Community Development in an Uncertain World Vision, Analysis and Practice

AT THE HEART of community development is the idea of change from below. This is a natural consequence of the ecological, social justice, post-Enlightenment and Indigenous perspectives discussed in chapters 3–5, and was referred to a number of times in those chapters. The idea that the community should be able to determine its own needs and how they should be met, that people at local level know best what they need and that communities should be self-directing and self-reliant, is intuitively attractive, and hence it is easy to incorporate it into the rhetoric of community development. People are readily persuaded by such statements as ‘Communities should be self-reliant’, ‘There should be more power at grassroots level’ and ‘People should be able to determine their own future’. However, although it may be easy to state the rhetoric, the idea itself when put into practice is extremely radical and for many people requires a major change of mindset (De Young & Princen 2012). It goes against many of the dominant and prevailing views inherent in policy-making and program management, particularly in the Western tradition. This, indeed, is one of the primary reasons for the failure of many community development programs: the idea of change from below, if moved from the rhetorical to actual practice, challenges a number of taken-for-granted assumptions and threatens some powerful interests. It is important therefore to examine in more detail the idea of change from below and what it really involves. This will be undertaken initially around the ideas of valuing local knowledge, valuing local culture, valuing local resources, valuing local skills, valuing local processes and working in solidarity. After this discussion, six important ideological and theoretical traditions – pluralism, democratic socialism, anarchism, postcolonialism, postmodernism/poststructuralism and feminism – will be used to provide theoretical substance to the idea of change from below.

Valuing local knowledge

Community workers face the temptation common to all human service workers: to assume that somehow they are the experts, with specialist knowledge to be brought to the community and used to help in some way. Special expertise, after all, is the only claim to legitimacy that community workers can have; why else would they be intruding into other people's community life? Why should community members take any notice of them, unless they have something special to bring to the community?