Community Development & the Struggle Against Powerlessness

For people who have been extensively involved in community development, it is no doubt an approach that can empower communities to improve their lives.  However, for others who know little about it, it conjures up images of residents complaining about their areas and delaying projects that were meant to benefit them.  This knowledge gap, one might think, would have been closed by the impact community development work has achieved over time.  Unfortunately, the majority of policy makers and funders still seem to have a complete blind spot when it comes to the value of helping communities build their collective influence.

An underlying problem is that public bodies, which should be welcoming and supporting community development, often view it as merely an instrument in aid of getting top-down targets met.  When those targets end up being questioned, the processes for attaining them are challenged, and alternative plans are sought, those in charge of setting and meeting their own organisational targets are not happy.  What they don’t realise is that the central issue here is power – the power of people living and working in various communities to deal with the problems they face.  Targets, objectives, outputs, etc. need to relate to communities’ experience.  Problem-solving must connect with people’s understanding of possible options.  If solutions and programmes are imposed on people without their informed involvement in shaping them, it exacerbates their powerlessness, and leaves them more disillusioned than ever with how things are organised around them.

 

To appreciate the real importance of community development, one should see it in the historical context of collective struggles against powerlessness.  The driving force has always been the refusal to accept an unpalatable state of affairs as unalterable.  From racist practices, appalling housing conditions, neighbourhood crime and disorder, to widespread poverty, diminishing employment prospects, and environmental degradation, whenever communities are galvanised into working together to formulate and press for better outcomes, community development takes another step forward.

 

Looking back, the closest community development came to be recognised by any government as a core discipline in empowering communities was when the Labour Government established the Civil Renewal Unit (CRU) in 2003 which went on to promote the community development ethos and the adoption of diverse engagement techniques across local and central government, in partnership with the community sector.  CRU established a network of Civic Pioneers to widen local authorities’ engagement with local people, a series of Take Part hubs to help people exert greater influence over public policies and services, and a group of Guide Neighbourhoods to facilitate peer-to-peer learning amongst communities in shaping local priorities and strategies.  It acted as the government sponsor of the Community Development Foundation, and ran national and regional ‘Together We Can’ awareness-raising campaigns to encourage collaborative working between community groups and statutory bodies.  It also invested in dissemination infrastructure to increase the take-up of practices such as participatory budgeting, neighbourhood plans, and community asset transfers.

 

Yet despite the impact of these activities in raising community confidence and satisfaction in a wide range of areas across the country, it was still all too easy for a different political regime to dismantle this structure when it took over from Labour in 2010.  Coordinated and long-term support for community development activities ceased, and the Community Development Foundation itself was closed down.  At one level, this might be regarded as myopic policy making – opting for short term cuts over more durable community improvement.  But at a deeper level, it reveals a callous disinterest in addressing the problem of powerlessness in society.  Shallow rhetoric about ‘Taking Back Control’ will not get us very far (or worse, it covers up even greater loss of power).  History tells a clear story – for the struggle to secure a fair share of power for all, we need sustained community development.

 

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David Boyle has written an essay on the history of community development, which provides a decade-by-decade retracing of community development in the UK and US.

It can be accessed via Local Trust: https://localtrust.org.uk/insights/essays/a-history-of-community-development/

 

The Problem with History-Blind Judgements

Should individuals of an earlier era be criticised for holding certain views that in later times would come to be considered wrong?  There is a crucial difference between someone who believes in what the vast majority of people at that time routinely believe, and someone who refuses to question an idea when many have begun to cast doubt on its acceptability.

 

It’s understandable why someone living in the 10th century BC might assume the earth was flat, yet anyone holding such a view in the 21st century would arouse suspicion about their capacity for learning.  Similarly, we would not chastise a European cartographer whose 5th century map omitted the Americas, but we would not excuse a 19th century mapmaker who displayed a similar lack of knowledge.

 

Our judgement of people from the past ought to be based on how far ahead or behind they were in comparison with their contemporaries.  Furthermore, one could be ahead in many significant ways while lagging in some areas nonetheless.  Newton, for example, is rightly considered a great scientific thinker who led the world in advancing our understanding of many aspects of physics, even if he subscribed to a few spurious astrological ideas prevalent in the 17th century.

 

Unfortunately, when it comes to the social understanding of other people, it seems that the level of comprehension that has been attained here and now is used by many as the standard to judge the moral quality of people regardless of what historical period they actually lived in.

 

There were people who were cruel and callous by the prevailing standards of their times, and their attitudes and behaviour should be frowned upon. Instead of celebrating them as heroes, they should be seen as contemptible figures.  However, there were also many who had grown up with assumptions common in their times about others with a different ethnicity, nationality, gender, religion, or social status, and even though they might have gradually discarded some of those prejudices through critical reflections, they did not shake off every last one of them.  Should they be singled out as vile reprobates, or should we recognise that they had managed to move forward in some areas, and the direction of travel of their ethical thinking was towards the further elimination of prejudicial thought even if they had not got there completely?

 

In fact, can any of us say that we have got there ‘completely’ in terms of thinking appropriately about everything that matters in life?  As the 18th century Enlightenment taught us, the key is to keep learning, reviewing, discovering, so that we may move forward from mistaken assumptions of the past.  So long as we are making a real effort to improve, and encourage others to do likewise, we should not be faulted for not eradicating all errors in how we think – if indeed that is ever possible.

 

Ironically, many leading thinkers of the Enlightenment have been attacked for holding particular prejudiced views at some point in their lives even though overall they devoted themselves to combating bigotry and dogmas on numerous fronts.  The problem with history-blind judgements is that all too often they savage those who were seeking improvement, and divert attention from the incalcitrant reactionaries who genuinely deserve to be censured.