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RES-182-25-0019: Skills for Managing Spatial Diversity Output 2 Output 2: Murtagh, B. and Ellis, G. Skills, Conflict and Spatial Planning in Northern Ireland, submitted to Planning Practice and Research, Submitted September 2008. Filename: RES182250019 OUTPUT 2. Brendan Murtagh and Geraint Ellis

Brendan Murtagh, SPACE, The Queen’s University Belfast, David Keir Building, Stranmillis Road, Belfast, BT9 5AG, UK. Tel: +44 (0)28 9097 4742; Fax: 44(0)28 9068 7652; Email: b.murtagh@qub.ac.uk. Geraint Ellis, SPACE, The Queen’s University Belfast, David Keir Building, Stranmillis Road, Belfast, BT9 5AG, UK. Tel: +44 (0)28 9097 4370; Fax: 44(0)28 9068 7652; Email: g.ellis@qub.ac.uk.

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Skills, Conflict and Spatial Planning in Northern Ireland1 Brendan Murtagh and Geraint Ellis Abstract: This paper examines the implications of ethno-religious segregation and ideas about community cohesion for planning skills. Empirically, it is located in the post-conflict conditions of Northern Ireland but it draws on recent debates about the relationship between competence, knowledge and learning in sustainable communities. Despite a long period of territorialized conflict, the paper suggests that practices in managing spatial diversity are weakly developed and poorly transmitted. The research, based on survey data and qualitative interviews, identifies skills deficits and the organisational, professional and cultural obstacles to sharing knowledge and practice. The paper concludes by highlighting the value of social learning methods to the management of post-conflict transition in the region.

1 This paper is based on the research project Skills for Managing Spatial Diversity funded under the joint ESRC-Academy for Sustainable Communities Targeted Initiative on Skills and Knowledge for Sustainable Communities; grant number RES-182-25-0019. We would like to thank the ESRC and the ASC for the support we have received in undertaking this project.

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Introduction The skills agenda in Britain created an engaging debate about the nature of sustainability, the capacity of professionals to respond to spatial complexity and the value of professionalism when confronted with unpredictable urban change (Peel, 2005). More recently, the evaluation of skills has specialised into areas concerned, with design, brownfield development and community cohesion. The Academy for Sustainable Communities published a paper making the link between sustainability and community cohesion in England, emphasising the interdisciplinary challenges created by parallel lives, enclaving and educational segregation (ASC, 2007a). Techniques in cross-community engagement and participatory practice were prioritised as well as the need to recognise the ethical implications of working in different social, linguistic and cultural settings. Policy makers have also been encouraged to look at experience in Northern Ireland in developing these methodologies and frameworks (Home Office, 2001). The experience of managing three decades of territorialised ethno-religious conflict has spawned a community relations sector steeped in the language of cultural traditions, mutual respect and inter-community mediation. Whilst this has produced important thinking and innovation on conflict resolution and peace building the extent, quality and transferability of experience dealing with the ‘hard edges’ of residential segregation is less certain. This paper reviews the implications of the skills agenda for Northern Ireland and in particular the extent to which competencies and practices for managing spatial diversity have resonance for the wider community cohesion debate. Drawing on survey data, it suggests that the capacity to manage let alone resolve, spatial conflict is weak, sporadic and lacks coherence, especially within the planning system. The research was funded by the ESRC and ASC under the Skills and Knowledge for Sustainable Communities initiative and this paper reflects on two parts of the methodology: a survey of 253 practitioners operating across the public, private and voluntary sectors; and a programme of 28 in-depth interviews with policy makers and practitioners involved in regeneration and local development. The analysis suggests that part of the explanation rests in the dominance of bureaucratic cultures, professionalism and structures within the local state. However, part of the problem is the absence of an open and vibrant learning culture in which practice and experience is actively shared within and between agencies, sectors and professions. The paper concludes by highlighting the importance of innovative, if isolated initiatives, but suggests that the development and transfer of skills in managing spatial diversity requires a deeper understanding of learning styles and cultures both regionally and nationally. Communities, skills and local development The role of the community and voluntary sector in Northern Ireland, especially during the Troubles and in the period of post conflict transition has been well documented (Morrissey, 2005). The dominant narrative positions the sector as a resource that held civil society together and provided an alternative to the politics of sectarianism, markets and a highly centralized bureaucratic state (Murtagh, 2002). Intellectually, the critique rested heavily on the notion of social capital and in particular, the role of organisational structures and governance in local development (Shirlow and Murtagh, 2004). Building participative democracy lead to a series of programmes aimed at shoring up the

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voluntary sector, especially in the most disadvantaged neighbourhoods (Muir, 2004). The EU PEACE Programme I 1994-2000 and II 2000-2006 placed particular emphasis on community infrastructure to match investment in the hard infrastructure of traditional regional policy.

Weak community infrastructure exists in communities where social need and disadvantage sit alongside the absence of locally organised, locally managed, accountable and participative community development activity. It is evident by the lack of self-help approaches to tackling local social, educational, health, cultural, environmental and economic issues (CFNI, 2007, p. 6).

Whilst there was a rationale for supporting the sector, there was little investment in understanding what skills, knowledge and learning were required to achieve sustained change. In Scotland, Turok and Taylor (2006) argued that the skills debate was prompted by the need for: a more complete set of knowledge to deliver broad based sustainability; a stronger engagement with local people; and a less regulatory and more constructive stance by public officials. Their framework informed the Scottish Skills Strategy and “recognises the context of associated knowledge behaviour and values that are vital for skills to be effective” (Turok and Taylor, 2006, p. 501). The competencies that are required included: strategic skills such as leadership and planning; process skills including people management; and practical skills such as setting up financial and administrative systems. In England, the Egan Review (2004) set out the generic and technical skills required to achieve sustainable communities and proposed a national academy and regional skills centres to support practitioners and professionals. Peel (2005) pointed out that much of the interest in skills development could be traced to New Labour thinking on communitarianism and active citizenship. Here, she argued that the skills debate underplayed the importance of learning and in particular, what motivates individuals to learn. Simplistic notions of capacity building which see the need to develop communities to a point where they can deliver policies and government programmes for and by themselves is especially problematic. Peel called for a learner centred approach and drawing on Klob (1984) suggested that it is the interplay between education, meaningful work and personal development that is essential for achieving the full potential of individuals. Citizens need to be ‘seen as active producers’ of, rather than the products of, regeneration practice (Peel, 2005, p.447). Higher level understandings of information via analysis, manipulation or evaluation allow citizens to be more innovative and creative and to thereby challenge traditional power structures. Here ‘situated’ learning emphasises engagement in specific social practices as opposed to ‘acquisition’ learning, where the approach is based on the transmissions of facts and knowledge. Like Peel, Bailey (2005) feels that too much emphasis has been placed on setting out lists required by practitioners rather than trying to understand how learning takes place in places, organizations and networks. In Northern Ireland, the policy impetus was political in that it involved skilling communities, not necessarily state officials, to build representative structures in order to give them a material stake in conflict transformation. In Britain a rounded definition of sustainable communities and the capacity of the system, especially professionals, to deliver spatial planning, produced a more critical evaluation of skills and learning. Skilled practitioners were important, but a commitment to situated learning and learning organisations were essential components of the strategic approach:

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Learning Organisations build learning into every day tasks. Day-to-day work includes opportunities for reflection, debriefing, practicing things, giving and receiving feedback. A range of approaches can be adopted, including courses, on the job training, learning plans, coaching and secondments. People seek and use evidence to test ideas, to learn from new practice and to evaluate progress (NRU, 2002, p.39).

In a recent paper on Communities of Practice Schweitzer et al (2008) highlighted the diversity of learning styles and methods in land use planning. These included action learning based on practice, from peer groups and student centred learning where individuals develop capacities to address their own development needs and skills. For Wenger et al (1998), Communities of Practice offered a way of integrating knowledge sets, research traditions and methods to stimulate new thinking about social problems. Thus, Synder et al pointed out that complexity calls “for flexible arrangements, constant adaptation and the savvy blending of expertise and credibility that requires crossing the boundaries of organizations, sectors and governance levels. One way to integrate efforts across these boundaries is to cultivate, ‘communities of practice’ that promote cross-boundary action learning to address national priorities” (Synder et al., 2005, p. 2). Communities of Practice are: groups of people who share a concern, a set of problems, or a passion about a topic, and who deepen their knowledge and expertise in this area by interacting on an ongoing basis (Wenger et al., 2002, p 1). They operate as ‘social learning systems’ where knowledge communities, competency networks, thematic groups and learning methods create a new culture of problem solving. The role of social learning in the environment is especially important in this context:

Social learning is the collective action and reflections that occurs among different individuals and groups as they work to improve the management of human and environmental interrelations. Social learning for improved human interrelations within the environment must ultimately includes us all because we are all part of the same systems and each of us will inevitably experience the consequences of these change processes (Keen et al. 2005, p. 4).

However, for learning to be meaningful, knowledge and its diversity need to be recognised and valued. Alexander (2005) drew a distinction between three kinds of knowledge in land use planning: Systematic scientific knowledge includes substantive and produced theories and

systematic methods and skills; Performance knowledge (judgment and good senses, shown in communicative

interaction and personal competencies); and Appreciative knowledge (normative knowledge) embracing understanding of

values needs and problems and substantive, empirical knowledge based on personal experience, anecdotal observation and appreciative judgment.

For Rydin, the planner plays an important role in handling different knowledge sets so the governance arenas in which competing and contested versions of reality can be tested will be crucial:

This requires forums for engaging expert with expert, lay perspective with lay perspective and lay and expert perspectives in examination of each other’s claims. Again, the planner may need to support less powerful

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contributors. Any forum also requires procedures for resolution of these multiple claims to establish a relatively uncontested basis for planning action and evaluating that action (Rydin, 2007, p.63).

This interplay between knowledge, learning and skills is at the heart of the development of sustainable communities agenda but it is less than clear how this would help to manage the connection between sustainable communities and the emerging political concern for community cohesion. In 2004, the Home Office set out guidance on building community cohesion into area based strategies and placed a particular emphasis on working with mono-cultural communities:

Some communities are mono-cultural in nature and you will therefore need to use a different approach to promote cross-cultural contact. This will need to concentrate on educating neighbouring communities about one another, developing projects that link the communities together and, by building contact and trust, breaking down negative images of the other community (Home Office, 2004, p. 22).

However, Robinson (2006) argued that this link was poorly understood and indeed contradictory. The promotion of cohesive communities assumed a narrow, white sense of British citizenship and down played the advantages that segregation offered vulnerable ethnic minorities. The emphasis on consensus at the expensive of positive agonistic practice has profound implications for the type of skills that need to be supported in segregated neighbourhoods as Robinson pointed out:

The new politics of community appears to be slipping into worst excesses of political communitarianism … whereby a notion of community is applied that justifies hierarchical arrangements and delegitimises areas of conflict and contest in modern society. There would, therefore, appear to be good reason to view this new politics of community with a good dose of skepticism and no small amount of concern (Robinson, 2008, p.31).

The ASC commissioned the Institute of Community Cohesion to explore the connection between sustainable communities and community cohesion and the implications for planning skills (ASC, 2007b). The review recognised that “there is limited practical guidance about the way in which areas can be effectively planned to be attractive to all communities and to ensure that separation and segregation along ethnic lines is minimised (ASC, 2007b, p.27). The table below summarises the main recommendations, from the review, which emphasises the importance of best practice and tool kits to address the skills gap in this arena.

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Table 1 ASC recommendations on community cohesion

Recommendation 1. There is limited evidence that cohesion factors in internal policy themes and guidance, routes

to learning and dissemination of information; professional skills still prevails. 2. There is a need to develop examples of best practice and a Pathway Development

Programme leading to an accredited award. 3. There should be a champion in key organization to promote and share best practice. 4. A resource pack should be developed on community cohesion aimed at practitioners. 5. However, specific guides are also needed which would be distinctive to each sector but with

an emphasis on cutting across agencies and professions. 6. The ASC and Institute for Community Cohesion ICC need to amass and update a body of

knowledge, practice and innovation in this arena. 7. There needs to be a clear and precise list of sectors and organizations to be targeted with

these initiatives. 8. Regional governments, RDAs and Regional Centres of Excellence need to be encouraged to

place this at the top of their agenda. 9. Professional services and publications should be envisaged to raise the quality of the debate. 10. The practitioners network needs to be envisaged and supplied to deepen and share skills. Source: Based on ASC, 2007b, pp.74-77. COMEDIA and the ASC also wrestled with the conceptual problems identified in the Home Office report (2001) and individual reviews of Bradford, Burnley and Oldham. The challenge is clearly set in the parallel lives that fuelled suspicion, exclusion and sporadic outbreaks of violence:

This has serious implications for all the sustainable communities’ professions, including planning regeneration, social work, etc. particularly for the skills they require for engaging with communities (COMEDIA and ASC, 2006, p. 11).

The key skills challenges of the intercultural work include: Understanding change and the role that culture plays in socio-economic and

demographic change; Understanding that culture involves looking at the values, practices and

instructions that help make a placed based community work; Managing conflict and resolving disputes; Thinking and planning culturally using a Cultural Sensitivity Analysis to assess

where and how planning would relate to cultural practices, values and institutions.

The study also revealed difficulties among local authorities in making connections between planning and community cohesion. Consultation with diverse communities is especially problematic given the time involved, the reluctance by some communities to engage, the resources required to deliver it effectively and linguistic differences. The COMEDIA/ASC report takes each of the Egan General Skills and shows how they relate to intercultural engagement. For instance, it recognises the need to negotiate with gatekeepers who can control the amount and quality of consultation in a community. This might involve a specific skill of:

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Demonstrating the ethics of good practice, including respect for all parties, tolerance of different people and perspectives, confidentiality and the importance of honesty (COMEDIA and the ASC, 2006, p. 39).

The twelve principles of good practice in intercultural community engagement are described in the table below:

Table 2 Twelve principles of good practice in intercultural engagement 1. Clear ground rules should be established; 2. The process must have an honest intention; 3. Engagement needs to be built over a long time; 4. Aim to inform and involve all those who have a justifiable right to participate; 5. Make sure that communication and publicity is inclusive; 6. Use methods of involvement which are relevant to the communities concerned; 7. Train community members in planning and engagement techniques 8. Resources need to be identified to support the process; 9. Conflict is inevitable; 10. Staff attitudes are crucial; 11. Consultation should contribute to Building cohesion; and 12. Participants have a right to expect that the process of data analysis and the formulation of

conclusions will be conducted with transparency. Source: COMEDIA and ASC, 2006, p.41. Linked to this, the ASC (OPM/ASC, 2008) identified the skills and practices that could help to translate these broad concepts into local plans, especially where they engender a sense of belonging and attachment to place. Here, they advocated a wider understanding of cohesion to embrace age, gender and social class and argued for a framework rather than a strict or restrictive definition, which might assume that communities are a fixed identity. They highlighted some of the priority areas for skills developments: Understanding change and the role that culture plays in socio-economic and

demographic change; Understanding that culture involves looking at the values, practices and

instructions that help make a placed based community work; Managing conflict and resolving disputes; Thinking and planning culturally using a Cultural Sensitivity Analysis to assess

where and how planning would relate to cultural practices, values and institutions.

The table below sets out the competencies for core practitioners involved in community cohesion which interestingly emphasises the need to understand local ‘complexity’ and the ‘tensions’ that shape inter- and intra-community tensions. Whilst this does not go on to articulate the power dynamics that produce and embed these tensions.

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Table 3 Cohesion-building competencies for core practitioners

A. ACTION ROOTED IN THE COMMUNITY B. BUILDING COHESION WITH OTHER

PRACTITIONERS Understanding complexity in a community (including its composition, dynamics, current tensions and likely future tensions)

Working in partnership with other agencies/practitioners (particularly within a specific locality, in formal structures and informally)

Understanding what people in the community want (including what makes them feel ‘mad, bad and sad’ about a place)

Developing a clear vision and bringing others along with you (including having the confidence and communication skills to give leadership around that vision)

Working with people in the community (including making connections, building relationships and being able to negotiate and explain decisions)

Risk taking and forging new approaches (eg. being able to balance national targets and local needs

Empowering the community (including encouraging participation, creating opportunities and facilitating the emergence of ‘community champions’)

Sharing good practice (including being attuned to the differences and similarities between your area and others, and thus understanding which good practice from elsewhere could be translated to best effect)

Source: OPM/ASC, 2008, p.39. The CRE (2007a) reviewed progress in race relations in Britain and argued that much still needed to be done on improving BME representation on Local Strategy Partnerships, prioritising race issues in local development work and encouraging innovation among minority entrepreneurs. Linked to this the CRE (2007b) highlighted the need for more intensive work on regeneration and its relationship with the race equality duty (CRE, 2007b). The review called for vision and stronger leadership on race equality and highlighted a need to proof all strategies for their impact on ethnic minorities. Mainstreaming equality across local authority functions, principally housing urban regeneration and planning demanded improved skills and the CRE called for the ASC to promote good race relations throughout its work programme. CLG (2007) reviewed what works in community cohesion and highlighted the following lessons: Projects among young people are seen to be key; A focus on supporting new arrivals is important; It is important not to neglect those who are less visible such as women; Tailored and innovative approaches, targeted at specific groups and

neighbourhoods are essential; It is important not to unintentionally emphasise difference or create competition

by funding discrete groups; Promote the perception of fairness in the delivery of services to different groups; Developing English is crucial to social inclusion; Engage communities in other languages will still be important to improving

services; Projects that facilitate meaningful interaction between people are particularly

important; Participation methods and building community capacities need to underpin

effective strategies; Myths needs to be dispelled in terms of cross-community attitudes;

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Crises responses are important when things go wrong; Leadership and cross-organisation work to ensure services are delivered as

close to local people as possible; and Dissemination and learning from practice are both important in mainstreaming

cohesion approaches in government. The national policy agenda in skills has produced new strategic direction, a regional skills infrastructure and research and guidance on training and education. The policy agenda attracted and created critical debate on the emphasis placed on generic skills at the expense of more radical initiatives that questioned the distributional effects of policies and programmes. The literature and even some skills polices, have unravelled the relationship between skills, knowledge and learning in order to develop more holistic and constructive approaches to planning sustainable communities. More recently, this involved an analysis of skills for inter-cultural work and the need to value community cohesion. The next part of the paper reviews circumstances in Northern Ireland which, despite an established tradition in community relations work, fall short in significant areas of the skills and learning culture. The skills gap in Northern Ireland The first part of the data gathering involved an e-survey of 253 individuals active in regeneration and planning across the public, private and voluntary sectors. In particular, the questionnaire attempted to compare shortfalls in generic skills, as defined by the Egan review, between UK and Northern Ireland practitioners. It also identified skills that required improvement in managing ethno-religious diversity in the context of local development in the region. The diagram below compares Northern Ireland with the UK on six of the Egan generic skills areas. It shows that Northern Ireland out performs the UK on some skills such as financial management. Here, 40% of UK respondents felt that this required improvement compared with 36% in Northern Ireland and the experience of agencies in the delivery of the EU Structural Funds may be part of the explanation. Similarly, leadership skills seem to be better developed and with traditionally high rates of political activity and civic participation (Aughey, 2005), 17% of respondents felt that this competency required support compared with 22% in the UK. However, on analytical skills, strategic planning, setting the vision and creative thinking, Northern Ireland lagged behind their UK counterparts. For instance, 45% of respondents locally felt that their skills in breakthrough thinking required improvement compared with just 28% in the national survey. A community group respondent commented that part of the problem was that the sheer pressure of project delivery which “left no space to think about what we were doing and we sometimes drifted away from what we should have been doing” (Interview with community organisation chairperson).

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Figure 1 Egan skills that require improvement in Northern Ireland and the United Kingdom UK figures: ASC (2007) Mind the Skills Gap: The Skills We Need for Sustainable Communities, Leeds, ASC, p.28. Figure 2 looks at specific skills in community relations that are important in local development initiatives. This shows that the key skills shortfalls were in the techniques of dispute resolution (36%), getting past political gatekeepers (33%) and getting groups on both sides of the ethno-religious divide to keep to their agreed commitments (33%). The survey also showed that groups needed more support in brokering deals between the two communities (31%) and rescuing projects when things go wrong (28%). Thirty seven per cent of respondents also felt they needed more support in the conduct of Equality Impact Assessments (EQIAs). EQIAs were introduced by the Northern Ireland Act (1998) to proof all public policies, programmes and projects for their effects on statutorily defined equality groupings including, religion and political opinion. The data also show that 36% of respondents had difficulty accessing best practice in conflict resolution and 43% in accessing training in community relations. Given the investment in capacity building measures in Northern Ireland, not least in the context of the EU PEACE Programmes, the problems accessing training and best practice resources highlight the important structural weaknesses in the regional skills market.

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Project Management

Leadership

Brekthrough thinking

Visioning

Finanacialmanagement

Analysis

%

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Figure 2 Skills that require improvement in community relations in Northern Ireland The diagram below shows comparisons between the private, public and community sectors. It reveals that getting access to suitable training in community relations was a problem shared across the sectors but whilst statutory sector representatives had fewer problems operating EQIAs (28%) community groups identified this as a significant skills gap (42%). Given the potential of EQIAs to: identify the negative community relations effects of planning policies; mitigate and identify alternative measures; strengthen good relations; and hold the public sector to account, this seems to be a significant area for development. Twenty two per cent of public sector respondents felt that they required improved analysis and decision making skills and a further 13% identified a need for customer awareness skills. The figures for the community sector were 37% and 24% respectively. Community respondents were, however, stronger at more operational skills such as getting past paramilitary gatekeepers (32%) and building trust and mutual community respect (27%) compared with their statutory counterparts (40% and 27% respectively).

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Dispute resolution

Getting past gatekeepers

Understanding conflict

Keeping to commitments

EQIAs

Rescuing projects

Brokering deals

Accessing training

Accessing best practice

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Figure 3 Inter-sectoral comparisons of skills that require improvement in Northern Ireland

Skills and Context The second strand of the research methodology involved a series of 28 semi-structured in-depth interviews with policy makers and practitioners across the statutory, community and voluntary sectors. The survey addressed a range of issues including: the awareness of skills in the delivery of a range of functions; competency strengths and gaps; the skills required for managing ethno-religious segregation; how skills are acquired and used; and the institutional context for the development and delivery of an active skills agenda. The peace process and cross-community negotiations associated with it, helped to reframe residential segregation as an explicitly political issue demanding attention from the policy community (Shirlow and Murtagh, 2006). Land use planning, urban regeneration and housing policies have all recently shifted their strategic emphasis to address the territorial legacy of the Northern Ireland conflict. The Regional Development Strategy for Northern Ireland (RDS) introduced a new Strategic Planning Guidance on Community Cohesion (SPG-SRC 3) in which planning policy would respond to the effects of segregation and interfacing and at the same time, promote opportunities for residential mixing and neutral, shared places (DRD, 2001). Similarly, the regions public sector housing agency, the Housing Executive also used the language of community cohesion to launch a strategy aimed at: addressing the effects of the peace lines; creating public sector integrated housing; removing political and paramilitary graffiti; and responding to the needs of tenants displaced by the effects of sectarian attacks (NIHE, 2005). The Neighbourhood Renewal Strategy for Northern Ireland, People and Place, emphasised the way in which territoriality deepened the exclusion of disadvantaged communities; the need to build good relations into local development programmes and the importance of sharing good practice particularly in responding to interface problems (DSD, 2003).

0 10 20 30 40 50

Community

Public

Private

%

Access to trainingRecuing projects

EQIAs

Building trustGetting past gatekeepers

Understanding posotions

AnalysisCustomer aw areness

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However, individual Area Development Plans, Sectoral Housing Strategies and Neighbourhood Renewal programmes designed to implement these high level commitments showed little engagement with community cohesion in operational practice. A lack of competence and technical know how is part of the explanation but organisational cultures, professional values and state agency all help to dictate the shape and content of the planning discourse. The research identified five issues that need to be considered in developing and transferring skills for managing the legacy of conflict and creating cohesive communities. Agency and Structure. ‘I left University with a lot of skills but I found I couldn’t work on them in the Planning Service. They just weren’t needed for the way things were done’ (Planning Official). The reform of the Northern Ireland state in 1972 was intimately linked to the depth of the economic and political crises following the outbreak of civil disorder in 1969. As predicted by Saunders (1986), a ‘legitimacy crisis’ will force states to centralise and corporatise strategic, expensive and contentious functions. In particular, functions vital to the hegemony of production including land use planning, infrastructure, especially roads and economic development were relocated to a small number of larger Departments accountable only to Direct Rule Ministers. The displacement of a sectarian tribal discourse with policy routines based on technical rationality, objectivity and certainty was part of the wider coping strategy. Here, professional values and routines held strong appeal in cleaning up policy areas such as housing and planning where resource allocation was predicated on sectarian head counting (Aughey, 2005). The professionalisation of planning, for instance, centred on dominant procedural methodologies and value systems that defined skills narrowly around regulatory land use management. This helped to insulate the Direct Rule state from accusation of discrimination and bias but reproduced a culture in which engagement with the contested realities of segregation were marginalised or ignored altogether. When the politics of conflict transformation requested a deeper engagement with the problems of interfacing or the opportunities for residential mixing, planners, housing officials and urban managers were ill-equipped to make the shift. One voluntary group manager stated that:

It has become absurd. The elephant is in the room and no-one is discussing it … we need to face up to real life and do something about these (peace wall) problems (Manager of a voluntary sector organisation).

Confused Policy Objectives. The history of public administration explains part of the malaise but as with community cohesion in Britain, there are confused and contradictory policy objectives making it difficult to articulate, let alone acquire, a clear set of prescriptive competences. Robinson (2008) made the point that Community Cohesion reflected a narrow elite sense of White British citizenship and was at odds with the emphasis on faith and social capital building in communities. In 2005, Direct Rule Ministers launched the Shared Future strategy on community relations which clearly indicated intolerance of the social, cultural and especially the economic costs of segregated living (OFMDFM, 2005). The reconstituted Executive, under the control of the Democratic Unionist Party and Sinn Fein, withdrew significantly from these sentiments demoting the policy to a programme theme on Cohesion Sharing and Inclusion. As Aughey (2005) noted, integration has little to offer the sectarian elites whose power base relies to a large extent on homogenous ethno-spatial constituencies. One housing manager stated that, “the skills to make mixed housing are hardly likely to be the same as the skills to keep them separate – which one is it?” Linked to this is a

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weak understanding of residential mixing. The post-conflict economy created a massive surge in the house prices as investors and buyers sought out more mixed and stable markets in the south of the city. Gentrification and gating characterised the middle- and outer-city and created new forms of segregation and tenure exclusion. A community development worker in south Belfast made the point that elite and exclusive apartment developments were creating affordability problems and “this not religion was the main cause of segregation and instability” (Community development worker, South Belfast). Risk, Innovation and Problem Complexity. In the in-depth interviews, central government officials were among the first to identify a lack of innovation as an obstacle to the progressive adoption of a skills policy. A culture of regulatory audit, financial monitoring and accountability has reduced risk taking and a willingness to roll out new programmes in areas where the responsibilities are unclear. One official pointed to the operating style of the Northern Ireland Public Accounts Committee and its preference for high profile, public and at times, aggressive scrutiny of civil servants. Even well equipped professionals would have limited prospect of success in this difficult operating environment. The sheer ‘wickedness’ of the problems of segregation and the interplay with social deprivation has caused a number of officials to question the relevance of a ‘skills fix’ (Urban regeneration programme manager). The problems are deeply political and structural and will not be solved by planning officials, no matter how well skilled they are. A Weak ‘Learning’ Culture. We noted earlier that there are important examples of creative project intervention in the public and voluntary sector in dealing with residential segregation and programme delivery. The problem is that the design, implementation and evaluation of these initiatives happen in discrete, self-contained policy or practice communities. The EU URBAN II 2000-20006 initiative in North Belfast was led by the Department for Social Development and delivered integrated projects in contested sites across North Belfast. The Stewartstown Road project involved a community sector initiative that regenerated a peace line in West Belfast to offer services and facilities to both communities in a way that has nearly eradicated internecine conflict, removed environmental blight, created cross-community trust and durable partnership structures, which are being used to launch a new phase of development work. The voluntary sector organisation, the Community Foundation for Northern Ireland, developed a Communities in Transition model for working in communities suffering from conflict and weak capacity. This has been successfully replicated across some of the most disadvantaged and polarised housing estates in Northern Ireland with significant effects on: initiating a process of community development, often for the first time in the locality; addressing the power of paramilitaries; planning and prioritising development projects; re-engaging service providers; and attracting investment, albeit primarily from the public sector. Each project contains significant learning and each displayed a different set of skills applied to a range of spatial problems and organisational settings. However, this learning, if it occurs, happens in self-contained circuits and there are few mechanisms to share experience and cut across organisational or discipline boundaries. Rydin, 2007, Wenger (1998) and Schweitzer et al. (2008) have all advanced the concept Communities of Practice in land use planning whereby a mix of professionals and practitioners are connected via social learning systems, which value diverse methodologies, ideas and experiences. Power and Skills. Part of the problem with the Egan Review, or rather the promotion of generic skills within the framework, is that has tended to emphasise supply problems in

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the property economy. A profession more appreciative of finance, project delivery and managing real world development would ease regulatory obstacles to growth, especially in the south east of England. Making planners more technically proficient and aligned with purpose of capital at the expense of a deeper engagement of spatial inequalities goes to the heart of the debate on theories of planning and theories for planning. We have seen that the procedural bias in planning cultures in Northern Ireland were the result of a deliberative strategy in the politics of state management. Locally, the capability to analysis and interpret the way in which identity shapes place is weak because it is simply not valued as a skill. Interfacing is now conceputalised as a dysfunctional relic of a contest left behind by the progressive city and the politics of conflict transformation. The strategic advantages of ethnic segregation, the manipulation of territory by sectarian politicians, the fear and the policing of paramilitaries all dictate the regeneration agenda in divided places. Understanding how petty power is asserted by residual paramilitaries is therefore crucial to an evaluation of community capacity and potential for change. The assumption that difference can be condensed via collaborative planning processes to produce an agreed understanding of citizenship is spatially problematic here. Hillier (2007) argued that agonistic practice is not only inevitable but should be valued. For Flyvbjerg (2004), ‘strife’ shapes the local development agenda and he argued that planning needs to focus on values, put power at the core of analysis and promote dialogue with a polyphony of voices. This raises specific issues, not just for skills but for whose knowledge is valued and for how knowledge claims are asserted and received in policy processes.

Implications for skills and practice The restoration of devolution, the reform of the public administration system, involving the creation of local authorities with regeneration, planning and housing powers and the political commitment to draw on Northern Ireland as a laboratory for conflict transformation sets a conducive context for thinking about skills and sustainable places. This part of the paper sets out the implications of the research for the development of such an agenda and the potential contribution that this could make to national policy and mainstream regeneration practice. At the outset, there needs to be a clear strategic framework setting out the skills, learning and knowledge environment. There are valuable lessons, especially from Britain, but the skills set to manage the distinctive spatial pressures in Northern Ireland must respond to local conditions. Importantly, this needs to define and deliver the competencies required to manage and help transform contested places. Three generic skills categories might help to shape our understanding of more engaged learning opportunities in which difference, power and strife are valued in skills and knowledge production. First, analytical skills could place an emphasis, not just on traditional socio economic audit of places but also map the power circuits that shape, retard or produce change. These might be to do with labour market restructuring and education but it could also explore how nascent paramilitary structures determine what is permissible in local development and what is not. Pløger (2004) and Flybjerg (2004) called for the development of a more agonistic approach to planning in which the reality of conflict and the value of difference are starting points for practice. A focus on the value base of different position and how power is used by planners, politicians, community activists and paramilitaries requires a distinctive knowledge set and approach to learning. Second planning skills to integrate traditional and necessary evaluative techniques together with conflict resolution and ethnic mediation strategies

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are also important. Building durable networks and governance structures capable of supporting cross-community alliances also requires an understanding of risk and uncertainty and how to manage unpredictable crises. Third, delivery skills are also not new but in the context of divided places, implementing projects that are practicable, attract cross-community support and can resist paramilitaries requires fresh thinking in professional disciplines. All of this highlights the importance of learning and knowledge. The skills called for here have an experiential edge and are not easily supplied in formal training contexts. Learning, situated in places and with projects aimed at conflict transformation have enormous potential for individuals, organisations and wider communities of practice. We have seen that there are illustrations of innovative practice but that the learning is rarely shared outside sectoral, organisational or professional boundaries. For this to happen, there needs to be a greater acknowledgement of the validity of different types of knowledge and mechanisms to facilitate learning and its exchange within a network of actors. The shortfall of skills in conflict management, especially in spatial planning, is unlikely to be addressed given the primary attached to normative methodologies and rational paradigms. Lay knowledge, the experience of interface projects and the frameworks developed for managing transitional communities all contain rich and valuable material. They define best practice and identify core competencies, not least in dealing with petty power structures, on which the effective regeneration of contested places rests. There also needs to be political, administrative and resource commitment behind such a project equivalent to the support for the development of a national and regional skills infrastructure in England and Scotland. A regional skills centre could draw on research and practice but stand apart from academic and government structures and their knowledge cultures. Knowledge brokers that link academics, policy makers and programme managers would be a valuable asset in the creation and maintenance of practice communities. Breaking down the epistemological and organisational boundaries in order to create interdisciplinary analysis and competencies will also require a strong commitment to skilled translation and dissemination of research to a range of user communities. This might also help to create new arenas for the presentation, testing and validating knowledge claims, especially around contested place. The control and ownership of territory is central to the Northern Ireland conflict and claims about ethnic cleansing, community alienation and enclaving are routinely made without any substantive evidence or ethical concern. The politics of Northern Ireland is not dominated by discursive, evidence-based or argumentative styles. Sectarian reductionism and resource competition are far more likely to characterise debates about housing, land and community. Narratives of discrimination, exploitation and harm are expressed, are politically powerful and resonate across time and place; yet they are rarely open to inspection or challenge. This does not imply that they are invalid, only that their authenticity and reliability should be capable of being tested. The common economic position shared by the most marginal Catholic and Protestant communities and the capacity for a shared response to the increasing residualisation of inner city areas is rarely articulated. Skilled analysis of how de-industrialisation, global change and technology affect the spatial economy may help to create an alternative scenario to the zero-sum game of territorial competition. For instance, this might challenge atavistic assumptions offered by some sectarian elites for the presence of interfaces, the need to

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hold on to ‘our’ territory and for suspicion of the ‘other’. The formation, presentation, defence and translation of alternative knowledge sets is, in itself, a skills that could help to reframe our understanding of segregation and how and who benefits from continued interfacing in post conflict Belfast.

Conclusions Northern Ireland now attracts attention for its experience with community conflict and peace building. Yet, there have been more peace lines constructed after the 1994 case-fires than in the decade before (Shirlow and Murtagh, 2006). Poverty and segregation are more concentrated in the north and west of the city at the same times wealth and mixing characterises the south and east. A peace process that engages the political elites but fails to register on the lives of the most marginal is always likely to be vulnerable and unpredictable. There is not a skills fix to these contradictions but knowledge and learning have an increasingly important role to play, not least in challenging practitioners, educators, public officials and politicians. A narrowly conceived approach to community relations premised on quasi-religious notions of forgiveness and resolution is unlikely to guide application in Belfast’s hard line communities. A policy discourse that champions the renaissance city and marginalises the recalcitrant one is also unlikely to embed a genuinely engaged model of conflict transformation. Educators likewise, have responsibilities in challenging the adoption of colourblind technocratic professional standards and seek to contribute to a more active learning culture in which knowledge and skills are not fixed but respond to the needs and realities of defined situations. This type of situated learning has much to draw upon in the type of successful projects at the Suffolk interface, in Communities in Transition and through development schemes such as URBAN II. Millions of Pounds and Euros have been spent on capacity building but often with little thought about what capacities are being developed and what are they for? The mere presence of capacities seemed to be enough and in the face of sustained internecine conflict, there is some validity in this version of third way politics. However, as Northern Ireland emerges into some form of peace and political stability, there needs to be a comprehensive re-think about the skills and practices for managing post-conflict transition. The investment in research, policy debate, infrastructure and real resources in Britain is impressive but ultimately skills and knowledge need to reflect good, bad and indifferent local circumstances. Northern Ireland has much to offer in inter-cultural learning but it needs to put its own house in order before exporting the variable experiences of managing conflict in the region.

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References Academy for Sustainable Communities (ASC) (2007a) Mind the Skills Gap: The Skills We Need for Sustainable Communities, Leeds, ASC. Academy for Sustainable Communities (ASC) (2007b) Promoting Sustainable Communities and Community Cohesion, Leeds, ASC.

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