Beyond Homo Ecomomicus: English Local Authority Community Asset Transfer (LA CAT)

Local authority community asset transfer (LA CAT) is a mechanism which involves the transfer of local authority owned land or buildings to the stewardship and/or ownership of a community based organisation (CBO). An era of public sector spending cuts, combined with a cross-party consensus on the importance of community empowerment, would seem an opportune time for cash poor, but asset and people rich, English local authorities to deploy LA CAT.

This article investigates the practical reality of English LA CAT delivery, exposing a landscape where, despite considerable policy interest in LA CAT, LA CAT delivery is in decline. Where pockets of multiple LA CAT deliveries are identified, the common denominator is the use of a tripartite delivery model where third-party facilitators act as cultural brokers between local authorities and candidate LA CAT recipient CBOs.

This study asserts that LA CAT delivery is a complex adaptive system. As such, current positivistic local authority working practices, driven by rationalism and objective fact impede LA CAT delivery. Complexity-sensitive approaches can stabilise a LA CAT system, ultimately unblocking delivery. The study finds that third-party facilitation, as a complexity-sensitive intervention, can improve network connectivity within the system, which, in turn, promotes flexibility and creates space for uncertainty. The research concludes that, although non-linearity dictates that the use of third party facilitation is generalisable only as practicable; if LA CAT is to achieve its full ideological potential, fundamentally, that non-linearity necessitates a local authority epistemological pivot away from rationality to embrace complexity thinking.