The community development approach has and continues to be influenced enormously by the increased accountability required of practitioners and the community development field as a whole. Discussion and debate around the need for evidence is now a staple ingredient of any community development conference. This chapter will look at how the issues of evaluation, evidence and accountability were addressed in the past through the experiences of practitioners and what this meant for practice. These experiences will be used to make sense of the rising demands for accountability on the work of practitioners today and the implications this has for the type of relationships developed between practitioners and communities. Twinned with this shift towards greater accountability has been an emphasis on partnerships, as outlined in earlier chapters. Communities and the voluntary and community sector are being asked to participate and ‘deliver’ in more ways than ever before. What does this mean for community development practice? To what extent does it need to adapt its methods and skills?

Evaluation and evidence

In its early days, community development was subject to very little in the way of reporting requirements to those bodies that funded the work. Employing organisations as well as practitioners were afforded a considerable degree of freedom in defining the purpose and processes for their work, allowing them to be responsive to the communities in which they worked. The downward pressures on practitioners that define life in the public and voluntary sectors today had not hit in quite the same way in the 1970s and early 1980s:

This is not to suggest that without these upward reporting requirements practitioners were necessarily unclear what they were doing or what was expected of them. While the language of outcomes was not used in the mid-1970s, Alan Barr suggests that this is what he has always been working towards: