Following a conversation this week, I realised that anyone reading this blog for the first time could quite easily get the wrong end of the stick regarding its focus.
Most of the posts recently have highlighted new national policy documents, with little or no accompanying analysis. There are two reasons for this:- The change of national government has heralded a lot of activity in Whitehall, in particular in the Department for Communities and Local Government (CLG).
- As I'm in the fieldwork period of the research, I'm keeping detailed discussion of themes or progress off the blog to avoid unduly influencing the fieldwork still to come. Of course, I could take a more open approach to this (and would like to experiment with such a method in the future), but for this project there will be no discussion of interim results until after the fieldwork is completed in Autumn 2011.
The resulting impression is that the project is focused on national influences over sub-national policy whereas in reality this just happens to be the area where there has been a lot of activity (at least in the form of documents) which I could pass on here. Local and community projects are also likely to be a significant part of the picture, it's just that any significant analysis of them will come at a later stage.
The content of this blog will develop over time, and certainly towards the end of next year (a long way off I know) I anticipate it being used as one means of disseminating research findings.
