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introduction
Community is a concept that seems always to be in fashion with policy makers community development, less so. In some quarters, the existence of community is seen as a natural and enduring facet of society; others lament its decline. One of the primary purposes of community development is to boost the effectiveness of community action, participation and capacity. Not everyone sees the necessity of strategic interventions to achieve this. Indeed, the term itself is problematic, with the approach also being called social development, popular education, critical pedagogy, community organising, community engagement and community education, for example. In the UK some writers prefer the term critical community practice (Butcher et al, 2007), which describes a broader approach to working with communities. Nonetheless, internationally, community development is commonly adopted by non-governmental organisations as a means of developing infrastructure, local economic initiatives and democracy. Governments worldwide have introduced community development programmes to tackle poverty and other seemingly intractable social problems. They have also been confronted by communities who have decided to mobilise for themselves, organising services, protest actions and self-help movements to improve living standards and gain important civil rights.
In the 1950s the United Nations defined community development as a process designed to create conditions of economic and social progress for the whole community with its active participation (United Nations, 1955, p 6).
The International Association for Community Development (IACD) recently adopted the following guiding principles for working with communities.
Box 1.1 IACDs understanding of community development
Community development is a set of practices and methods that focus on harnessing the innate abilities and potential that exist in all human communities to become active agents in their own development, and to organise themselves to address key issues and concerns that they share.
Community development workers may be members of the community, paid workers or volunteers. They work with and alongside people in the community to identify concerns and opportunities, and develop the confidence and energy to respond together.
The building of community and social capital is both a core part of the process and an outcome, and in this way there is an extension of co-operative attitudes and practices that are built through community development that can increase community resilience over time.
Source: IACD (2015a)
In the UK the fortunes and status of community development have waxed and waned. As an external intervention, it was initially used by philanthropic bodies (for example, the university settlements) to bring adult education and capacity building to disadvantaged neighbourhoods, such as the London Docklands. Local authorities and housing trusts later employed officers in new towns and estates to encourage residents to set up groups and associations for various leisure and civic purposes in order to generate community spirit and promote self-help. For a long time, community development raised for policy makers the spectre of the Community Development Projects of the 1970s (Loney, 1983), a government-sponsored programme whose Marxist critique of capitalism despite striking a chord with many practitioners was not quite what the programmes sponsors had in mind. Since that time community development has been used to build community capacity and social capital, as well as to support community empowerment and participation underpinning new approaches to persistent local problems.
Community development is not a phrase that necessarily travels well. A recent mapping study by the IACD (2015b) found a plethora of terms in use that seemed to cover the core understanding, and noted significant differences in practice between countries on different continents. In the global South community development retains its colonial associations, often devoid of the political content that characterises popular education movements there, for example, in Latin America (Pearce et al, 2010). However, the term maintains its currency. In the US, where community development organizations are increasingly assuming the roles of local government (DeFilippis and Saegert, 2012, p 1), the term describes a mainstream set of practices and institutions. It also continues to have salience in a number of Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries, such as Australia and Canada.
There are, of course, many debates about the terminology of community and community development, and we will visit these in the chapters that follow, as well as beginning to unpack some of the terms used above.
A quick review of definitions developed over the years by scholars, practitioners and institutions concerned with community development yields a number of common themes around social change, social justice, collective action, equality and mutual respect, enabling participation, and changing power relationships. One US text echoes the analysis of the Community Development Projects in the UK, arguing that: Community development occurs when the conditions of surviving and thriving in a place are not being supplied by capital. This highlights the need to connect geographical communities to the far greater resources, opportunities and power that lie outside [them] (DeFilippis and Saegert, 2012, p 6). Descriptions from elsewhere in the world emphasise the need to develop political awareness alongside skills, confidence and resources, drawing on the popular education movement in Latin America and the seminal writings of Paulo Freire.
