Community development and the politics of community

In a context in which ‘community empowerment’ isvirtually government policy, it is hardly surprising that thereis almost no area of social policy that is immune from the communitytreatment. Of course, this is not new, despite the zeal withwhich each new initiative is ‘rolled out’. In fact,sometimes it seems that policy development needs to reinventthe wheel of community every decade or so. The question, therefore,is what this ideological recycling of community tells us: first,about the meaning of the term itself; second, about its contemporarysignificance within the wider politics of the state. This articleargues that we need to draw on those historical and theoreticalresources which help us to think our way through to the contemporarycontext. Only an active and engaged recognition of the politicsof community will enable us to get to the root of the problematicyet promising nature of community development.     

Revisiting 'community' in community-based natural resource management

This article is concerned with the diverse nature and interestin the concept of ‘community’ and especially asit applies to community-based natural resource management projectsthat have grown in emphasis during the past twenty years. Despiteall the rhetoric about community and its reference in a ritualisticmanner in projects and policy documents, often contrary experiencesand mixed results in the field have started stirring negativereactions from various quarters. This article delves into thechallenges and dilemmas, which the focus on ‘community’,with its lack of specificity, has conjured up for practitioners,policy-makers and academicians alike.     

Strength Broadsides from Disability on the Arts

This book is a deeply personal treatise connecting experienceto the very tangible social constructs around Dis-Ability. We are writing as what Masefield calls TAP s – temporarilyable people – with experience of working in communitydevelopment and community arts: his own life exemplifies this.Masefield was a respected and successful theatre director andcommunity arts manager when, at forty-four, he developed a debilitatingand devastating myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME), which renderedhim speechless and almost immobile. Indeed, one of the mostpowerful parts of the book is where he describes his own transitionfrom able to disabled like ‘trying to run a car on a torchbattery’. A very useful ‘way in’ to all ofthis     

Assumptions, Motivations and Neutrality in Rural Development: The Portuguese Paradigm

Development agents need to examine their underlying assumptions,motivations, neutrality, and their terminology, which is oftenimprecise and misleading. In addition, development is frequentlycharacterized by self-created dichotomies that obscure the veryproblems that need to be solved. The combined cooperativistand constructivist approach has proved itself successful inovercoming these problems. "A lady once said to him, ‘My maid must be pleased, Igave her my dresses.’ ‘That's nice’, he replied,‘does she give you hers?" Jean-Paul Sarrte, Saint Genet "You name it, you claim it." Max Roach, Black American jazzmusician, referring to whites, and jazz.     

Four different approaches to community participation

This paper explores some of the politics of community work byexamining four basic community participation approaches. Movingfrom the right of politics to the left, it overviews some ofthe different theoretical orientations, goals, processes andrecruitment practices that are commonly used but not alwaysrecognized to constitute different forms of community participation.Offered primarily to ‘lay’ community members, studentsand beginning practitioners, the paper is intended to clarifysome of the differences that emerge when participation projectsare designed, and to stimulate discussion about community participationmore generally.     

New Labour's appropriation of the concept of community: a critique

This article analyses the ways in which ‘community’,one of the most important yet ill-defined concepts in SocialSciences, has been ‘appropriated’ in the discourseof the UK's New Labour government. It argues that the highlystrategic ways in which the term is used leads to associatedmeanings that neglect the intrinsically complex nature of theconcept and risk essentializing group identities, thus adverselyaffecting the most deprived sections of society.     

Empowered or over-powered? The real experiences of local participation in the UK's New Deal for Communities

The notion of ‘participation’ has growing currencyat many levels of social policy in the UK where the Labour governmentuses it to denote the engagement of ‘local people’in decision-making about the services and structures which affecttheir daily lives. In particular, local participation is givenas the distinctive feature of the UK government's flagship initiativefor neighbourhood renewal, the New Deal for Communities, butthere is little known about what this means in practice forthe ‘local’ people it affects.     

The Durham Miners' Gala and the spirit of community

Can industrial communities survive the loss of their industrialheritage? Can communities once thought to be in terminal declinereinvigorate themselves? Evidence from the Durham coalminingcommunities suggests that the answer to both questions is yes.This paper presents evidence from a study of the annual DurhamMiners' Gala – the ‘Big Meeting’ – thatreflects a revival of community vitality around the event. Togetherwith an analysis of the Gala itself, the complex backgroundto the resilience of the mining communities is explored.     

New information communication technologies and the development of a children's 'community of interest'

This paper is concerned with the potential of new InformationCommunication Technologies as a means of furthering a children’s‘community of interest’. A ‘community of interest’is taken from Raymond Williams’ concept of people formingcommunities not around place but around specific ‘interests’.I wish in this paper to explore the forms and tensions of achildren’s ‘community of interest’ that mightbe facilitated around ICTs in general and the Internet in particular.The paper draws on community development literature around thepotentials and use of ICTs as a means of developing communities.The paper highlights these potentials but also investigatesthe obstacles that a children’s online ‘communityof interest’ may confront.     

Editorial

After forty successful years of publishing and supporting otherrelated activities, the Community Development Journal remainsat the forefront within the field of community development.Its coverage of material from the north and south as well aspractice and theory ensures that the Journal continues to commanda unique position among academic journals. The recent introductionof online advance access publishing and e-letters ensures theJournal reflects the best in publishing. This issue begins with an article by Glen Laverack, in whichhe introduces the concept of the ‘domains approach’to community empowerment, which is illustrated by a case studyfrom Kyrgyzstan. Extrapolating from the community developmentliterature, Laverack identifies     

Community development research: Merging (or submerging) communities of practice? A response to Van Vlaenderen

A response to Van Vlaenderen (2004) is needed both as a correctivemeasure and as a stimulus for debate. This article argues thatVan Vlaenderen incorrectly draws on the theory of ‘communitiesof practice’ (Lave and Wenger, 1999; Wenger, 1998) anddiscusses the conceptual and political implications of suchincorrect usage. The article contends that the merger of communitiesof practice that Van Vlaenderen describes using two case examplesis unlikely to have occurred and that presenting such transactionsas mergers can be unhelpful to the community development fieldin that they mask important status and power asymmetries thatexist within and between communities. This latter argument issupported by a discussion of the concepts of participation,participatory process, power, and empowerment. Van Vlaenderenappears to have written about joint activity between communitiesrather than the merger of communities of practice.     

Using a 'domains' approach to build community empowerment

This paper provides two case study examples of how communityempowerment can be better conceptualized, planned and appliedwithin a programme context by using a ‘domains’approach. What is new about this approach is that it does notstart with a blank slate onto which participants inscribe theirown problems or needs but provides a predetermined focus througheach of nine ‘empowerment domains’: Improves participation;Develops local leadership; Increases problem assessment capacities;Enhances the ability to ‘ask why’; Builds empoweringorganizational structures; Improves resource mobilization; Strengthenslinks to other organizations and people; Creates an equitablerelationship with outside agents; and Increases control overprogramme management. The importance to community developmentpractice is that the approach provides a more systematic meansfor community empowerment in a programme context.     

Editorial introduction to the Special Issue

In March 2004, a major conference on community development inthe ‘new Europe’ was held in Budapest, Hungary,to mark the accession of a further ten nation states, most ofthem in the east and central European region, to the EuropeanUnion. The conference was sponsored by the International Associationfor Community Development (www.iacdglobal.org), in conjunctionwith the Combined European Bureau for Social Development (www.cebsd.org),the Hungarian Association for Community Development (kofe@kkapcsolat.hu),and the Community Development Journal (www.cdj.oupjournals.org).The initial outcome was the Budapest Declaration, the text ofwhich was included in the CDJ issue of October 2004 (39(4),423–429 – copies     

A New Deal': art, museums and communities re-imagining relations

‘A New Deal’ argues that engaged or participatoryart practice can be shown to be central rather than marginalto the meaning and value of art in the ‘story’ ofhuman society, but only if we take a long view and change theposition from which we read and understand received history.It also argues that new models of art and institutional practiceare needed in the present, which foreground and validate participation,engagement and commonality – the reconnection of artistand community within social space. These new models are neededif we are to generate the new art forms that emancipate ratherthan disempower the citizen and which are not defined by thecul de sac of commodity and consumerism.     

What next? Volume 1. Setting the context. Special issue of development dialogue

In 1976, the Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation sponsored a symposiumresulting in the publication titled What Now? Another Developmentthat presented diverse, authoritative, critical perspectiveson the ways countries, organizations, and individuals in theindustrialized world could foster social and economic developmentin less wealthy countries, most of them in the South. The suggestionswere striking for their emphasis on large development projects,encouragement of development of civil society and democratizationof societies, and centralized interventions. The present volumeprovides a follow-up on this first effort thirty years later. One of the most striking ‘findings’ of the presentvolume is how misguided the earlier volume seems from the standpointof a similar panel of experts today. What Now? was built ona model of exporting social, political, and     

Campaign for education in democratic citizenship, Guadalajara, Mexico

Since the time of the Mexican Revolution that began in 1910(views on when it finished vary between 1917 and 1940) Mexicohad been ruled by the same, single political party, the PRI(the Partido Revolucionario Institucional, meaning the ‘InstitutionalRevolutionary Party’), until it finally lost a presidentialelection in 2000 to the right-wing Party of National Action,after seventy-one years in power. The PRI had stayed in powerthrough a mixture of ‘clientelism’, ‘populism’,‘corruption’ and the rigging of elections and helda tight control on the whole of Mexican society. In its effortsto bring about social change, from the 1990s onwards Mexicansociety began to concentrate its efforts on challenging thedominance held by the PRI at the national, federal level. Adebate on the ‘transition to democracy’ took offin both academic circles and social and civil organizationslooking for ways to create a new and different kind of relationshipbetween government and society. It was in that context that,as with many other civil organizations in Mexico, we in IMDEC¹considered how we might best open up more spaces for the cultureand practice of democracy and motivate citizens to activelycampaign on those issues impacting on their daily lives. Theissue, however, was how to engage this participation differently,in a more festive atmosphere, breaking with formal traditions,in such a way that people would feel better motivated to becomeinvolved in actively addressing the problems that surroundedthem. In this article, I want to share an experience, whichtook place between April and August 1994, before the local electionsof that year, based on a Campaign for Education in DemocraticCitizenship.     

Looking inside public involvement: how is it made so ineffective and can we change this?

Communities and community groups across Britain are faced withever-increasing opportunities to ‘participate’,yet such engagement is widely viewed as ineffective and themotives behind it viewed with suspicion. This article suggeststhat ineffectiveness is often at least partly the result ofdecisions that are taken within the wider policy-making processesthat develop and surround public involvement, and presents away of analysing such management. This analysis also pointsto a strategy for being more effective, through attempting tobecome more active players in the larger policy-making ‘game’.