Does Community Development Work

4



IDASA closed its doors in 2013.

Title: Does community development work?
Sub-title: An appreciative and critical inquiry into the practice of community development a South African perspective, by Dr Peter Westoby, The University of Queensland
Introduction
Slide #1
In 1994 I arrived in South Africa as a young 27 year old community worker.
Captivated by those transition years to post-apartheid South Africa, I have spent the past 20 years on a back and forth journey working on numerous development initiatives there. During the past 4 years I also conducted intensive field-based research trying to 'see and make sense' of CD as deployed in historical, material and discursive practices. This book emerges from these 4 years.
Intriguingly when I first arrived in 1994, and introduced myself as a community development worker, I was often told that it's best not to talk about CD. Research illuminated a shadowy past with P. W. Botha's appointment as the Minister of Community Development and Coloured Affairs in the 1960s with CD being part of the architecture of 'separate development' and forced removals. People associated CD with this oppressive tradition of CD as opposed to the more progressive or emancipatory traces of CD. More of this later.
Slide #2
However, as of 2003, CD has enjoyed an official resurgence, sparked particularly by the announcement by the then President, Thabo Mbeki, of the formation of a National Community Development Worker Program, which has since been supplemented by numerous community work initiatives of the state. The two main national CD programs alone employ more than 7000 workers at each Ward level of local government. Again more about that later on.
The primary goal of the research was to 'see and make sense' of community development within RSA – through an appreciative AND critical lens. But I had over goals.
One alludes to the kind of statement a colleague of mine Dr Lynda Shevellar recently heard at an international conference. On stage were some academically credentialed presenters. Responding to a question about community development, one of the presenters, a MIT global policy leader and researcher, stated, without blinking an eyelid, that, 'the research shows that community development does not work'. One goal had been to then write a book and theorise community development in a way that such an ignorant statement could be shown to be patently untrue. As is shown in this book such a statement can only be untrue simply because the statement fails to deal with the complexity of traditions, frameworks and approaches to 'community development'. Obviously to such a statement a reply would be, 'what kind of community development are you talking about?', and, 'considering all the community-led or community-based initiatives around the world that continue to impact profoundly for good on people's lives, in what way does it not work?'
The other goal refers to an attempt to concretise the vision and hopes articulated by the (late) South African scholar-activist-humanitarian-revolutionary Neville Alexander, (Slide #3) who recently argued that:
… besides the ongoing political and economic class struggles in which we are willy-nilly involved, and by means of which we attempt to create and consolidate more democratic space in the short to medium term, we have to go back to the community development tasks that the BCM [Black Consciousness Movement] initiated so successfully, if not always sustainably owing to the ravages of the apartheid system (Alexander, 2013, p.199).

In that statement Alexander argues for a way forward but also reminds the reader of not only state-led official CD (often in the service of the apartheid state up until the 1990s) but also whole other 'traditions' of CD – such as Steve Biko's Black Community Programmes (do people know who Biko was?), which were inspired by Biko's reading of Paulo Freire's 1970 publication of Pedagogy of the Oppressed. The point to make here and which I explore substantially in one chapter of the book on TRADITIONS, is that the analytical frame brought to this book is against the grain of most books on CD, which start with a definition of CD and work from there. (Slide #4) I have never been interested in a definition, but instead have come to clarify, mainly through this research project, that it is best to:
Explore how CD is deployed in practice (discursively and materially), and,
Recognise that there are diverse traditions and frameworks that influence how CD is understood. Each tradition/framework is underpinned by an implicit, and occasionally explicit, set of normative practices…(albeit let's for the sake of those not familiar with CD as an historical and material set of practices, centres community as both the site (geographical or population groups) and vehicle (i.e. collective work) for social change. Forms of solidarity and agency come to the fore in method and analysis).
Returning to Neville Alexander's vision, he argues that:
… [South African's] have to rebuild communities and neighbourhoods by means of establishing, as far as possible on a voluntary basis, all manner of community projects that bring visible short-term benefit to the people and that initiate at the same time the trajectories of fundamental social transformation. ... These could range from relatively simple programmes such as keeping the streets and public toilets clean, preferably in liaison with the local authority, whether or not it is "delivering" at this level, to more complex programmes such as bulk-buying clubs, community reading clubs, enrichment programmes for students preparing for exams, teachers' resource groups at the local level and, of course, sports and cultural activities on a more convivial basis... (2013, p.200).

This is a reasonable vision, grounded in what my research indicates is happening in some South African spaces. There is a huge number of community-based and community-led work occurring within South Africa, and there are numerous networks, linking, or converging - as Alexander puts it - into a vibrant transformational spaces where alternative worlds are being imagined and created.
The research clearly shows that this expression of community agency at times assimilates, and at other times accommodates or resists hegemonic neoliberal trajectories for development. The point is they do exist, however fragile and vibrant - and Alexander's vision is being made true, and the MIT professor's analysis is found to be banal and false.
Okay, moving beyond the introduction what was the research design?
Slide #5
The research employs an analytical framework that I don't have time to describe right now, but the guiding research questions were:
How are the poor organising themselves using various forms of community development; or in some cases
How are the state or other non-state actors attempting to organise, engage or accompany the poor through community development?
How can the practice of community development be theorised inductively, drawing on answers to the previous questions?

And three last things in this 'setting up point of the presentation: (Slide #6)
Firstly, I engaged the research drawing on the notion of 'double stories' – with one story-line of post-apartheid successes, easily forgotten as people's expectations rise (Slide #7). It is the story representing discontinuity, rupture, or at least the changes resultant from a negotiated transition. More people than ever have access to water, electricity, work; there is a growing black middle class, along with the BEE elite. The second story is that of on-going post-apartheid troubles, ever present to the point that many people suffer what Jacob Dlamini calls 'native nostalgia' (a longing for the apartheid past). We can talk about the ongoing cleavages of class, gender and race. This is the story-line representing continuity with the past. (Slides 8-10)

Secondly, the post-apartheid context for development requires a sophisticated understanding of the complexity of the challenges. Development cannot be reduced to either economic, social, political, cultural or spiritual/moral factors. Clearly the enduring state of what Chilean economist Manfred Max-Neef (1991) calls poverties requires an equally sophisticated understanding of the holistic and systemic nature of the challenge. For example, South Africa's development challenge has not emerged just from apartheid's racial policies, but also from the ongoing exploitative class formations of a particular kind of capitalist development (Alexander, 2013; Andreasson, 2010; Marais, 2011; Mbeki, 2009). People interviewed within the research project argued for many kinds of analyses. For example, one senior practitioner argued that the main challenges facing South Africa are threefold, dealing with: (i) the failure to transform the education system; (ii) the failure of land reform; and, (iii) the failure to transform patterns of corporate ownership and power. Another argued that South Africa lay at a key juncture at this historical moment, focusing on an analysis of the state - with one direction being where the state would fragment and slumber into failure; the other where the state would rise with the best and brightest of human resources.

Thirdly, it is into such a context that community development practice is one contributor amongst many of social change work approaches. Community development practitioners sit alongside lawyers, educators, unionists, activists and others in utilising different traditions, approaches and methods of social change. It should also be noted that while this book focuses on community development practice within South Africa I understand community development work as a small humble contributor to social change. From the perspective of a more macro or national level, particularly drawing on more state and economic centric orthodox views of development, community development would appear to be marginal. It is easy to argue that the core 'developmental process' of South Africa is being worked out within the class-based struggles represented by mining and agricultural related worker struggles. Here is endogenous development at its crux, as South African workers struggle for their fair share of the surplus generated by the capitalist development trajectory of one of the BRICS nations (Forslund, 2013). The 2012 Marikana minor workers strike, and accompanying state-led violence, was a crucial moment in highlighting these ongoing class-based struggles (Pillay, 2013).
In contrast most community development work occurs at the margins, among what has been previously described as surplus people (Bauman, 2004). And I tend to agree. However, from less orthodox development perspectives, those that are more oriented towards the post-structural and post-development perspectives, (Esteva, 1987; McMichael, 2010) community development represents an important people-centred tradition of social solidarity (Sennett, 2012), one that experiments with social change initially on a small-scale, but which can grow significantly with appropriate inputs and support, and also offer visions and actions of 'contested development' (McMichael, 2010). McMichael's vision coincides with Neville Alexander's vision for community development, as per my quotes earlier within the chapter.
A glimpse into findings
Now turning to more substantial findings from the research project -within the book I report on the findings through four main sections:
CD traditions and frameworks used within South Africa
NGO-led CD
State-led CD
I then reflect on the 3rd research question to do with CD practice.
1. CD traditions and frameworks (Slide #11)
As already briefly mentioned I attempt to do two main things in these chapters: first to engage with the debate within CD about definition; and second to 'read' what I learned about how CD is deployed through the conceptual lens of traditions and frameworks. The chapters are full of rich data and analysis but for the purposes of this presentation I'll mention how I describe elements of three main traditions, understood as:
Social mobilizing (communities 'against' the state – in RSA latest big manifestation is 'service-led protest', anti-fracking, or the Durban based Abahlali movement (associated with Shack Dwellers International);
Social guidance (led by experts, trying to 'get people to participate' – often in state-led programmes but also many INGO and NGO led (particularly if the latter more or less see themselves as sub-contractors of the state);
Social learning….
(Slides # 12-14) Let's briefly look at the social learning tradition. In 1972, Steve Biko approached community animators/educators Anne Hope and Sally Timmel to help the Black Consciousness Movement. Their task was to train some adult educators in the Freirean literacy method. Biko had become aware of this method through his readings of Freire's then recently published Pedagogy of the Oppressed and was impressed with the potential relevance to South Africa. Sally, with Steve, developed a one week per month training programme implemented through most of 1972, equipping fifteen adult educators, selected by Biko, with the literacy method. However, most of these people along with Biko, were imprisoned by Christmas of that same year. The Freirean approach was part of Biko's hope for a holistic community development approach based on social learning.
More recent examples of such practice include (the then) IDASA's grassroots popular education initiatives, Mvula Trust's citizen voice initiatives and REFLECT groups run by the INGO, ActionAid.
I also somewhat disrupt a simple reading of this, by for example, tracing overlaps….
For example, returning to Biko - a closer reading of Biko's work has led me to conclude that while the form of the community development work might be understood within a social learning frame, the intellectual roots are different. For example, for Es'kia Mphahlele the roots were what he called African Humanism (Mphahlele, 2002, p.185ff) and for Biko it was Black Consciousness, informed by the likes of Malcolm X, Frantz Fanon and James Cone. Such intellectual roots in turn have a similarity to Gandhi's thinking about the significance of Indian consciousness within the quest for independence and self-development (and remember, how many years was Gandhi working in S. Africa?).
For Steve Biko a key rationale in setting up health clinics was that they were health clinics run for blacks, and by blacks, both in terms of black medical staff, and also black management. The health clinic was important per say, but for Biko, what was more important was 'reconstructing' a cultural consciousness that blacks can manage and run their own affairs. The key 'developmental' problems were cultural - if black people only see good things coming from white people then they will inevitably develop a sense of inferiority that saps the soul; and structural - recognising the role of capitalist modes of production and accumulation within exploitation. Development activity then was focused on the practical, but also on the cultural-conscious. In a sense then Biko's work whilst firmly within the Freirean social learning tradition also represents strong elements of the Gandhian social reconstruction tradition.
Anyway, the point is that these two chapters on traditions and frameworks explore these kinds of historical and contemporary CD practices, organising them into a coherent conceptual frame.
(Slide #15) And quickly on frameworks, the chapter is organised conceptually through a number of different kinds of community development frameworks, namely:
Policy diffused frameworks (income, basic needs, social exclusion and most recently the SLA);
The big 4 organisational diffused ones (rights-based CD, assets-based CD, community-led CD, sustainable livelihoods approaches); and
Endogenous organisational frameworks. Three of these, as particularly interesting include:
CDRA and their 'developmental framework' (picture) (Slide #16)
The Grail Institute and Training for Transformation (picture) (Slide #17)
Khanya aacid – using SLA and community-based planning (Slide #18)
Okay, moving onto the second main set of findings...
2. NGO-led CD
This section of the book draws on five case studies – each of which represents: (Slide #19)
A crucial issue within contemporary S. Africa – that is, community economics/sustainable livelihoods, land reform/political organizing, social cohesion and xenophobia, education reform and community-led schools; and finally the challenges to do with gender violence and HIV;
Four main directions CD focuses on – economic, social, political and educational, and;
Crucial elements of CD practice.
For example, and I only have time for one, the Southern Cape Land Council (Slide #20) considers the linkages between community development and political practices focusing on community organising work within the Western and Eastern Cape. The story is located within the ongoing challenges of farm-workers and land reform within South Africa and also unpacks the community development practices known as meta-level work, that is, the building of networks, coalitions and federations to tackle trans-local issues.
Within South Africa the issue of land is central to transformational hopes. Since early settlement there has been an ongoing process of colonisation that has seen land ownership predominantly in the hands of white commercial farmers. Different crucial moments, such as the Land Act of 1913, which both extended processes of forced removal, but essentially codified existing patterns of land loss to blacks, simply represented part of an ongoing process of colonisation.
With apartheid ending in 1994 the previously dispossessed became hopeful – there was a perception that change was coming. However, since 1994, despite a post-colonial epoch, decolonisation of land has failed miserably. The same pre-apartheid patterns of ownership, labour and agrarian exploitation continue. While numerous laws claim to have made a positive difference, related to issues such as minimal wage increases, eviction and tenure, enduring structures and relations continue.
It is into such a context that the Southern Cape Land Committee, originally known as the Southern Cape Against Removals (SCAR), works across communities of the Western and Eastern Cape. Their work is focused on farm-workers, emerging farmers, agro-ecological practices, political schools and networking with government departments. Their dual strategy could be construed as: (i) first order social change work, enabling farm workers and potential emerging black farmers to 'survive the existing system' through para-legal work, and seeding and supporting new agro-ecological initiatives; (ii) while also conducting second order social change, 'to change the system' through community organising, campaigning and advocating for new models of land reform. There are both aspirational and pragmatic elements to their strategy.
For example, their work aims to support emerging farmers to 'act as one voice'. The community development workers of the Land Committee support emerging (black) farmers through capacitation of leadership so that they can act with one voice within local-level multi-stakeholder forums. I remember driving another 170km from their Graaff-Reinet office onto the town of Willowmore where I spent a day with several members of the Baviaans Land and Agrarian Reform Forum (BLARF) who are organising 17 cooperatives of emerging black farmers within the municipality boundary.
The focus is on engaging local municipalities with one voice. Governments find it easier to relate to each individual group separately – it then becomes easier to utilise patronage forms of politic with some groups, or simply to ignore others. However, when groups organise horizontally, and form a cooperative, network, forum or coalition in the way that has been fostered by the Southern Cape Land Committee, then it is difficult for local municipalities to discard the arising issues. Such networks of groups have a stronger force which is harder to be ignored or manipulated by the powerful.
They also use a 'rights-based' practice to educate farm-workers about their (limited) rights. Their practices involve the formation of farm committees at very local levels, ensuring that farm workers can work together. Again, such farm-worker committees are then linked them together giving a stronger voice.
Also the Committee works among emerging black farmers to promote agro-ecology, as per the work demonstrated by Via Campesina. This work supports emerging farmers in producing their own food with the aim of food sovereignty. This requires engagement with local government, particularly to lever access to commonage land and also particular services, such as water.
Finally, their work focuses on people mobilisation, raising awareness of poverty-producing processes and supporting initiatives and movements for change. Here they work in close partnership with other civil society organisations like Khanya College, an organisation that is experienced in running 'critical schools', attempting to catalyse social movements.
From a broader perspective the Southern Cape Land Committee attempts to integrate these initiatives into the overall goal of building local leadership that can catalyse a rural social movement that demands change in the various spheres of influence. They attempt to integrate practical and strategic work – the former being work such as agro-ecology, supporting people to grow their own food, and the latter being more explicitly political whereby the organisation accompanies people in learning about, and exercising their rights along with campaigning work.
Within each chapter I then also, as per the third main research question, consider CD practices. For example, within this story I distil four practices including: 'the delicate relationship' between community educator and community organiser; the practices of horizontal learning; the practices of structuring the work into meta-level organisation; and finally, a co-creative approach of community-state relations.
3. State-led CD (Slide #22)
Within one section of the book I focus on state-led CD. Three main chapters focus on research conducted within both the National Community Development Worker Program and also the National Community Development Practitioner Program. I report on the findings through discussing:
The dilemmatic space of state employed CD workers;
The interface between state-led CD and cooperative formation, a cornerstone of the South African state's 'jobs' creation vision; and,
An analysis of the training of CD workers by the state.
Again, and by example, Chapter 11 considers my investigation into the interaction between supply-oriented state-led community development and cooperative formation. Cooperative formation is a crucial element of the South African national development plan and has been well integrated into the national community development programmes. The chapter considers the challenges of state-led strategies such as cooperative formation particularly when linked into a supply-oriented chain. (Slides #23-24)
Essentially my research is quite critical, illuminating the problems that state-led CD is experiencing.
And just to give you a glimpse: during interviews and observation, analysis can best be summed up in the following comment:
When I ask people, 'why did you start a cooperative, they say, "because the government said to, and they'd give us money"' (Slide #25)
Another participant also describes the problem:
In the municipality there is a unit called local economic development and when you look at the problem of CDW reporting, the one that gives me most points is when I form a cooperative with women, youth ... but it is much harder to form a co-op, it is easier with a smaller group of two people or so. In co-ops usually you have up to 20 people, so it is a good number for the reporting, but hard to sustain. (Participant 6 - CDW)
Within these narratives, echoed by almost all the interviewees and informal discussions, are insights into crucial issues related to the instrumental pressures to form cooperatives as a numerical imperative. Cooperatives are considered particularly useful because, if for example there are 20 members of a cooperative, then it can be reported that 20 jobs have been created. Cooperative formation is then subjected to the instrumental and political needs of the state and ruling political party, which has staked its legitimacy upon 'jobs, jobs, and jobs'.
CD Practice (Slide #26)
Let's talk about CD practice. It should be said that the main body of the concluding chapters of the book does however focus on the third key research question, which in turn alludes to the title of the whole book. As an inductive process I end up suggesting a theory of practice that consists of four dimensions.
I won't touch on them all, but here's two points:
(Slide #27) Firstly, I argue that community development within South Africa, whilst many things, is also a practice in the sense that is defined by James Dunne (2011, 14) drawing on a MacIntyrean perspective (1984). Community development is, as he puts it when defining a practice, 'a more or less coherent and complex set of activities that has evolved cooperatively and cumulatively over time, and that exists most significantly in the community of those who are its practitioners' (ibid, p.14). Community development within South Africa clearly has a history, that is, as a field of practice it has evolved cooperatively and cumulatively over time. There is also a degree of coherence, despite contestations related to what I have called different traditions and frameworks of community development.
There are clearly internal goods to the practice alluding to at least two things. Firstly, there are the internal goods related to the 'desirable outcomes characteristically aimed at through a practice' (Dunne, 2011, p14). Distilled within this research monograph and related to community development, these desirable outcomes include: collective processes of social change aimed at educational, economic, political, cultural or social changes; increased capacities for a group; further rights achieved; and, projects initiated to the satisfaction of the participants. Secondly, there are the kinds of internal goods that 'reside within the practitioners themselves' (ibid, p.14), such as the competencies of a community worker, and also the virtues of the kinds of practitioner required (such as patience, humility, delicacy, tenacity and care).
While such internal goods are the constitutive core of a practice, there are also external goods – mainly to do with pay, standards, recognition, or what I have previously called the 'architecture of the profession' (Westoby and Shevellar, 2014). Within South Africa there are energetic processes committed to establishing this architecture – through the formation of a national occupational category, the ongoing endeavours to develop a national association of community development, the establishment of university-based community development degrees and certificates and so forth.
It should also be noted that at its best, the external goods, or institutional structures of community development, can serve the practice's internal goods. However, often there is substantial compromise as the former colonises the latter.
(Slide #28) Secondly, there is a dimension of community development practice best understood as 'practical wisdom' – made clear for me within this research project. Within a reimagining of community development practice as story or event, discussed within the book, the community development practitioner cannot fall back on propositions. They need to embrace the notion of practical wisdom within community development. Community development practical wisdom requires the ability to recognise situations as somewhat typical, that is, a community development situation that has been met before and for which there is some kind of method, or already established 'way forward'; or the opposite – that the situation is not typical – but that the practitioner is capable of responding adequately and appropriately. In doing this there is recognition that every situation needs to be respected in its particularity, but at the same time, recognition that the practitioner (with wisdom) is able to, 'bring this particularity into some relationship, albeit one yet to be determined, with the body of [community development] knowledge…one's adeptness then lies then in the capacity to mediate between the general and the particular' (Dunne, 2011, p.18). This in turn requires the capacity to engage each and every situation with fresh creative insight, knowing that context is always reshaping any kind of response; and, recognition that such a way of responding requires a radical openness that 'allows one's experience to be quickened by new learning so that one develops finely discriminating judgement' (ibid, p.18). In doing this there is a receptivity to the salient moment, knowing that receptivity might 'call for a high level of imagination and emotional engagement by the self' (ibid, p.19), which in turn acknowledges that judgement in the moment is also a confluence of both the personal and professional – that is, expressive of the kind of person as well as kind of practitioner that one has become.
(Slide #29) One of the fears emerging from this research is the spectral nightmare of practitioners without practice, people who know all the propositions, or the procedures, but don't get the practice. For all my hope, this is one of the big warnings emerging from the book.
In conclusion (Slide #30)
As you hopefully have a sense of the research project is rich with data, analysis and conceptual ideas. I have just touched the surface. However, in finishing this presentation I'd like to say one more thing. A critical perspective permits a more considered understanding of the conditions within South Africa that have produced a 'ripe moment' for community development's revival. Questions arise as to why community development is so popular at this historical moment within South Africa? Why is the state supporting the institutionalising of community development – within programmes, universities, professions – at this time? Again, a more appreciative genealogical study might infer that the state, as the key instrument of emancipatory practice, needs skilled practitioners. However, a more critical reading might alternatively argue that community development as deployed at least by the state, and also potentially by NGOs, is useful within this moment of neoliberal peace (Tschirhart, 2011). In this sense community development feeds into the state's needs for the poor to become self-reliant, to 'stand up' on their own feet, to be resourceful (rather than resourced), and also to participate in government consultations. Within this 'reading' community development is part of Duffield's development-security nexus that deploys a model of social development which has no hope of shifting the structural problems facing the poor, but at least provides a measure of development and security. There is a socio-economic dimension as per the state's goals around sustainable livelihoods and cooperatives; and there is also the political-security dimension as community development is deployed within a regime of governance or governmentality, as per local government participation processes. I would like to suggest that over the next few years studying the social and political conditions that allow statements and pronouncements that attain the status of 'truth' and 'common sense' about community development within South Africa will need to be invested in. My holding to an appreciative stance on community development does not allow a blinkered view to dominate the way in which power is deployed could be left unanalysed.