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Reviewing "The Community Development Reader". 2011
Monday 19th December 2011, 17:12
“The Community Development Reader: History, themes and issues” by Policy Press ” sets out a range of past papers to represent the debates within community development since the 1950’s. The underlying editorial message is that community development is a diverse, contested field of many perspectives, a good old argument rather than one “true meaning” (although clearly the arguments are often stoked by reference to an undiluted community development which hints at a true meaning somewhere, if we could ever agree it).
The introductory sections between chapters are the exciting part for me; bold summaries of the context in which people struggled to defend and practice community development, more often than not in unsympathetic or downright hostile circumstances. The introduction stakes out the contradictory forces which have pulled at community development; top-down control of communities by governments and agencies, and dogged attempts to support grassroots liberation from communities’ own agendas. The editors describe community development as a “contested space”, an “ambivalent” field wherein we have struggled to assert our values of social justice and equalities in a continually shifting policy world.
If those who do not understand their history may be condemned to repeat the same mistakes , whirling in an endless bewilderment of frustrated ideals, how can this history help us to orientate ourselves and boldly go? I think that the key lesson from this Reader is that that the sanity of community development lies in a continuing commitment to ask the question about how the values can be put into practice right now, in current circumstances, without being trapped by previous generations’ habits and dogma. The Reader is invaluable in presenting the dilemmas and partial solutions discovered by community development practitioners over the past sixty years, placing these partial solutions in the context of the challenges of the specific moment, and ends with an up-to-date outline of the current challenges facing us: in particular, the neo-liberalist rolling back of the state while rolling over us all with pressure to divert communities into substituting for public services. The Reader is excellent in portraying the dilemma of defending public services from cuts when so much of our history has been to assail public services wherever they are merely managing communities or ignoring the diversity of community needs.
The community development practitioners of the present and future will be well-advised to read this book and reflect on the challenges of how community development can respond to new social movements which often develop themselves, and how we orientate ourselves within globalism and super-diversity. Never has Local been so complicated. There are no magic solutions; the editors are very careful not to grab a crystal ball and pontificate on the future. However, the current fragmentation of community development across a wide range of potential organisations could be its greatest strength if the diversity can cohere around shared values and a collaborative mindsets and behaviours. Can dog-eat-dog become dog-feeding-dog as we model our own values in our attempts to forge partnerships in the continuing struggle for social justice and equalities? And if we do, let’s hope that in 50 years we can look back at how community development reasserted itself in helping to create a world where inclusive communities initiate policies and direct the deployment of resources.
"The Community Development Reader: History, themes and issues", edited by Gary Craig, Marjorie Mayo, Keith Popple, Mae Shaw and Marilyn Taylor (what a forward line!), Policy Press, 2011