Tag Archives: community development

Ecologies, Economy, Environment & Justice, Struggle & Movement

Arturo Escobar on Development and Discourse

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Arturo Escobar’s Encountering Development is one of those books that felt like it fundamentally changed how I see things.

Because of this, maybe, I never properly blogged it — I have a PDF full of highlights, bought the book, I flip through seeking key insights and instead get involved again on every page. But I wanted to get a bit down, an overview of argument as I think through some of these ideas for new work of my own (and finishing up a article long overdue). I start with the preface:

THIS BOOK grew out of a sense of puzzlement: the fact that for many years the industrialized nations of North America and Europe were supposed to be the indubitable models for the societies of Asia. Africa, and Latin America, the so-called Third World, and that these societies must catch up with the industrialized countries, perhaps even become like them. This belief is still held today in many quarters.

It is quite puzzling. Sadly it still seems almost as true in 2021 as it did in 1995.

While he calls this a poststructural approach and it focuses in on discourse, he never loses sight of the material. This is one of those works that manages to bring two very different, and often opposing, ways of though together in fruitful and powerful ways. I think maybe Anna Tsing is the last person to so impress me with this alchemy. So to say again what Escobar wishes for this book to be and do:

Continue reading Arturo Escobar on Development and Discourse →
City Unseen, Environment & Justice, Housing, Intersections, Struggle & Movement

Gilding the Ghetto: Poverty and Poverty Programmes in the 60s and 70s

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I’m not the only one who thinks this is extraordinary, but it is still something that maybe not everyone reads and it really is worth spending some time with Gilding the Ghetto, published in 1977. It’s a strange moment to be reading it really, after so many years of austerity, facing many of the same issues with the same roots, but in vastly different contexts. Still, both periods were framed in terms of crisis.

Towards the end of 1976 among the endless reminders of Britain’s economic predicament another theme was brought to public attention: the urban crisis.

This is how it opens – but they are quick to note that this urban crisis was not new — crisis was never new. Forty years later that shit is still not new.

Anyway, In the late 60s and early 70s a number of projects were started — and I found them fascinating so explore them in potentially boring detail here. For the most part they were attempted, they were awesome, but then they were finished and buried, and this cycle is so familiar.

Yet today there is an official silence about these programmes of the late 1960s and early seventies. A striking silence.

This report goes back to the early stage. Written by a group of workers from the National Community Development Project it tries to make sense of the spate of government ‘poverty initiatives’ beginning in 1968 of which CDP was a part. It is written from inside but, we hope, for an outside world. It comes from our own experience as some of the state’s ‘poverty’ workers, and from the doubts that experience raised in our minds about what our employers were really intending.

This sounds so familiar:

The Home Office, with James Callaghan as Home Secretary, embarked on CDP in 1969. The idea was to collaborate with local authorities in setting up local projects, each with a five- year lifespan as ‘a neighbourhood-based experiment aimed at finding new ways of meeting the needs of people living in areas of high social deprivation’. There were to be twelve projects … Their brief rested on three important assumptions. Firstly, that it was the ‘deprived’ themselves who were the cause of ‘urban deprivation’. Secondly, the problem could best be solved by overcoming these people’s apathy and promoting self-help. Thirdly, locally-based research into the problems would serve to bring about changes in local and central government policy.

Makes me really angry of course. Also unsurprising:

A few months’ field-work in areas suffering long-term economic decline and high unemployment was enough to provoke the first teams of CDP workers to question the Home Office’s original assumptions. There might certainly be in these areas a higher proportion of the sick and the elderly for whom a better co-ordination of services would undoubtedly be helpful, but the vast majority were ordinary working-class men and women who, through forces outside their control, happened to be living in areas where bad housing conditions, redundancies, lay-offs, and low wages were commonplace.

So they started organizing the people they were working with, using their research to pressure local authorities and councillors and investigating the structural issues at play – and that’s when they were shut down and buried really. In 1973 a central CDP Information and Intelligence Unit was set up and published a series of (probably embarrassing to the government) reports: The Poverty of the Improvement Programme, Whatever Happened to Council Housing? Profits against Houses and the Costs of Industrial Change. In 1974 central government asked for a review of the programme, with a goal of controlling, curtailing and closing down. (5)

Only six weeks after publishing the highly critical report on the government’s public spending cuts, Cutting the Welfare State (Who Profits), the Home Secretary ordered the closure of the unit.

This pamphlet was written in 1977, when a few projects were still running out their time, but finding it hard to coordinate work or collectively make sense of the findings.

This report is part of that attempt. Though it is not an account of our experience – that is to be found in the various local and inter-project reports — it tries to locate and explain that experience in the context of the series of government moves of which CDP was one….Still we hope that our analysis will help to clarify for others as it has for us, the role of government in relation to both the demands of the economy and pressures from the working class, and the part that such programmes we describe here as the ‘Poverty Programme’ play in maintaining the status quo. (6)

Part 1: The Poverty Programme

The men behind all of this top down malarky, well the men still look the same. Glasses are different of course.

A handful of home secretaries: top left, James Callaghan; right,
Robert Carr; bottom left, Roy Jenkins; right, Merlyn Rees. The
Home Office led the field in urban deprivation but it was a series
of official reports that triggered off the activity.

The Welfare state was under pressure, government unsure what to do, this all sounds familiar too. It was an experiment— the word comes up again and again — conducted with very limited resources in many separate laboratories. The central state drew in the local authorities, disregarding their traditional departmental boundaries. ‘Citizen involvement’ and ‘participation’ were recurring themes. Most important, all the schemes took as their testing grounds, small, working-class districts of Britain’s big cities and older industrial towns. These were the ‘areas of special need’ which had first come to the centre of official concern; soon they were being called ‘pockets of deprivation’. (9) In describing the programming that emerged in response, James Callaghan, Home Secretary said it was:

to provide for the care of our citizens who live in the poorest or most overcrowded parts of our cities and towns. It is intended to arrest, in so far as it is possible by financial means, and reverse the downward spiral which afflicts so many of these areas. There is a deadly quagmire of need and apathy. Hansard, 2.12.68 (10)

Quagmire. Right. Still, I’m only just beginning to realise what a big deal it has been, the centralisation of funds and control over programmes, so this is important

Responsibility for Urban Aid was located in the Community Relations Department of the Home Office, the department also responsible for the Community Relations Commission. The money made available for Urban Aid was not an extra government grant, but money already existing in the Rate Support Grant which was taken out of the general allocation and put into the Special Grant category. This allowed the government to have for the first time some direct control over what was going on ‘at the grass roots’. Local authorities could apply for grants from this Special Grant for specific projects which could be financed for up to five years on a 75/25% basis (10)

It still seems to have been quite decentralised, and going into quality programmes:

As the local authorities grasped the new idea and sent back descriptions of the areas they regarded as being ‘of special social need’ the kinds of projects supported through the Urban Aid Programme widened in scope. From the nursery schools, day nurseries and children’s homes, family advice centres and language classes for immigrants of the earlier phases, it had extended its embrace to many more informal kinds of organisation by the later phases. The Home Office actively encouraged local authorities to support autonomous forms of organisation that were already active in their areas. Women’s Aid centres, holiday play schemes, housing and neighbourhood advice centres, family planning projects were all included in later phases of the Urban Aid Programme. (11)

But of course there was never enough funding

there have been around five times more applications made than those granted. In 1971 for instance the London Borough of Lambeth submitted applications for projects to cost £103,500 – only £13,650 of this was approved (11)

In 1969 the Home Office set up its version of ‘action research’:  This included an array of programmes: Urban Aid (a neighbourhood-based experiment aimed at finding new ways of meeting the needs of people living in areas of high social deprivation; by bringing together the work of all the social services under the leadership of a special project team and also by tapping resources of self help and mutual help which may exist among the people in the neighbourhoods. Home Office Press Release 16.7.69 (12)); the Educational Priority Area (EPA) action-research project; Neighbourhood Schemes intensively targeting money into small deprived areas to complement the other programming; and the National Community Development Project. In the words of civil servant Derek Morell who pushed this through:

The whole project is aimed against fragmentation … The starting point of the project is that ours is a fragmented, disintegrating society. But the project aims at evolutionary changes, not revolution. Depersonalisation is another problem. The technical juggernaut is taking over and we are no longer the masters. The most difficult step will be how to discover how to perform the crucial task of raising the people of Hillfields from a fatalistic dependence on ‘the council’ to self-sufficiency and independence –Minutes, 14.7.69

That all sounds familiar too. And as if it were a race, the Department of the Environment announced in quick succession its own ‘total approach’ scheme: the Six Towns Studies.

In our approach to the environment, we have endeavoured in the first two years under the new DoE to make a switch of resources to bad areas .. . I believe that the next most important step for any department is to bring about a total approach to the urban problem. In the past the attitude has been a series of fragmented decisions not properly co-ordinated and not bringing about the improvement of urban areas which is necessary. –Peter Walker, then Secretary of State for the Environment, in the Budget Debate 1972, quoted in Community Action No.8. (13)

The Department of Health and Social Security (Sir Keith Joseph Minister), then set up a working party to explore ‘whether the cycle of transmitted deprivation would be a fruitful area of research’…investigating how ‘deprivation’ is passed on through the family. (13) Ah, how I love to hate that old chestnut. 1973 brought Quality of Life Studies, courtesy of the Department of the Environment, looking at improving access to leisure activities. They were a bit worried about how to coordinate it all by then, so created the Urban Deprivation Unit (UDU), and the Comprehensive Community Programmes. These were all partnerships between local and national government, but the European Economic Community (EEC) was also involved, and sponsored its own ‘Poverty Programme’ focused on the ‘chronically poor’. The research proliferated.

2. The (non) eradication of poverty

The aims of the EEC programme sound familiar: ‘to develop clearer perceptions of a complex problem and pioneer new techniques for tackling it‘.

The results? Mixed. The effort – beggars belief really.

The inner city areas of Liverpool are the delight of every deprivation theorist. They have been treated with each of the government’s urban deprivation programmes in turn, sometimes with several at a time. An EPA in 1969, a CDP in 1970, a Neighbourhood Scheme in 1971, an Inner Area Study in 1973 which then sponsored an Area Management experiment have all been tried there, and up to 1974 £1,707,213 had been spent on a stunning total of 146 different Urban Aid projects.

And yet:

In 1968 when the poverty initiatives came to town, 25,000 people were registered as out of work on Merseyside. Four years later their numbers had more than doubled with 52,000 people unemployed. Today, 85,600 men and women, 11.3% of Merseyside’s population, are out of work. Even these telling city-wide figures cover up the real story of the inner-city areas. There the predicament of would-be workers is even worse with up to 20% unemployed and up to 30% among younger people. (19)

It’s all structural, innit. No one wants to tackle that though.

Both the CDP and the Inner Area Study agreed that immediate action was needed to tackle inner-Liverpool’s housing crisis. But though the message of their reports became more insistent, the actual housing output declined. (20)

It all boils down to this, always and everywhere seems like:

The poverty initiatives then have clearly not made any great inroads on inner-Liverpool’s real material problems. All they have done is to restate, usually in academic terms, what the people who live there have known for a long time.

Let’s just repeat that, because we are still doing it.

All they have done is to restate, usually in academic terms, what the people who live there have known for a long time.

Right, to continue:

If you live on Merseyside you have a better than average chance of being made redundant, being on the dole for a long time, living in slum conditions, being evicted, and forced to wait over six months for hospital treatment. Your children are more likely to die in infancy, or when, after getting no nursery schooling, they finally get to school, of being in larger classes in worse buildings, only to emerge finally onto the dole. Over 10,000 people leave Liverpool each year as a way of avoiding these problems. Those who are left can debate them in the neighbourhood councils and area management experiments left behind by the ‘poverty projects’. But, as they well know, talk is not going to make any impact on the worsening situation that faces them. (20)

12.5%  households were still without hot water in 1966, though that had dropped to 6.5% by 1971 (21). Homelessness figures, though, were rising:

Homelessness has doubled since 1970. On an average day in that year there were 12,874 people applying for temporary accommodation throughout Britain: by 1975 this had increased to 25,120 people a day. Meanwhile there are one million households still on local authority housing waiting lists throughout England while in London alone the total number on the housing waiting list increased from 152,000 in 1965 to 233,000 in 1974. (21)

So what change was achieved?

The problems of ‘deprivation’ then would seem to be as acute as ever for those who live them, and the prospects are bleak. Neither the poverty initiatives, nor the government’s more general policies towards the poor could be said to have had much impact on the problems facing the people who live in the older urban areas. But the programmes have always been small compared to the size of these. Not so much geared to solving the problems, they set out to provide the basis on which policy at both central and local government levels could be improved. Did the EPAs, Inner Area Studies, CDPs and the rest at least succeed in this respect? When it came to it neither Tory nor Labour governments seem to have taken much notice of the major policy recommendations emerging from the programmes although several years have now passed since their first reports were available. (22)

For housing specifically:

In housing too the pattern is much the same. One of the major recommendations of all three Inner Area Studies was the need for more spending on house improvement, with changes in policy to allow poorer owner-occupiers to take up improvement grants and more powers to enable local authorities to ensure that rented property was improved. The local authorities got their greater powers in 1974, as part of the Housing Action Areas scheme, but powers alone are useless without money, and they have now been denied the resources to carry out these proposals at all as government spending on improvement grants has gradually been cut back from £195.2m in 19734 to £85.8m in 1975-6. (23)

1976 brought in a renewed period of cuts — more money going to the ‘urban problem’, but not as much as was being cut in other spending in face of national economic crisis.  So – it’s structural inequality. A great quote from the quote from the Liverpool Inner Area Study:

A number of issues emerge from this description of inner area characteristics and the work carried out by Inner Area Studies. The chief one is the poverty and neglect of the area and its people in every sense. To a great extent this poverty is a reflection of inequalities in society as a whole. Clearly the scale and character of the problem is too great for policies concerned solely and specifically with inner areas to be effective. Any fundamental change must come through policies concerned with the distribution of wealth and the allocation of resources. IAS/L1/6 Third Study Review, Nov. 1974. (24)

Next post — the larger political economy of the 1960s, and just why all this spending on certain kinds of solutions could never provide the right answers. I can’t believe we’re still having that conversation, but the CDP did it masterfully.

Building Social Spaces, Struggle & Movement

Ledwith on Freire, Gramsci, and Community Development in the UK

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I loved Margaret Ledwith’s book, Community Development: A critical approach. This has been my practice for so long alongside community organizing and then on its own — I can’t describe the feeling of reading something that resonates so strongly, that frames this kind of work within this academic context that sometimes feels so alien and this British context with its very different trajectories. All that, and offering new insight. I’m working on the next paper, which is on this kind of work in London, so there will be a couple of posts on this, though the paper is actually almost done. Should have been submitted ages ago.

Sigh.

Why Empower

I tend to hate the word empowerment, but I suppose mostly because it has been so eviscerated of all critical content and liberatory practice. I have heard it come out of the mouths of people who wouldn’t empower anyone at all if they really admitted the truth to themselves, it has lost much of its credibility to me. But Ledwith some of it back. First, a quote from Butcher et al (a wealth of reading lies ahead of me as always):

If empowerment is at the heart of critical community practice, then “power” and its utilization are at the core of empowerment. It is only through engaging with structures and processes of social, political and economic power that communities can effectively work to confront the disadvantage, exclusion and oppression that they experience. (Butcher et al, 2007) 13

And here Ledwith nails much of why I hate the word:

Empowerment is a transformation concept but without a critical analysis it is all too often applied naively to confidence and self-esteem at a personal level, within a paradigm of social pathology, a purpose that is usually associated with personal responsibility for lifting oneself out of poverty, overlooking structural analyses of inequality. (13)

And the kind of practice I prefer instead.

Radical practice has a transformative agenda, an intention to bring about social change that is based on a fair, just and sustainable world. In this respect, it locates the roots of inequality in the structures and processes of society, not in personal or community pathology. (14)

And a final note on how things change, on how static models are never enough.

Community development is never static: its practice is always re-forming in dynamic with current thought, political contexts and lived experience. (14)

It emphasizes to me just how much depends on individual practice and ability to be flexible, to adjust, to do what’s best given the situation. To change the world, which is the point, not just to get the model right. Always hard, both to do, and to teach.

History of Radical Community Development

She gives a short history of such radical community development in the UK (which she describes as being longer in the earlier version damn it! I needed that! I will have to find an old edition). I found it so useful. So this version skips the Victorian settlement stuff, jumps right into the Beveridge Report in 1942 which established the consensus on the welfare state. There’s the work by Peter Townsend and others in the 1960s that showed the failings of the welfare state (including Cathy Come Home and everything Ken Loach was doing). The founding of the Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG). The sea of reports in the 1960s that recommended community development be a professional practice, but one committed to working with communities — in England more as planning and service delivery, but in Scotland (no surprise really it should be more radical there) as community learning. The setting up of the Urban Programme in 1968, the Community Development Project in 1969 — they sought to use action research and tackle the structural grounds of poverty as opposed to the pathology-based model. In this it defined itself against social work, which it saw as ‘soft policing’ and youth work, which ‘was dismissed as a means of simply keeping working-class kids off the streets’. (16)

Over the 1970s came a split, the radical agenda ‘which believes that community development is a locus of change within the struggle for transformation of the structures of society that are the root causes of oppression’ (Mayo, Craig et al, Ohri et all, Dominelli) and the pluralist one: ‘which believes there is a multiplicity of competing bases in society, mediated by the state, and that community development is only capable of ameliorative small-scale neighbourhood change and piecemeal reforms. (Henderson and Thomas, Twelvetrees) (17)

We come to the 1980s. Thatcher and the New Right, the return of the distinctions between deserving and undeserving poor, the active dismantling of the welfare state. New Labour also moved towards ‘we are all on the same side’ and away from commitment to structural change or analysis of injustice and inequality — they also embraced zero tolerance policing, punitive approaches to asylum seekers and fines for ‘anti-social behaviour’. (21) Hardly surprising that the radical agenda became less effective in this period. All that before we get to the Big Society under Cameron (and Clegg), their transferring responsibility to community while implementing austerity. Some good stuff on what a bad idea that is.
Gary Craig’s work critiquing this move, move away from critical position.

There are some good critiques listed here: the critique of communitarianism (Etzioni) which emerged in New Labour agenda — Robson arguing it ignores Gramsci, and the insight around hegemony of how dominant ideas infiltrate into civil society institutions. Cook and Kothar’s critique of participation as the ‘new tyranny’, which could perhaps be condensed down to the knowledge that key concepts reduced to buzzwords can dangerously flip transformative practice into placatory practice. (29)

And of course, praxis has developed quite a lot despite such conservative decades, and so our work needs to be imbued with critical analysis around intersections of race and class and gender, also with sustainability.

The story of a community

Ledwith gives a first walk through of how community development might work, an important tool for grounding the rest of the book in practice, and talking through some of the issues through narrative. She writes:

Community is a complex system of interrelationships woven across social difference, diverse histories and cultures, and determined in the present by political and social trends. This calls for practitioners to have an incisive analysis of…political context and the historical issues… (34)

Important to know — but where to start? In the tradition of emancipatory action research, she describes a process in which any project should start with a community profile. This means ‘local people researching their own stories, beginning the process of critical consciousness’. (35) This can then be put into play with statistical evidence, sociopolitical trends & community development interventions to develop collectively, and look in a structured way at the level of the individual, the group, the community, society’s structures/ institutions, and wider society. (36)

She gives a model here for critical praxis, locating internal and external forces in the community and working through how they impact on people’s lives. I like these drawings. That said, I sometimes stare at them quite a while trying to work out quite what they mean.

 

Doing Community Development

This chapter opens with a focus on Paulo Freire, so it’s covering much of what I know though I appreciated the discussion of the feminist critique of his work. It did feel a bit like Freire in all of his imperfections became a bit of target, when what I like about his work is that the whole point is to facilitate a collective learning and collective liberation to avoid being trapped in any one individual’s blindnesses. I feel it is the establishment and academia that sets individuals up as super philosophers only to be torn down, and that’s more a fault of the system if any one individual is given so much power. Still, the critique is just, I just wish we could be more generous with each other. Anyway.

I love the connection between the work of popular education and narrative, and the telling of a story. Ledwith shares a great quote from O’Donohue (2004):

A real narrative is a web of alternating possibilities. The imagination is capable of kindness that the mind often lacks because it works naturally from the world of Between; it does not engage things in a cold, clear-cut way but always searches for the hidden worlds that wait at the edge of things. (61)

The more I stare at that quote the more I love it, I’ve been thinking about fiction and non-fiction for a while. That captures something important.

Other quotes from Carolyn Steedman on how story names our place in the social world.  Brought together with analysis, Ledwith says, these become critical insight for action. This is particularly important in Western settings where the preoccupation with the individual (in distinction to the rest of the world) means people are fractured and split from the greater community. This rootedness in storytelling is also key to feminist pedagogy, with greater emphasis on the the

complex interlinking, overlapping matrix of oppressions that shape us all according to ‘race’, class, gender, age, ethnicity, sexuality ‘dis’ ability, religion and so on, rather than a simplistic dichotomous analysis of oppressor/ oppressed. (64)

I love this, all of this.

Without the link between person and political, Ledwith writes, stories remain subjective. She gives insights form Chris Cavanagh’s practice of using storytelling for social justice. In fact, there are so so many good examples about narrative and storytelling and justice… they’re on a list now. My to read list is absurd, I shall have to retire early.

Organising in the community

So here we get to her practice of Emancipatory Action Research (EAR) as the glue that binds theory and practice together. Not just through the results of the research, but in the process to move towards a better world and to escape the power relations of traditional research. Ledwith writes:

we need to create critical spaces for dialogue, involving all co-participants in co-creating knowledge for our times. These are counter-hegemonic critical spaces where power relationships are deconstructed according to our analyses of power in order to reconstruct democratic relations with new possibilities for a world that is fair and just. (78)

So, EAR, in summary:

  • grounded in an ideology of equality;
  • adopting a methodology that is emancipatory, working with not on people, power is redistributed;
  • using non-controlling methods, open to multiple ways of knowing, experience is explored beyond the written word through dialogue, story, music, drama, poetry, drawings and photographs in a search for multiple truths;
  • action for change emerges from new knowledge (79)

It consists of 4 interlinked stages:

  • critiquing the status quo
  • identifying key sites of intervention
  • creating new ways of making sense of the world (epistemology)
  • creating new ways of being in the world (ontology).

She writes about Rowan’s ‘Dialectical paradigm for research’ (1981), which sounds amazing, you can never be too dialectical. I’ll read that and write more, it’s already on the stack. This chapter includes checklists and questions (these are throughout, and so damn useful,  meaning this will be a well-thumbed book once research is underway). Everything she quotes from this foundational text by Reason and Rowan sounds pretty phenomenal. She combines this with Schuler’s core values model, to help pay attention to the balance of needs while you are busy doing everything else. All these tools I never knew of. There’s the Scottish ABCD model as well, also to be explored.

There’s more on organising, on Saul Alinsky…but there I have written far too much. I shall stretch towards the new.

Collective action for change

Ledwith describes the flow of popular education from the very first stage:

Community groups form the initial collective stage of the process where trust and cooperation create the context for reflection. It is a stage at which personal prejudice needs to be explored in order to reach a collective purpose. It is a place where problematising teaches people to question their reality, to open their minds to altered perspectives on life. This is the bedrock of collective, critical action. (98)

Yep. After that comes

Conscientisation [that word I can never pronounce] …the process whereby people become aware of the political, socioeconomic and cultural contradictions that interact in a hegemonic way to diminish their lives. This awareness, which is based on critical insight, leads to collective action. (100)

this process is so important, because otherwise collective action can simply lead to taking power without a critique of how power operates, which makes it easier to abuse because that is, after all, the dominant model. Critique also has to stretch towards a global view, developing understandings of how it is all linked.

She sees two major ‘sticking points’ in community development — the first a resistance to developing theory in practice, the other a reluctance to move beyond community to harness a greater collective force for change. (110)

This chapter ends with lots of case studies, they are dead useful.

The power of ideas

Gramsci! You can never have too much Gramsci. The key ideas of hegemony, the personal as political and the role of intellectuals. The importance of challenging dominant and damaging forms of common sense supporting the dominant system, particularly around race and patriarchy. So if you read your Gramsci you know that empowerment must therefore be connected to conscientisation.

Empowerment is therefore the ability to make critical connections in relation to power and control in society in order to identify discrimination and determine collective action for change. In this sense, it embraces identity and autonomy. (144)

She raises critiques of Freire and Gramsci, and to do so brings in Foucault! This made me like Foucault more than anything else has done, how his work combines with Gramsci and Freire and Marx to really understand internalized coercive power and how it operates at the micro-level, ‘how it permeates the nooks and crannies of everyday existence’. (165)

So what do we need to challenge it? Transform it?

Towards a Freirean-feminist-anti-racist pedagogy

Power…becomes a mutually reinforcing process operating from the bottom up as well as top down. This places consciousness at the heart of change, suggesting that the beginning of this process lie firmly in the stories of everyday life as the beginning of a process of progressive social change. (177)

Conscientisation. And I think she’s right. But there’s lots more to say about that. It is interesting how much this resonates with Boaventura de Sousa Santos as I finish his book, so many people working along similar lines for so many decades and, I think, never in real contact. But drawing on many of the same ideas I suppose. Makes me feel like we’re on the right track.

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Building Social Spaces, Struggle & Movement

On the Tyranny of Participation

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Participation: The New Tyranny? was so good. I so rarely find books on international development so good, Hamdi and Kaplan are maybe rare exceptions, but this raised so many of the real issues with participatory  development and action. Above all, the way it has been stripped of its radical, emancipatory content and understandings of structural power (though interwoven here is more discussion of some of the micro-levels of power as well, what we internalize…). I would hope that we could now start discussions of community development with this book in mind and just build on it — whether international or home grown. I am still bemused at how little the two talk to each other, another enduring effect of racism and empire. Sadly, too, I was listening to a panel on international development all about co-production just a few weeks ago, and really ‘co-production’ is just this repackaged. You hear it all over the damn place these days. But no one there really spoke at this level of thinking, I don’t think they could have read it. They stumbled in this direction instead. Rather tragic.

Anyway.

Cooke, Bill and Kothari, Uma ‘The Case for Participation as Tyranny’, 1-15

The editors write:

Our primary aim with this book is to provide a set of more rigorous and critical insights into the participatory development discourse than has hitherto been the case, through a conceptual and ideological examination of its theory, methods and practices. (2)

They identify three sets of tyrannies (their words, my bullet points):

  • Tyranny of decision making and control – does it override existing legitimate decision-making processes?

  • Tyranny of the group – do group dynamics lead to participatory decisions that reinforce the interests of the already powerful?

  • Tyranny of method – Have participatory methods driven out others which have advantages participation cannot provide? (7-8)

These are the questions everyone should be checking their practice with, right? Especially when an ‘expert’ is coming into a new community they don’t perhaps fully understand, and where there is no trust.

Some of the potential overarching problems they identify:

…the naivety of assumptions about the authenticity of motivations and behavior in participatory processes, how the language of empowerment masks a real concern for managerialist effectiveness; the quasi-religious associations of participatory rhetoric and practice; and how an emphasis on the micro level of intervention can obscure, and indeed sustain, broader macro-level inequalities and injustice. (14)

Exactly right. I thought perhaps I might stop here with the intro, that the case studies from around the world wouldn’t be as important. But they are amazing, and I am fascinated with their range, and how each of them illustrates one or another of the basic issues that arose for us working in LA, though of course with a richness all their own and very different specifics around the context and politics and the kind of requirements on funding (though somehow not that different) and the exact brand of prejudices development figures might be starting with. So. The chapters.

David Mosse: ‘People’s Knowledge’, Participation and Patronage: Operations and Representations in Rural Development’, 16-35

I liked the summary from the introduction:

‘local knowledge’, far from determining planning processes and outcomes, is often structured by them. For example, what in one case was expressed as a ‘local need’ was actually shaped by local perceptions of what the agency in question could legitimately and realistically be expected to deliver. Indeed, participatory planning’ may, more accurately, be viewed as the acquisition and manipulation of a new ‘planning knowledge’ rather than the incorporation of ‘people’s knowledge’ by projects. 8

That catches it in a nutshell, but to add some more depth because I loved this interrogation of both knowledge and planning:

The critical point is that what is taken as ‘people’s knowledge’ is itself constructed in the context of planning and reflects the social relationships that planning systems entail. As Long and Villareal point out, knowledge must be looked at relationally, that is, as a product of social relationships and not as a fixed commodity. (17)

Mosse describes participatory processes as particularly ‘subject to the effects of dominance’ because they are public, often with authority figures and outsiders present, and there is a lot at stake in controlling the outcomes. (19) He continues to look at how local hierarchies operate, how communities try to use the language of planning and work within a project framework and their understandings of both its limits (what solutions or resources are available) as well what kinds of action it considers to be legitimate, these can be manipulated to address what they feel are the real needs, though this may not be openly discussed. Because of course people do this, they aren’t stupid.

What Mosse describes is how people manipulate a system to their own ends, but pf course the organizations facilitating that system are doing likewise — this process is used to legitimate and advance their own agenda and of course must quantify its successes, number its activities, justify its spending. It’s complicated. ‘Participatory’ does not always mean better. It can serve to advance technocracy and bureaucracy as much as to combat it.

Cleaver, Frances ‘Institutions, Agency and the Limitations of Participatory Approaches to Development’, 36-55

Cleaver writes of participation as an act of faith with three main tenets:

that participation is intrinsically a ‘good thing’ (especially for the participants); that a focus on ‘getting the techniques right’ is the principal way of ensuring the success of such approaches; and that considerations of power and politics on the whole should be avoided as divisive and obstructive. (36)

Blimey. Not wonder shit is going wrong. She notes how different this is from roots in radical empowerment a la Freire:

associated with both individual and class action, with the transformation of structures of subordination through radical changes…The model of ‘participation’ implied is of development practitioners working with poor people to struggle actively for change.

But she continues:

Sadly, such ideas are ‘rather out of fashion in development’ outside of feminist scholarship and the Latin American participatory tradition. (37)

So sad. I loved too how she lists just how much else is missed, where the focus is misplaced. This is particularly apt for communities I’ve worked in:

‘Participation’ in development activities has been translated into a managerial exercise based on ‘toolboxes’ of procedures and techniques…This limited approach to participation gives rise to a number of critical tensions… While we emphasize the desirability of empowerment, project approaches remain largely concerned with efficiency. While we  recognize the importance of institutions, we focus attention only on the highly visible, formal, local organizations, overlooking the numerous communal activities that occur through daily interactions and socially embedded arrangements. … The time is ripe for a critical re-analysis of ‘participatory approaches’. (53)

Hildyard, Nicholas; Hegde, Pandurang, Wolvekamp, Paul and Reddy, Somasekhare ‘Pluralism, Participation and Power: Joint Forest Management in India’, 56-71

I loved this one, connecting the very different ways people understand both their relationships to their environment and to society. I’m reading a collection of essays by Winona La Duke at the moment, and this rings so true…

For Forest Department officials, forests may be what pass across their desks, for villagers they represent secure water supplies, the availability of fodder for animals, medicines for friends or family, places to play or sources of spiritual power. Similarly, ‘participation’ covers a spectrum of meanings: for many project managers, it may signal a means to cut costs, secure cheap labor or co-opt opposition; for marginalized groups, by contrast, it is a right–both a means to an end and an end in itself. (56)

The authors brilliantly shows how the most ‘participatory’ processes occurred where villagers were already organized and had already ‘taken matters into their own hands’, a kind of after the fact legitimization (62). Part of this victory has involved showing the corruption and inefficiency of the Forest Department, but in turn this has been manipulated by other interests desiring privatization — how the issue ultimately gets framed will be a political battle and determined by power and will…

John Hailey ‘Beyond the Formulaic: Process and Practice in South Asian NGOs’, 88-101

This, to me, is both brilliant and painfully stating the obvious. An obvious thing that can never be stated too often. It points to the way that formulaic use of tools and techniques can result in formulaic responses — that more depends on relationships as well as personalities than the tools in the box. (59)

The case studies presented here show the importance of long-term commitment to communities and to such relationships, the need for years — YEARS — of building trust and ‘walking and talking’ with communities. Of course, I say, of course it takes years. But it just needs to be repeated and repeated and repeated, because funders never like you to work this way.

The article goes on to look at what discourse of participation says about those promoting it and why they might do so — it’s not pretty, because of course it emerges from the cold war, discourses of Western democracy. It is essentially designed to undercut more radical interpretations and participatory action and to wipe out any leanings towards revolt. No wonder a model is promoted that won’t work.

Taylor, Harry ‘Insights into Participation from Critical Management and Labour Process Perspectives’, 122-138

They discuss how the word ‘participatory’ is being used to give:

the “sense” and warm emotional pull of participation without its substance, and thus an attempt to placate those without power and obscure the real levers of power inherent in the social relations of global capitalism. (125)

Instituting participation at a certain, limited level shuts down more radical demands and potential for more radical democratization. They give the example of the move from direct control of Taylorization to more internalised control involved in more participatory post-fordist structures. I liked this:

Participation is only radical if there is a ‘challenge from below’ (136)

Kothari, Uma ‘Power, knowledge and Social Control in Participatory Development’, 139-152

More about the constructions of knowledge, and more in the sense of a warning, how it can all go wrong. Which is needed, and its needed to be mindful of it:

…knowledge is culturally, socially and politically produced and is continuously reformulated as a powerful normative construct. Knowledge is thus an accumulation of social norms, rituals and practices that, far from being constructed in isolation from power relations, is embedded in them (or against them). However, the creation of dichotomies of power within participatory discourse (the haves and the have-nots) allows the revealing of power not as a social and political discourse or as embodied practice, but only as manifest in material realities. Thus participatory approaches can unearth who gets what, when and where, but not necessarily the processes by which this happens or the ways in which the knowledge produced through participatory techniques is a normalized one that reflects and articulates wider power relations in society. (141)

Participation can thus lead to continued dominance, to the

reification of social norms through self-surveillance and consensus building, and that it “purifies” knowledge and the spaces of participation in terms of how it demands certain kinds of performances to be enacted’. (142)

On the other hand, Kothari notes a:

general failing among development practitioners to recognize or acknowledge the capacity of individuals and groups to resist inclusion, resist projections about their lives, retain information, knowledge and values, and act out a performance and in so doing present themselves in a variety of ways. (151)

I think evolving a genuinely emancipatory practice over years in the community can overcome all of this, is in fact the only real way to do so, but that superficial processes run by people with such blindnesses…well. It is hard to find hope in them. This leads us to the penultimate chapter:

Mohan, Giles ‘Beyond Participation: Strategies for Deeper Empowerment’, 153-167

It looks at postcolonial critiques and imagines a new participation:

‘Participatory development could follow these notions of hybridity that acknowledge that inequalities of power exist, but looks at this productively rather than attempting to minimize a differential which cannot be readily removed. the first move is to acknowledge that those we view as powerless are not (cites Rahnema 1992, and Scott 1990) (164)

This helps us move beyond patronizing attitudes, imagining resistance as only a subject outside of and against power structures.

Over all a brilliant volume to return to, because I didn’t even get to everyone in this post…

[Cooke, Bill and Kothari, Uma, eds. (2004) Participation: The New Tyranny. London: Zed Books.]

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City Unseen, Struggle & Movement

Alinsky on Existing Community Organization

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I’ve been thinking so much lately about community and connection and reading so much about poverty and place and feeling so strongly about how wrong most of these authors get things looking into neighbourhoods from the outside and seeing only the absences of things, so I found this little snippet particularly interesting in Saul Alinsky. It’s a lot about seeing what is actually in front you, understanding that you are not operating in some kind of vacuum or emptiness, that organisation exists even if not in the form you expect or recognise.

The ghetto or slum in which he is organizing is not a disorganzied community. There is no such animal as a disorganized community. It is a contradiction in terms to use the two words “disorganization” and “community” together: the word community itself implies an organized, communal life; people living in an organized fashion. These people in the community which concern us may have experienced successive frustrations to the point that their will to participate has seemingly atrophied. They may be living in anonymity and starved for personal recognition. They may be suffering from various forms of deprivation and discrimination. They may have accepted anonymity and resigned in apathy. They may despair and feel hopeless about their children inheriting a little better world. From your point of view they may be representing a very negative form of existence, but the fact is that they are organized in that way of life. Call it organized apathy or organized non-participation, but that is their community pattern. They are living under a certain set of arrangements, standards, accepted modus operandis and a way of life. They may in short have surrendered – but life goes on in an organized form; even if it is as Thoreau described about most lives as being one of “quiet desperation.”

Therefore, if your function is to attack apathy and create citizen participation it is in actual fact an attack upon the prevailing patterns of organized living in the community. Here I would like to state my first proposition; the first function of community organization is community disorganization. Disorganization of the accepted circumstances and the status quo of the arrangements under which they live. These circumstances and arrangements must be disorganized if they are to be displaced with changed patterns providing the opportunities and means for citizen participation. All change means disorganization of the old and organization of the new.

This is why the organizer is immediately confronted with conflict. (115-116)

I am rather fascinated by this. I think he is missing here all the ways the women at least are more positively organized amongst themselves to work and keep the home together and keep an eye on the kids and find out about sources of support and all those things they have traditionally had to do and that often require help, particularly at the time Alinsky was working. And again, he overplays the conflict, always, there are other ways to go about this. But this is still worth thinking about, making sure you understand the patterns that exist, how people are surviving, seeing the strengths there and seeing what might hold folks back. Particularly important, it seems to me, is understanding that in how disrupting old patterns you better be damn sure you are building stronger, more supportive patterns in their place.

Books, Struggle & Movement, Sustainability

Allan Kaplan on Development–Power–Justice

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Allan Kaplan - The Development Practitioners' HandbookIt’s rare I read books on development, having a deep distrust of so much of the field — only cemented after reading Allan Kaplan’s The Development Practioner’s Handbook. But that is because of his own critiques of his own field. What he himself has written is a sensitive and nuanced exploration of how  development can be facilitated (never forced, imposed, pushed), and how conscientization in the Freirean sense can occur. This is why I found it praised so highly in Nabeel Hamdi’s work, which brought it to my notice.

I haven’t quoted any of the insets, lyrical memories of his first development post, what went wrong and what went right, the process of learning what he is writing about. But I did love them.

Before looking at what a righteous and revolutionary development can be, let’s first have a taste of what development a la World Bank, IMF and multiple international aid agencies has brought and has meant, because that shouldn’t be forgotten:

Thus after over that 30 years of international development practice and theorising, problems of unemployment, housing, human rights, poverty and landlessness are worse than ever. (ix)

What has international development meant for the most part?

First, development is not growth. Development implies structural change with respect to the whole system. The modernisation approach equates development unequivocally with growth in GNP; the status quo is to be maintained while growth leads to development. Moreover, development is seen as a continuous process; there is no sense of timing, of the recognition that a particular level of development will be maintained until a structural crisis leads to a sudden leap to a new level. Modernisation theory assumes that development moves along a smooth and continuous upward path; there need be no radical shifts, nothing which will rock the boat or disturb the status quo. Indeed, development (as modernisation) was seen by its proponents as the instrument with which to maintain the status quo…(35)

Small wonder that Wolfgang Sachs and colleagues,…note that ‘the idea of development stands like a ruin in the intellectual landscape’; they maintain that the development epoch is crumbling under the weight of delusion, disappointment, failure and crime, and ‘the time is ripe to write its obituary.’  (x) (Sachs ed. The Development Dictionary: A Guide to knowledge as Power (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1992)

But the process of working with people and organisations so they are able to step into their own power and define their own lives and surroundings — now that is something altogether different. that is what Kaplan is about and there is much to learn here. I’m in the midst of article writing, so this is more a string of quotes than usual, divided up by Kaplan’s own chapter headings as they were useful in outlining the key concepts.

Natural Processes

We can learn about development through observing it as a life process, more specifically as a biological process. (2)

I am always a bit dubious about metaphors that use biological life to explain social life, and that never quite left me in this chapter just as it never left me entirely through the whole of Emergence or Capra’s The Hidden Connections which build on a very similar conceit. But there were a few things I did very much like, like the acknowledgment that while growth and development are often conflated, but

growth is in fact one element of development. Growth is quantitative increase; development implies qualitative increase and qualitative transformation (from one state to another). (3)

I also love the emphasis on the time required — funders and heads of organisations never fucking get this at all.

…development is a process in time….it is a vital observation, for it should bring with it the correct attitude towards developmental processes — that of respect and humility. Development needs time, and flows with the rhythm of time. It cannot be forced, imposed or created. That is not to say that we cannot affect it; indeed , the development practitioner must seek to influence the process of development.

Over and over again the reminder to throw arrogance out the window.

But the appropriate stance becomes one of facilitation rather than force; nurture rather than imposition; respect rather than arrogant presumption. We cannot cause development, we can only nurture the development process. (3)

A few other truths I quite liked:

This reveals another distinguishing characteristic of development: it is irreversible.  (3)

and this:

Contrary to what we often take for granted, the process of unfolding, the movement of life as maturation or development, is discontinuous. It proceeds in a stepwise fashion rather than a smooth, continuous ‘upward’ motion. It proceeds, in fact, from structural crisis to structural crisis. (6)

And above all, both the difficulties and the rewards:

how else other that through critical turning points can we shake ourselves our of our comfortable habits, overcome our resistance to change and move on? This, I believe, is what is sometimes referred to as the miracle of suffering.

This is where this connects to so much literature I am now reading on struggle and social movement and why things happen when they do. This is one of my favourite insights:

Development is not so much the pain of taking on the new but the pain of letting go of the old. (8)

Every step taken in development, every process of transformation, entails a death so that something new can be born. And the process of death and rebirth, the process of development, entails the overcoming of just such resistances, so that new energy can be released. (11)

It is also a process with no end point, and a process that pain is part of — so how do we create healthy spaces for that, support each other through it?

In the realm of human development at least, development does not have an end-point — we are always in a state of becoming.

…

In addition, pain is an integral part of development and cannot be avoided. It is not only, as we have seen, the spur to further development. It is also often the consequence of a particular developmental phase in the service of future development. This is not said to idealise pain, but rather to emphasis that its occurrence should not be denied or repressed. (15)

Paths and Destinations

Kaplan argues for a rather linear development, part of the metaphor of the life process. But I suppose ultimately it is circular in taht it is repeated over and over again, so could still fit the popular education model of the spiral:

People, as they move through life, move from the phase of dependence, through independance to interdependance. (19)

He uses this to base an interesting critique of Freire that doesn’t fit within my own understanding of his work:

In Paolo Freire’s terms, development occurs when one moves from dependence to a critical consciousness; the ability to analyze circumstance, to question existing reality, and to say no. This, however, only corresponds to the stage of independence. I am saying that this is only partial development, and that interdependence is a phase beyond. (22)

I don’t think that Freire fits into this box, though perhaps practitioners have indeed put him there. Still, I think there are some interesting things raised in this comparison of independence and inter-dependence.

These are the problems Kaplan sees  with the  ‘independent phase’:

The mode of denial with which it is associated, the mode of critique which is inherent in defining oneself by rejecting that which one is not, generates a new type of dependency. It is reactive, dependent on its opposite for its own definition. It asserts itself against a given reality, rather than in and of itself. (26)

So what is interdependence? A phase that Kaplan goes on to call ‘Organisational consciousness…that phase which I have characterised as ‘maturity’ in the individual. It is the ability to act decisively within the realm of uncertainty, to continually seek the balance between polarities. (25)

Consciousness implies objectivity and the faculty of self-reflection. It is the realm of true freedom, devoid of prejudice. It is the realm of responsible freedom; individuality coupled with respect, care and active membership of the collective. The process of development is the means towards increasing consciousness, thereby increasing humanness. (29)

I don’t know we can be devoid of prejudice, but we can aspire to get there, and know ourselves better as we try.

Social Development as Growth and Revolution

…both our current problem and our future project should be an educational practice whose fundamental purpose is to expand what it is to be human and to contribute to the establishment of a just and compassionate community within which a project of possibility becomes the guiding principle of social order.
–Roger Simon ‘Empowerment as a pedagogy of Possibility’ (32)

I love that quote. I also love Allan Kaplan’s acknowledgment of this:

Poverty is not simply a function of the poor, the powerless, the marginalised. It is as much, some would say more, a function of the rich, the powerful, the few in whose hands resources and decision-making concentrate themselves. (37)

Then there is what to my eyes is a strange critique of the ‘political economy’ approach and Freire, describing them as unable to leave the phase of independence or continue along the path of critical self-consciousness. Kaplan seems to assume that for Freire this would suddenly stop at a certain point that isn’t far enough, that winning revolutions would just result in new people taking power and abusing it, getting stuck in a paradigm of us and them, with no criticism possible as the revolution consolidates.

Ultimately he writes:

The similarities between modernisation and political economy theories speak to the same need. Both paradigms stress modernity and economic growth. In both developed and underdeveloped communities, the near exclusive emphasis on these two factors give rise to increasing poverty and marginalisation, environmental rape, social fragmentation and violence, and a crisis of meaning.

The advent of contramodernisation perspectives hearalds the search for a new meaning with respect to the development process. (46)

From all of the many books by Freire I have read, there seems to me no obvious link here in theory, only in the vicissitudes of practice in a world bent on destroying revolutions and uprisings and anything resembling structural change. But to return to what to Kaplan himself offers….

Development as the building of civil society

His proposal for moving beyond the phase of independence towards interdependence. Opens with a curious discussion of power, and what he calls the ‘myths’ of revolution and growth.

Kaplan begins with Glyn Roberts’ definition of development: “Development is the more equal distribution of power among people.’ For Roberts three different kinds of power exist: political, economic and cultural — Kaplan’s critique is that this is stuck in ideas of power ‘over’ or ‘against’ (52).

Keeping this idea of power over means in independence phase the coercive nature of power is not addressed, power blocks remain though the players change, means development can only go so far.

He gives the story of the Maccabee revolt, where one brother was prevented from fighting, from being tainted by the war to remain clear of its ravages so that he could become lawgiver at the end.

I struggle with this idea of purity and taint, even as I know full well that taking life in war changes people, tends to harden them, makes them more rigid in their beliefs. I still think it’s more complicated, but to return to the main argument.

Kaplan takes Scott Peck’s identification of a different form of power:

‘Spiritual power…resides entirely within the individual and has nothing do with the capacity to coerce others…It is the capacity to make decisions with maximum awareness. It is consciousness.’ (55)

Put another way, development moves from independence to the phase of interdependence when, having gained the critical power of independence, we are ’empowered’ enough, secure enough in ourselves, to transgress boundary lines,to recognise our limitations and constraints and the realities of our dependence on others, and to work beyond the attitude of ‘us and them’ into the attitude of ‘we’. We are all in this thing called life together. There is no one ultimate theory, no ultimate paradigm, no ultimate ideology, no ultimately correct political party, clique or social movement. To move beyond the crisis generated by independence we need to relearn humility. Not the subservient humility of the phase of dependence, but the conscious humility of interdependence. (56)

It is all about self-reflection and questioning. I wonder whether this can exist in our world without protection from the means of coercion by the kind of power wielded by empire. But still agree with this:

It seems to me that the only way to mediate such a situation, once a significant level of independence has been attained, is through the promotion and facilitation of a strong civil society, one which can curb the hegemonic forces contained in the various power spots which accumulate and grow. (59)

There is a lot to think about here in terms of creating a truly participatory society where people have power over their own lives and the world around them.

A New Stance

It is not reconciliation of compromise which is the essential note of organisational consciousness. Rather, it is the holding of the conflict between opposites as conflict. The ability to hold opposites as opposites , in conflict. Not to reconcile or compromise, but to see both s true at the same time, or at least to see both as embodying aspects of the truth.

Put slightly differently, we attempt to find harmony not through eradicating conflict but through dancing with conflict. We do not look for resolution of the conflict, but rather recognise the creativity which the conflict brings. (70)

I do love this…that certain kinds of conflict are positive (and again, I think this minimises the damage that capitalism does, that development a la world bank and IMF do and how other things can flower despite that).

Until we wander in the dark, embrace the chaotic uncertainty of the places of transition which lie between the worlds of certainty and action, until then we will not be able to embrace the freedom of movement necessary to a state of interdependent or organisational consciousness. (77)

I do think this is also true — and perhaps where an outside practitioner is most useful — someone comfortable and used to holding these things together and allowing new things to grow.

The Practice of the Development Practitioner

As their essential task, development practitioners assist in bringing individuals, organisations and societies to power. They intervene in people’s processes such that they are able to realise their power, and, ultimately, enable people to act out of a centre of awareness and objectivity. Development practitioners collaborate with people in the claiming of their rights, and facilitate their recognition of responsibilities. They facilitate their development towards a more human, purposeful and conscious future, and work through organisations and communities towards the actualisation of a conscious society. (85)

Hell yes to all this. He lists the methods  — and the list is very familiar (except for the rural bits, the only thing reminding you this is about a different kind of development than what we did in South Central L.A.):

Rapid rural appraisal, participatory rural appraisal, participatory research, community mapping, strategic planning, vision building, cooperative development, various forms of problem identification and analysis, project planning and implementation, project monitoring and evaluation… (86)

For Kaplan it’s ultimately all about developing instituional capacity and a stronger civil society — I myself am more inclined to think it is more about developing dense webs of connection and support with multiple smaller groupings alongside more formal organisation, but agree with this:

Ultimately the task is to facilitate an increase in the power and consciousness of social grouping. to leave them in a better condition than they were in before, with more capacity to control their world, their context and themselves. But particularly to maintain a condition of awareness and to be able to respond creatively and responsibly to approaching challenges. We arrive then at a picture of the practice of the development practitioner as being the facilitation of the institutional capacity of those institutions forming the building blocks of civil society. (88)

I think there is also something to these phases as well — it takes years sometimes for people to fully step into their own skin and take the power that is theirs:

During the phase of dependency development practice will consist in part of resource provision and activism. As independence is attained these are replaced by the facilitation of clients to come into their own power, and the building of organisational capacity and the provision of training. With the move to interdependence the role of the practitioner becomes the facilitation of the client’s ability to self-reflect, self-regulate and to take conscious control of its own processes of improvement and learning. (102)

The art

This is my favourite line of the whole book, and actually, all skill and learned technique aside, if people working in community development could just manage this, they would probably do all right:

We need to work with a certain awe and wonder for each unique path with which we are privileged to interact. (112)