ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on participation in Single Regeneration Budget Programmes. It examines the impact that ideas about community have had on policy formulation and some of the difficulties that have discerned in its usage in specific localities. Urban policy from the 1980s onwards has assumed that neighbourhoods are lived in by groups of people who hold in common a shared identity. The scope of community participation and involvement extended from the neighbourhood to the sub-regional and regional levels. The chapter looks at the history of community engagement in recent policy initiatives and considers the impact on the ground of the introduction of these programmes in the areas described above. It concludes by raising some of the practical and conceptual difficulties surrounding the idea of community participation in contemporary policy agendas, as these are explicated in the United Kingdom. The chapter also focuses on the notion of community engagement than on specific area-based issues.
