The emergence of organisations conducting Community Asset Transfers of leisure facilities

Community Asset Transfer (CAT) has increased as a way of delivering leisure services in England, where community groups (CG) form to manage leisure facilities in replacement for local authorities (LA). This paper builds on existing studies of the process of CAT to discuss how groups emerge to take on these facilities. Studies situated the emergence of these groups amidst LA outsourcing, with budgetary reductions, and poor management, as contexts for facilities needing transfer with CAT. A critical realist view of emergence is taken, where the morphogenetic framework is used to explain the contexts, interactions, and elaborations within two voluntary CGs that emerged to take on the management of leisure facilities. The paper confirms emergence as shaped by contexts of facility closure and LA cuts with interactions occurring when activists campaign to prevent closures, and form entities.