Community Development and Public Administration Theory

Promoting Democratic Principles to Improve Communities

Ashley E. Nickels, Jason D. Rivera, Ashley E. Nickels, Jason D. Rivera

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351396530
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Politica

The concept of community development is often misunderstood, holding different meanings across different academic disciplines. Moreover, the concept of community development has been historically abstracted, not only in the way the concept has been conceptualized in academic studies, but also by the way in which practitioners use the term in the vernacular. Departing from traditional definitions of community development, this volume applies the New Public Service (NPS) perspective of Public Administration to community development to illustrate how public administrators and public managers can engage in community development planning and implementation that results in more equitable and sustainable long-term outcomes.

This book will be of interest to practitioners and researchers in public administration/management, public administration theory, community development, economic development, urban sociology, urban politics, and urban planning.

Part I

Values and the Policy Environment

1 Defining and Aligning Community Development and Public Administration

Using Administrative Practices and Design to Better Communities

William Hatcher

Community development is a process of bettering the social, political, and economic assets of a community (Green & Haines, 2016). Based on this definition of development, communities need to construct visions for how to cultivate their local assets. From community visions come goals and strategies that serve as the basis for local development policies. The implementation of development policies ideally puts in place the change needed to strengthen communities; in other words: to achieve community betterment. Accordingly, community development is coordinating and implementing policy across multiple organizations, including public agencies, nonprofits, and private firms. Diverse actors interact across complex policy networks policy with the goal of bettering their communities. Community development, therefore, involves the organizing of multiple actors throughout agencies, a process that is fundamentally public administration.

Alternately, public administration is the implementation of public policy with a focus on efficiency, effectiveness, and fairness. Based on this view, public administration, at its foundation, is also about bettering communities through strengthening social, political, and economic institutions. Denhardt and Denhardt (2000) describe public administration as “the New Public Service” (NPS) and argue for public administrators to help citizens achieve their shared interest by fostering accountability, promoting citizenship, and advocating participation. These three ideals of NPS are linked to the field of public administration’s goals of efficiency, effectiveness, and fairness. Additionally, the NPS’s ideals fit within community development’s focus on cultivating or developing local political, social, and economic institutions in a participatory manner. Given the interconnectedness of community development and the NPS view of public administration, scholars and practitioners should strive to achieve more cross-pollination of ideas and practices from both fields.

The scholarly literature of public administration offers strategies to achieve this cross-pollination and help craft effective administrative designs for community betterment. In particular, public administration can help community development by:

1 Offering information on public participation in administrative processes for vision-building;

2 Helping understand the administrative design of local community economic development, such as the incorporation of town and gown partnerships;

3 Describing network analysis to help community development form regional solutions through cooperation; and,

4 Demonstrating the use of technology to achieve administrative goals.

In this chapter, I make the case for stronger relations between community development and public administration; a neglected relationship in the scholarly literature. Here, I examine this relationship through the lens of the asset model from community development and the NPS from public administration. To better define and align public administration and community development, I use a bottom-up approach by relying on community development scholarship and Google Trends to define community development, and employing an exploratory review of the public administration literature on community development.

The argument is divided into the following sections: First, I discuss the intersections of the two fields by defining community development and examining the community development research presented in the major public administration journals. Second, I draw specifically on the NPS approach to public administration to demonstrate the relationship between key concepts in community development: sustainability, public ethos, and community betterment. Third, I discuss the administrative tools of public administration that may benefit community development policy and practice at the local level. I examine how community development seeks to cultivate local assets, a goal shared with public administration. Last, I conclude with three ideas for how to bring community development and public administration closer together in practice and in scholarship.

Defining Community Development

The asset model’s definition of community development helps us construct an effective connection between community development and public administration. The asset model calls for communities to cultivate local assets (Kretzmann & McKnight, 1993). The model defines community development as the bettering of social, political, and economic institutions at the local level (Hatcher, 2015a; Kretzmann & McKnight, 1993). This definition differs from other views of community development that focus on power and activism in organizing (Davidoff, 1965; Ledwith, 2011). The assets of these institutions are often discussed as areas of capital and include the following: political capital, social capital, environmental capital, built capital (includes housing and infrastructure), financial capital, and other areas of assets that can be used to strengthen local communities. The asset model views community development as a process of cultivating these assets, not simply identifying needs in a community. In other words, the asset-based approach focuses on a community’s strengths, rather than their perceived deficiencies. It is a focus on sustainable development rather than primarily economic growth.

Examining the terms that citizens use to gather information about community development can help us construct a citizen-based definition of the field. Individuals are likely to use Google to collect information; therefore, I used Google Trends to identify the top community development-related searches. Google Trends presents data on what individuals search for regarding a particular topic. The tool presents search interest for a particular search phrase over time. Additionally, Google Trends identifies the top related queries for a particular search phrasing. For example, if one searches “community development,” then Google Trends can identify what are the normally related queries to the phrase. Last, Google Trends displays nation-centered data on searches—i.e., what countries have individuals using the particular search phrase more than individuals in other countries. By using these three tools, a citizen-centered or bottom-up definition of community development can be constructed from Google Trends.¹

On May 8, 2017, I conducted a basic Google Trend analysis of the search phrase “community development.” According to Google Trends, the following are the top community development-related searches: housing, community development corporation, community economic development, and economic development. Housing issues are the main interest of individuals searching “community development.” This is keeping with the history of the field, which has focused mostly on housing. For instance, the United States (US) Census includes housing in the agency’s counting of public employment and expenditures in community development. Related searches show us how individuals are defining community development when they are interested in knowing more about the topic. Individuals are often searching for more information on community development when they are also searching for more information on housing, community development corporation, community economic development, and economic development.

Google Trends can be used to further define community development by showing how individuals throughout the world describe community development, how individuals define community development, and how individuals compare community development to economic development. First, when examining “community development” interest by region, Google Trends shows individuals in African nations, such as Tanzania, Zambia, Kenya, Uganda, and Zimbabwe, are more likely to search for “community development” compared to other nations. In fact, the US was number 13 on the list of nations with the most searches for “community development.” This finding tells us that community development tends to have an international focus, but currently, is not as much of an interest in the US. Second, when I used Google Trends to examine the search “community development is …,” sustainability was the top related search. Last, when searching “economic development,” the top related search is economic growth, and many of the other related searches include economic growth in the results.

Based on the limited analytic capabilities of Google Trends results, I find that citizens are defining community development as involving housing, community development corporations, and being related to economic development. Citizens in the US are less likely than citizens in a number other countries to search for community development topics. Last, sustainability is a focus of community development inquiries; whereas, growth is a concern of economic development searches. This highlights the differences between community development and economic development. Community development, as defined by the asset model, focuses on the cultivation (development) of social, political, and economic institutions. Economic development focuses more primarily on the features of economic growth in a locality.

Google searches provide an idea of how the public views community development and the subjects that they associate with community development. Searching Google Books can give us an idea of how scholarship and popular literature view community development. Google Books is a comprehensive internet-based collection of published books. The tool can be used to search for books on a particular topic, and examine the changes in books on the topic over time. When searching for “community development,” a surface view of the books (i.e., not a detailed analysis of all the books on the topic) shows that issues of sustainability, assets, inequality, and class are often the focus of community development books. These topics are key subjects explored by the asset model of community development.

Interestingly, when searching Google Trends for “public administration and community development,” there is not enough data to produce any meaningful results. The field of public administration and management needs to encourage more scholarship and practice at the intersection of community development and public administration.

To help facilitate this cross-pollination and discuss the relationships between public administration and community development, we need to narrow the focus. The asset model’s (Hatcher, 2015a; Kretzmann & McKnight, 1993) approach to community development emphasizes the importance of community betterment and cultivating local assets. Focusing on improving local institutions is an important shared foundation for community development and public administration.

Intersections of Community Development and Public Administration

Public administration is the implementation of public policy. Community development is the improvement of social, political, and economic institutions in a sustainable manner. The two fields are ones of practice and are linked. Community development is inherently an administrative process that focuses on implementing goals for betterment across multiple organizations involved in the development process. Public administration, if done correctly, focuses on community betterment through the implementation of public policies in an efficient, effective, and fair manner. Even though both fields are ones of practice with similar goals, the intersection and cross-pollination of the two fields has ebbed and flowed. In this section, I would like to discuss the intersection of the two fields.

To explore this intersection, I examine the community development research in the top journals in public administration. I did not have access to the entire collection of articles in each journal. Therefore, I was not able to conduct a formal meta-analysis of the literature. I would label my examination of community development research in public administration’s top journals as an exploratory review. The goal of the exploratory review is to learn how community development is being treated by public administration scholars and practitioners. It should be noted that this is not a robust meta-analysis. Only a limited number of journals are analyzed using a single search parameter: “community development.” The search applied to articles that mention “community development” in the titles, abstracts, and in the full manuscript. Accordingly, the searches pull a large number of articles that were tangentially related to community development. These limitations weaken the overall findings, but the review is more systematic than a typical literature review on a topic. The exploratory review provides an idea of how the field of public administration studies community development.

Per an assessment of journal quality by Bernick and Krueger (2010), the top five public administration journals are:

• Journal of Public Administration Research & Theory

• Public Administration Review

• Journal of Policy Analysis & Review

• Administration & Society

• American Review of Public Administration.

Given the asset model’s view that economic development is focused primarily on growth and community development is concerned with cultivating local political, social, and economic institutions as a whole, I did not search specifically for economic development works. Economic development is actually a robust area of public administration research. For example, public administration scholars, such as Jeremy Hall, who as of 2017 coedits Public Administration Review, have conducted impactful studies exploring the intersections of economic development and public administration. In my limited analysis of community development research in public administration, I attempted to conduct a surface examination of how public administration has treated the topic of community development by reviewing the literature in the top journals.

Journal of Public Administration Research & Theory (J-PART)

A general search of community development research in this journal returns articles examining topics as diverse as service delivery, cooperation and intergovernmental relations, organization performance, and the funding of community development. Most of the research in this journal uses community development as a case to examine questions of public administration in general. For instance, Tummers, Bekkers, Vink, and Musheno (2015) examine the scholarly literature on stress of social workers and teachers during public service delivery. The authors use the information learned to develop ideas for how workers in community development cultivate coping mechanisms to deal with implementation stress.

However, J-PART also contains a number of studies that directly examine community development. First, the studies try to understand organizational performance by studying issues of community development. For instance, Nielsen (2013) uses 4-year panel data from more than 45,000 students in 314 Danish schools to understand the effect of performance-oriented management practices on their learning outcomes. Additionally, the studies in this journal focus on issues of intergovernmental relations. Bel, Fageda, and Mur (2014), for example, demonstrate how cooperation among local governments reduces the service delivery costs of solid waste removal. Last, the topic of collaboration in the context of community development is examined in J-PART. Sedgwick (2017) learns how collaboration in pre-school programs helps manage interorganizational activities based on the level of involvement from public managers.

Public Administration Review (PAR)

A search of our field’s flagship journal returns a large collect...