who were commissioned to assess and validate their interventions (see Lever, Reference Lever2012; Scullion and Brown, Reference Scullion and Brown2013).

In January 2013, BHA applied successfully for a grant from Manchester City Council in order to carry out a consultation with young Romanian Roma, aiming to:

We might interpret this position as explicitly opposed to the City Council's policy of mainstreaming and downscaling dedicated interventions. Once again, a discourse of turning the Roma into an issue of public concern emerged, now from within a municipal service and resorting to commissioned expert discourse, thus triggering a new round of needs interpretation.

In its interim project report to the City Council, from June 2014, the BHA claimed: ‘early marriage is a rite of passage that individuals from within the Roma community are required to partake’. It concluded by stating: ‘Roma in the UK and on continental Europe have developed a deep-rooted mistrust of outsiders, limiting forms of interaction and engagement with social care providers’. It then recommended that the BHA's remit and funding for the intervention should be extended in order to draw on the expertise and ‘trusting relationships’ that the BHA team has established in its own work with the RomaFootnote ¹¹ . Similar to other cases of Roma inclusion initiatives, BHA presents its relationship with community members as a means of interpretation that supports their expert position (cf. Timmer, Reference Timmer2010), allowing them to define needs (second moment) and gain designated recourses (third moment) without much struggle.

At the same time, a different discourse and policy focus was being strengthened with City Council involvement. In 2013, the MigRom consortium was launched, funded by the EU's Seventh Framework Programme. Coordinated by the University of Manchester, it also included Manchester City Council as a full partner. MigRom funding offered the City Council an opportunity to work towards strengthening a more self-reliant Romani communityFootnote ¹² while other Roma engagement strategies were being downscaled or mainstreamed (Interview: Regeneration).

In September 2013 the project launched its weekly advice sessions run by two Roma employed by the University of Manchester as outreach workers.Footnote ¹³ In order to forward its idea of a consultation forum, the project invited other young Roma to act as an informal ‘Roma Leadership Group’. In the summer of 2014 the group initiated a series of meetings with local councillors to discuss their positions on issues of concern to the Roma community.Footnote ¹⁴ The MigRom Project also made City Council minutes and BHA reports on Roma-related interventions accessible to the groupFootnote ¹⁵ and encouraged its members to put questions to City Council officials about the way in which the Roma were depicted in these documents, especially in relation to the presentation of safeguarding issues and early marriage. The researchers’ concern that the narrative proposed by BHA and its partners INA was potentially stigmatising, that it did not rest on evidence, and that there was no justification for a targeted intervention, resonated well with the young Roma. They complained to councillors and City Council officers about the way in which their community was being portrayed and asked to be involved directly in any future discussions about their community.

The Roma leadership group thus drew on means of interpretation and communication presented by MigRom as well as their own ‘authentic’ experience to engage in the second episode of need interpretation politics, putting institutionalised assumptions on Roma culture to public debate (as a struggle about the public legitimacy of certain needs, or Fraser's ‘first moment’) while putting themselves forward as actors who should be involved in defining needs (Fraser's ‘second moment’). MigRom scholars and Regeneration partners (interviews) regarded this as a process though which community members were able to familiarise themselves with policy representatives, discourses, and procedures, as a way of acquiring ‘resilience capital’. After a series of informal meetings over a period of several months, the Roma leadership group was given an opportunity to raise its concerns more formally at a meeting with councillors and City Council officers at Manchester Town Hall in December 2014, where a promise was made to consult the community about future reports.Footnote ¹⁶ In June 2015, Manchester City Council released a new report on its Roma Engagement in which it acknowledged that some statements made in earlier reports had not been evidenced and declared that no unsubstantiated information would be included in any future reports. It also promised to turn to the newly formed Roma community initiative, ‘Roma Voices of Manchester’, a continuation of the informal Roma Leadership Group, as a channel of communication with the Romani community.Footnote ¹⁷

Arguably, the demand that Manchester City Council should abandon discussions of culture and targeted interventions amounted to an attempt to dispute the legitimacy of institutionalised needs interpretation in regard to these issues and to ‘re-privatise’ or return such issues to the domestic sphere (seemingly at odds with Fraser's perspective on the oppositional discourse). The young Roma spokespersons argued that Roma culture, like any culture, is subject to constant change from within and that generalising statements achieve more harm than good and threaten to damage the image of the community, especially since there was no evidence for the assertions made (based on its research in the community, the MigRom Project disputed BHA's claim that the Roma community had a ‘disproportionate rate of teenage pregnancies’; see MigRom 2015; MigRom 2014). If the Roma have the same rights as all citizens, they should be subjected to the same safeguarding procedures. For their part, BHA continued to argue that it had real indications that safeguarding was a problem in the Roma community and that while early marriage was not a ‘Roma problem’ per se, it was not illegitimate to investigate the issue in the Roma community (Interview: BHA).

The ensuing debate, which revolved around who was best placed to define needs and the concrete ways in which these would be addressed, might be regarded as the emergence of two competing alliances of actors, both developing strategies that aim to empower the Roma, and both claiming expert status and trust relationships with community members. On the one hand, the alliance of INA and BHA continued the strand of engagement that treated the Roma as passive subjects in the politics of need interpretation and policy development. They drew arguments in favour of their approach from their experience in education, health and safeguarding with the Roma and other minorities (Interview: BHA). To strengthen its position, this alliance mobilised an expert discourse, drawing on their own work and commissioning academics to support their positions (for a critical analysis see Matras et al., Reference Matras, Leggio and Steel2015). They described their approach to outreach as ‘assertive’ (Interview: INA, BHA), implicitly suggesting that the Roma would not engage with services without dedicated and pro-active interventions. This view of the Roma as passive subjects can also be inferred from the fact that the Roma were only employed in BHA's safeguarding intervention as interpreters. Just as they were not involved in the identification and assessment of needs in preparation of BHA's application, their input remained limited during the BHA project itself.

On the other hand, Manchester City Council's Regeneration and Equality teams aimed at mainstreaming the Roma access to services and encouraging self-reliance. Through their involvement in the MigRom project they engaged in a continuous dialogue with members of the Roma community, particularly those members that host the weekly advice sessions and those involved in the leadership group. They were thus able to claim legitimacy for their approach as an enterprise to which the Roma contributed as active partners. As a research project, MigRom treated expert discourses as a point of departure rather than as a validation. Social interventions were then put in place as a way of testing the validity of the expert discourse. MigRom's approach was to put the Roma in a position from which they could develop their own voice. Due in part to its internationally recognised expertise on Roma culture, MigRom's alliance was in a position to argue against essentialist approaches to the Roma community and its culture and to challenge the City Council's contradictory commitment to support both strands at the same time and to partake in both alliances. With a direct dialogue between the two alliances proving difficult to arrange, the City Council's representative on MigRom argued: