How do community organizations develop successful strategies of resistance? Revisiting institutional embeddedness and agency

The capacity for resistance is an essential component of the principles and practice of liberal democracy. Critical policy scholars agree that unwelcome interventions in local communities by the state meet resistance, but disagree on whether such efforts can be successful in any meaningful sense. This paper identifies an optimistic turn in the literature, and derives from this a workable definition of successful resistance, which it then applies to an original piece of research into the ‘Save The Green Backyard’ campaign in Peterborough in the UK. Theory driven, it takes two basic concepts from the new institutionalism, embeddedness and agency, and demonstrates how a conceptual framework developed from these can expose the underlying mechanisms driving the successful resistance observed in the case study. The final section of the paper considers how forms of embeddedness worked together to provide a context for successful resistance; the nature of the agency in the case study; and how popular and invited spaces impacted differentially on the community organization in terms of embeddedness and agency. It also draws out some implications for institutionalist theory and methodologies, and for community organizations seeking to protect themselves against unwelcome state interference.