Politics, Power and Community Development

Meade, Rosie, Shaw, Mae, Rosie Meade, Mae Shaw, Sarah Banks

• Publisher: Policy Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781447317364
• eBook ISBN: 9781447317401
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Social Sciences

The increasing impact of neoliberalism across the globe means that a complex interplay of democratic, economic and managerial rationalities now frame the parameters and practices of community development. This book explores how contemporary politics, and the power relations it reflects and projects, is shaping the field today.

This first title in the timely Rethinking Community Development series presents unique and critical reflections on policy and practice in Taiwan, Australia, India, South Africa, Burundi, Germany, the USA, Ireland, Malawi, Ecuadorian and Peruvian Amazonia and the UK. It addresses the global dominance of neoliberalism, and the extent to which practitioners, activists and programmes can challenge, critique, engage with or resist its influence.

Addressing key dilemmas and challenges being navigated by students, academics, professionals and activists, this is a vital intellectual and practical resource.

PART 1

Thinking politically

TWO

The politics of deploying community

Janet Newman and John Clarke

Introduction

Community development is understood – by practitioners and governments, by enthusiasts and critics – as an essentially political practice. In this chapter, then, we focus on the politics of deploying ‘community’ in programmes of development, empowerment and containment. Community development has been the focus of a series of attempted cooptions and reinventions as governments have sought to deflect its goals, incorporate its workers and depoliticise its activities. However, it has also been the focus of numerous reinventions as the political landscape has shifted and new generations of activists have aspired to bring about radical political and social change. The fracturing of the political settlements in many nations following the banking crisis of 2008 and the subsequent experience of austerity, coupled with images of popular uprisings in some of the nations of North Africa, Latin America and Eastern Europe, is producing new political aspirations and actions. Sometimes, these aspirations are understood through the distinctive entanglement of the romance of ‘community’ and the promise of ‘development’ (Ferguson, 1994; Escobar, 1995; Joseph, 2002).

However, the politics of community development are elusive. There are huge differences between community development in the US, the UK, India, Latin America, and other nations or regions. Time, as well as place, makes a difference: it is possible to trace the different national cycles of community development activity and draw attention to their different political aims, actions and outcomes. Time, we might suggest, itself carries ideological connotations: in some places community development signifies radical and new forms of political reinvention and renewal. However in others – not least the UK – it is associated with the discredited politics of the 1970s, and with the unfulfilled goals of numerous governmental programmes of renewal in the decades that followed. Nevertheless, notions of both ‘community’ and ‘development’ continue to serve as objects of political and governmental desire.

But this chapter does not aim to be comparative, nor do we set out to trace one particular history. Rather we seek to show how community development has been the focus of numerous political projects, and then go on to trace two crucial political processes that are in play in such projects. The first is the politics of translation. Here we argue that it is necessary to explore what happens as ideas and practices of community development move across national and/or institutional boundaries, and we draw attention to the importance of mediating actors – including, but not exclusively, community workers themselves. The second is the politics of articulation. We trace how some of the many possible meanings of ‘community’ and ‘development’ are selectively mobilised and articulated with other political concepts in ways that shape their meaning and that open – or close – political possibilities. The politics of articulation is crucial in understanding processes of cooptation, incorporation and managerialisation integral to programmes of neoliberalisation. However, as we argue, processes of articulation are never closed and complete. A focus on the work of community development enables us – and other contributors to this volume – to show how actors ‘work the spaces’ of would-be hegemonic projects in order to pursue alternative and radical goals of development and democratisation.

Community development as political projects: time, space and ideology

We begin by highlighting the multiplicity of political projects associated with the terms ‘community’ and ‘development’. Community is, of course, a highly contested concept, and there is an extensive literature that highlights different perspectives, meanings and policy foci (Cohen, 1987; Rose, 1999; Amit and Rapport, 2002; Creed, 2006; Mooney and Neal, 2009). In Keywords, Raymond Williams identified the continuing attractions of community:

Community can be the warmly persuasive word to describe an existing set of relationships, or the warmly persuasive word to describe an alternative set of relationships. What is most important, perhaps, is that unlike all other terms of social organization (state, nation, society etc) it never seems to be used unfavourably. (Williams, 1976/1986: 76)

Community has this long history of mobility and mutability of meanings. It is at one and the same time an ideal, a hoped-for way of living (for a civil society); the object of government enthusiasm (enabling and empowering communities, promoting economic development, offering a resource beyond the state); and the focus of anxiety (about social conflict and division, often between migrants and the imagined ‘home’ community). Such diverse connections render the idea of community ambiguous, able to be mobilised – and appropriated – within numerous and often antagonistic political projects. Political projects are not simply the programmes of particular political parties: they can be defined as ‘more or less coherent efforts to bring ideas, interests, people and power together’ (Newman and Clarke, 2009: 22).

Community development approaches in the global north, especially among former colonial powers, can be understood in a longer historical context of colonial struggles for independence. Craig (1989) notes the associations between community development and attempts by colonial powers to control, rather than liberate, local populations; but community development was also a central strategy in preparing former colonised populations for independence. These critiques of colonial rule are significant for our purposes since many who had participated as young people in the overseas service programmes of voluntary/NGO projects went on to help shape community development practices in their ‘home’ countries in the post-war years (Craig et al, 2011).

Community served as a device through which to fix governable identities among colonial populations (Pandey, 2005; 2006). Later, it also served as a device through which such ‘backward’ populations could be transformed through development and modernisation – towards a model of independence, both national and individual, decanted directly from the metropolitan imaginary. The combination of modernisation and development generates a dominant view of community as the space and as the relationships through which people might be improved (see, inter alia, Scott, 2004; Li, 2007a; 2007b).

These tensions between the ‘empowerment’ and ‘control’ of local populations also run through the urban social development programmes of industrialised nations – such as the UK – experiencing rapid economic and political change resulting from the decline or destruction of traditional industries in the 1970s and 1980s. The hardships that resulted generated the idea of community development as a form of class-based struggle, supported by trades unions, political parties of the left, and, crucially, radical community workers. In contrast, conservative political ideology tended to depict deficient communities peopled by poor families as the source of ‘cycles of deprivation’ linked to cultures of poverty (for example Rutter and Madge, 1976). A series of targeted programmes aimed to break such cycles, from the community development programmes of the late 1970s through to the social exclusion initiatives of the 1990s. In focusing on community as a spatially and culturally bounded entity, however, all failed to tackle the material roots of poverty and disadvantage.

A rather different set of political projects, often associated with the radical politics of Latin America, is directed to what Freire (1970) termed the ‘pedagogy of the oppressed’. Here community is inflected with notions of a whole civil society rather than with a particular place-bound locality: a civil society that might, through processes of collective development and education, be the source of mobilisations on the part of the subordinated, impoverished and marginalised. Freirean approaches seek to challenge established ideological frameworks of domination, creating and embedding new conceptual frameworks through pedagogic practices that enable people to make sense of their lived experience and promoting new forms of participation and engagement. This transformative conception of development has been espoused by many community workers and community projects in the global north who view the problems of their communities as rooted in broader patterns of inequality and injustice. This was particularly the case where activists had been inspired by the rise of new social movements and the ‘new left’ of the 1970s (Newman, 2012).

This ‘transformative’ approach can be contrasted with the work of Saul Alinsky, which offered a more focused engagement with the mobilisation of particular disenfranchised communities in order to challenge dominant relations of power. Alinsky’s model of community organising, originating in Chicago, worked through the activities of community organisers to promote broad-based alliances of existing community-based organisations. Through such alliances it proved possible to participate in the public decision-making arena and to negotiate with – or confront – power holders (Smock, 2004). The aim was to create ‘a permanent diverse alliance of civil society institutions working in a specific location to effect social and economic change’ (Jamoul and Wills, 2008: 209). This approach tended to be centred on the work of the organiser, and to be problem based rather than concerned with the building of long-term community strength (Minkler, 1997). However, it can serve to replicate – rather than challenge – dominant styles of politics. It may also exclude minority groups or fail to challenge social and economic polarisation.

The ‘community-building’ approach or ‘asset-based community development’ (ABCD) has also emerged from the US. This is focused less on securing concessions from the powerful through entry into the public sphere of decision making and more on developing and realising a community’s own assets in order to enable it to solve its own problems. Community building is concerned with ‘strengthening the internal social and economic fabric of the neighborhood itself’ (Smock, 2004: 17) to counter the lack of internal capacity, people’s isolation from mainstream political opportunity structures, and the erosion of more traditional forms of social cohesion in inner cities. This model can be criticised for its focus on enabling communities to realise their own assets from within rather than engage with ‘external’ structures of power and authority, including the state. It is, however, gaining popularity among think tanks and policy makers in mature welfare states as they seek to contain state expenditure, and increasingly look to communities to solve their own problems. It is an approach that may encourage the assumption that the problems belong to, and reside in, the community.

The ambiguities of earlier community development approaches in colonial and post-colonial nations can also be traced in the more recent approaches of the World Bank and other international agencies, which seek to ‘empower’ those in poverty and enhance participation in order to promote economic development agendas. As Craig et al (2011: 9) comment: ‘Their programmes, better known for fiscal conservatism than for political and social risk-taking, frequently led, however, to the undermining of local community social and economic structures while appearing to advocate the importance of “community”.’ Cruikshank (1999), Sharma (2008), Brown (2005) and others have noted the significance of such agencies in promulgating technologies of neoliberal rule ‘which help mold individuals into responsible citizen-subjects who fit the requirement of the prevalent governance regime and who participate in the project of rule by governing themselves’ (Sharma, 2008:17).

We will return to these contradictions later in the chapter, but here want to note the particular significance attached to women in international development programmes. Women tend to be positioned as the objects of development: the source of unrealised assets, and the stabilisers of otherwise potentially unruly political forces. But they are also frequently the agents of development, building economic activity through micro finance schemes and entrepreneurial forms of production. This multiple positioning is carried into community development programmes in the global north. Some forms of feminist scholarship have focused on how women’s agency is expressed in the ‘liminal spaces’ between public and private. This positioning, it is argued, enables women to focus on the everyday, the local and the pragmatic, and can be used strategically by women to develop community capacity and resources (Staeheli, 1996; Jupp, 2010).

Other feminist scholars show how community development programmes tend to rely on the work of women in partnering, joining up and reconciling difference (Larner and Craig, 2005). Newman (2012) explores the links between feminist activism and community politics. Many participants in her study had come to politics through an early involvement in community-based action. Some had been involved in anti-racist movements in India, the US, the Caribbean and the UK, and helped inflect the politics of community with a politics of race. Some, frustrated with the class-based politics of the left, had worked to build community capacities and resources in order to combat the poverty, poor housing and run-down estates that affected women’s lives. Others created small-scale cooperative and neighbourhood projects that brought ‘personal’ issues of childcare, women’s health or domestic violence into the public domain; yet others participated in community organising as a form of oppositional politics.

The gendering of community action underscores the dangers of viewing community as a cohesive entity, unmarked by social characteristics such as ‘race’, class, sexuality, disability, age and gender, and untouched by the political movements to which these gave rise. However, many community development initiatives have, as a more or less explicit aim, the promotion of ‘social cohesion’ in order to minimise possible tensions between different racialised groups. The community-mobilising and community-assets approaches outlined above frequently rely on churches, mosques and faith groups as a way of reaching out to untapped sources of social capital. But these in turn have been criticised for the suppression of potential political conflicts surrounding gender and sexuality in order to mobilise around supposedly ‘common’ issues and agendas. At the same time they implicitly look to women’s labour as offering unrealised capacities and resources – the capacities of neighbourliness and care, the emotional labour of building networks and community links, and the capacity to link ‘public’ and ‘personal’ agendas.

In this section we have shown how community development is not a singular set of ideas and practices, but has been aligned to very different political projects. Such projects ‘seek to remake the world (or part of it) in a different way: to give power to the people; to concentrate it in the hands of a deserving elite; to create social justice; or to spread market efficiencies’ (Newman and Clarke, 2009: 22). In what follows, we seek to show how multiple projects are often uneasily combined and to highlight the tensions that are generated as would-be dominant forms have to cope with the insu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Series Editors' Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on contributors
• ONE: Politics, power and community development: an introductory essay
• PART 1: Thinking politically
• PART 2: Practising politics
• PART 3: Politicising the future