[3] The research of Brian Abel-Smith and Peter Townsend, The Poor and the Poorest, published in 1965, argued that poverty had increased from 1953 to 1960 and that a significant factor in this was a gap between formal entitlement to benefits and the amount people actually claimed.
However Abel-Smith was to work closely with the Wilson administration, while Townsend was to play a critical and oppositional role with the second director of the CPAG, Frank Field, particularly in the run up to the 1966 general election.
[3] : 184 Likewise an individual advisor-client relationship was rejected in favour of discussing each case in the whole meeting, which provided an important organisational lesson: by working together people could do things for themselves.
The intent of this article is to reflect on the notion of empowered participatory governance in order to gain a better understanding of the institutional contexts and parameters that encourage a more participative democracy, and thereby bring to light the political mechanisms that contribute to broadening the decision-making process.
The chosen example has a dual significance: it underlines the role of temporal contingencies and scales of the process of decentralization in the participative structures at the local level, and it enables us to gain a better grasp of the problem of institutional architectures in implementing participatory democracy by emphasizing the political and social realities underlying new loci for decision making.