What is the legitimacy of new forms of governance at community level? This paper addresses the important yet little understood issue of how this is established, developing a constructivist approach to the concept of ‘legitimacy’ and presenting an analysis of how the legitimacy of community-based organisations is understood and constructed in a northern English city. This shows how their legitimacy draws on a range of pre-existing norms as well as new ones, only some of which are recognisably democratic, and is more a product of informal practices than formal structures. It is consequently fragile and open to challenge, and weak according to the norms of legitimacy derived from the representative democratic tradition or the standpoint of modern deliberative democracy. What could appropriately replace such norms remains unclear, although it is suggested that a way forward may be through reintroducing the value of activism as an acceptable grounding for political legitimacy.
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