Defining the limits of community governance

Recent government policy statements emphasize the importance of community participation in rural areas. Likewise the literature on governance emanating from the urban studies' field stresses that partnerships and coalitions are now central features of the governing process and the new partners often include community organizations. In this paper we examine critically the concern with community participation and argue that in certain policy sectors there is still a requirement for the state to impose a dominant strategic line. We examine the construction of such a line in the housing field and show that calculations of housing demand flow from the central to the local state and in the process tend to sideline local views of development. We conclude that although the shift to governance may open up scope for community involvement in certain arenas, in others strategic policy still overrides local demands and hierarchical relations between the centre and localities still exist. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.