The Routledge Handbook of Community Development

Perspectives from Around the Globe

Sue Kenny, Brian McGrath, Rhonda Phillips

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317378167
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Aménagement urbain et paysager

The Routledge Handbook of Community Development explores community development theory and practice across the world. The book provides perspectives about community development as an interactive, relevant and sometimes contradictory way to address issues impacting the human condition. It promotes better understanding of the complexities and challenges in identifying, designing, implementing and evaluating community development constructs, applications and interventions. This edited volume discusses how community development is conceptualized as an approach, method or profession. Themes provide the scope of the book, with projects, issues or perspectives presented in each of these areas.

This handbook provides invaluable contextualized insights on the theory and practice of community development around core themes relevant in society. Each chapter explores and presents an issue, perspectives, project or case in the thematic areas, with regional and country context included. It is a must-read for students and researchers working in community development, planning and human geography and an essential reference for any professional engaged in community development.

PART I

Governance and Community Development

1
GOVERNANCE

Cornelia Butler Flora and Jan L. Flora

Introduction and Context

Church members in Ames, Iowa were alarmed. The Emergency Residence Project which they supported was full to overflowing. More people with low-wage jobs were coming to get their meals and food for the week at Food at First, a multi-organization effort based in First Christian Church to provide non-means-tested food to whoever comes. And many of their church members, even those employed as staff of Iowa State University, were moving out of town because they could not afford to rent housing in town. This put additional hardship on those who could not afford a reliable car, as bus transportation did not go beyond the city limits, and when it did run, it did not meet the shift needs of the local factory workers.

Many were part of a civil society organization, AMOS (A Mid-Iowa Organizing Strategy) affiliated with the Industrial Areas Foundation. Their goal was to address the root causes of local social injustices. The lack of affordable housing seemed a clear root cause of the felt poverty of local people.

But a civil society organization, or even a coalition of civil society organizations, cannot solve complex local issues. Market-sector (private for profit) and public-sector allies must be found to address these issues in a non-partisan, win –win way. Market, state and civil society sectors have different roles in dealing with “wicked” problems. The market is a tool for allocating resources and provides signals regarding the relative monetary costs of different alternatives, but the market by itself does a poor job of reducing inequality or protecting the environment. In fact, left to its own devices the market is likely to exaggerate inequality and to negatively affect the environment. We see this in the growth of inequality in the US over the past three and a half decades and in the failure of the country to refocus our economic and political institutions on the greatest ecological threat of the Anthropocene era apart from thermonuclear war—that of global warming. This relates to the conundrum that Adam Smith sought to deal with in his Moral Sentiments book. He argued that there was a tendency for economic power to become concentrated and that there had to be a parallel moral economy—a values system—that would combat that system. In 1922, Max Weber called this moral economy substantive rationality: “the degree to which the provisioning of given groups of persons with goods is shaped by economically oriented social action under some criterion of ultimate values” (Weber 2013). Tocqueville, in his travels in the US in the mid-19th century, well before Weber wrote about it, had operationalized substantive rationality in the civil life and civic organizations through which Americans expressed their values. This net of civic organizations that existed in each small and large community in this country is what sociologists and political scientists now call civil society. Tocqueville saw this web of organizations as a unique protector of democracy.

Today, we know that good governance involves the interaction of market, civil society and the public or government sector in a very specific way: governments are (or should be) an expression of the will of the people. That will is expressed through civil society: through political parties, but also through non-government organizations, religious organizations, sports teams and clubs, what Robert Putnam calls the animal clubs (Lions, Elks, Eagles, etc.), racial and ethnically based organizations (yes, including white supremacists), environmental groups, etc. As Tocqueville recognized, civil society is an expression of the values that Americans hold. When mobilized individually and in coalition, these organizations affect government, whether in selection of elected or appointed officials, supporting or opposing legislation, and in lobbying or persuading governments at all levels in the shaping of legislation. It is then the obligation of government, often at the behest of civil society organizations, to regulate and channel market forces and firms in accordance with the values expressed. This is particularly crucial in those areas in which the market is unable to function—in amelioration of inequality, protecting the environment and in provision of basic services to those who lack the wherewithal to purchase them in the open market.

Max Weber attempted to characterize a Modern Economy (the private for-profit sector), which would function under universalistic—what he called formally rational—criteria needed for capitalism to function effectively. These included such things as “free labor, freedom of the labor market, and freedom (by owners) in the selection of workers”; “complete absence of substantive regulation of consumption, production, and prices, or of other forms of regulation which limit freedom of contract or specify conditions of exchange”; “market freedom” by which he meant the complete absence of market control by individual owners; “complete calculability of the functioning of public administration and the legal order and a reliable purely formal guarantee of all contracts by the political authority”; and finally a rationally organized monetary system (Weber 2013: 161–162).

Governance determines how resources are deployed by creating policies to be implemented by market, state and civil society actors. Good governance is based on negotiations among and within the sectors and involves a combination of formal and substantive rationality. Governance includes civil society in decision-making processes from the beginning. The old model of citizen participation, where their involvement was expected to be that of a sanctioning body, brought citizens in at the end of the process.

Political capital is key in governance, but political capital is not the same as electoral politics. Governance involves identifying key institutional actors in all sectors, identifying shared desired future conditions and working at a variety of levels to move toward those changes. Sometimes these are called advocacy coalitions (Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith 1993; 1999; C. Flora 2000; J. Flora et al. 2006) or, less provocatively, adaptation coalitions (Ashwill et al. 2011). These coalitions may address “wicked problems” that cannot be resolved by one entity alone. Governance that helps determine everyday allocation of resources is often called public–private partnership. These everyday governance decisions obligate market, state and civil society actors to utilize their separate resources in distinct, mutually advantageous ways.

The difference between governance coalitions of market, state and civil society actors, and the so-called public–private partnerships (see Margulis et al. 2013; Dougherty 2015) that do not include civil society, is dramatic. These public–private partnerships are often worked out in secret between multinational corporations and governments. Civil society then can only be involved to protest. When governance operates properly, negotiations are transparent, and diverse interests participate.

Governance, according to Jean (2015), is the sum of traditions, processes and institutions that form a specific system of social regulation of power and of decision making concerning the collective outcomes of a community. It produces innovative institutional arrangements put in place by local actors who take decisions affecting the destiny of the community. He then discusses the new local governance as a way that local communities have found to organize their decision-making process on matters related to the socio-economic life of the community. New local governance reveals an innovative way to use the power (partnership) and take decisions where the three basic local “social forces” (political–economic–community group; what we would call state, market and civil society) interact positively altogether.

The inclusion of the voice of civil society is increasingly important, as governments are now valued most by (1) how much money they cut from their budgets and (2) how much wealth their community generates. This is a shift from concern for providing a high level of services and from concern about the distribution of the wealth generated. The financialization of the public sector is made more acute as there is continued pressure to privatize the provision of public goods and services, based on the myth that privatization will make them more “efficient”. But every private sector firm must make a profit and return “value to the shareholders”. To do this, often the staff of the privatized service provider is cut, asked to work longer hours at lower wages, or their shifts cut so they receive no benefits. And they keep their jobs based on the number of clients served in a specific time period, not the impact of the services provided on client or public well-being. Thus we see the privatizations of prisons, education, care facilities for vulnerable populations. Market and state sectors in the context of neoliberalization require a constant “nudge” from civil society in order to make it profitable—and politically acceptable— to be concerned about all community capitals: natural, cultural, human, social, political and built, as well as financial, capital (see Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1 Community Capitals.

Diverse Local Governments

The many forms of government can be sorted into two types: general purpose and special purpose. General-purpose governments, as their name implies, are created to respond to the general needs of a geographic territory. They usually have the power to raise revenue and determine its use. State governments may restrict use of certain types of taxes or place ceilings on tax levels, as happened when taxpayers revolted in states such as California, which in 1978 limited property taxes to no more than 1 percent of the property’s “full cash value”, defined in terms of the assessed valuation. For people owning a California property two years prior to enactment of Proposition 13, “[t]he ‘full cash value’ means the county assessor’s valuation of real property as shown on the 1975–76 tax bill” (California, State of n.d.). Those property owners received an immediate reduction in their property tax bill on homes, businesses and farms, estimated by the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association (Jarvis was the intellectual and political author of Proposition 13) to have been 57 percent state-wide (Fox 2007). People buying a new or existing home after 1975, were to pay the assessed value based on its current full cash value. An annual inflationary adjustment of the assessed valuation is allowed that equals the percentage change in the Consumer Price Index or an increase of 2 percent, whichever is less. If the home declines in value, the assessed valuation “may be reduced to reflect substantial damage, destruction, or other factors causing a decline in value” (California, State of n.d.). No percentage limit was placed on the decline. These property tax restrictions greatly reduced all local governments’ ability to meet the needs of citizens, and had serious repercussions for such special-purpose governments as school districts.

Special-purpose governments are created to respond to specific community needs, such as schools, water supply, or medical services. These special districts usually can raise revenue to cover their costs, generally through fees or property taxes. Their freedom to tax is often severely restricted by state governments, but they also can raise revenue by user fees, as do water districts.

Other special tax concessions in the name of economic development, such as tax increment financing (TIF), can limit governments’ ability to support the services they offer. TIF is a tool used by municipalities to reduce or eliminate blighting conditions, foster improvement and enhance the tax base of every district that extends into the area. It provides for redevelopment that would not occur without the support of public investments. This tool allows a city to capture the increase in state and local property and sales taxes that results from a redevelopment. The city is required to prepare a redevelopment plan for each district that identifies uses for the TIF fund. However, the redirection of the taxes means that special-purpose governments, such as school or hospital districts, may be prevented from increasing funding during the period the TIF is in place.

The relative importance of any one type of rural government varies by region of the country and from state to state. In some states small municipalities are the most common type of generalpurpose government. In the West and throughout much of the South, counties provide most local governmental services; villages and towns often are not incorporated. In the West, where counties are much larger than in other regions of the country, county government can be essentially regional in character. In the states across the midwest and Great Plains, small municipalities and counties vie for political prominence, often providing complementary services. In New England and across the northern tier of states, townships are the most important generalpurpose government. Differences in political traditions and state law are reflected in the diversity of local governance. These differences can also influence the flexibility that local governments have to collaborate with other jurisdictions and market and civil society groups.

The climate of induced austerity since the official economic recovery has not allowed local governments to make up for the decrease in state and federal funding. In addition, states have imposed limits on the ability of towns and counties to vote to tax themselves. State and local government spending in the US steadily increased from 1970 to 2009. While there was a short leveling off during the Great Recession, the rapid rate of increase continued to 2013, the last date shown. While during the Great Depression and recovery from it, the federal government invested heavily to meet local needs, that pattern did not recur in other recessions.

Most rural governments are funded by a combination of local, state and federal funds. In general, rural communities rely on local sources of revenue for about 65 percent of their budgets. That percentage has been increasing sin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• About the Editors
• About the Contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I Governance and Community Development
• Part II Place and Community Development
• Part III Sustainable Livelihoods and Community Development
• Part IV Culture and Creative Expression in Community Development
• Part V Identity, Belonging and Connectedness
• Part VI Community Development, Human Rights and Resilience
• Part VII Engagement and Knowledge
• Index