International Community Development Practice

Charlie McConnell, Daniel Muia, Anna Clarke, Charlie McConnell, Daniel Muia, Anna Clarke

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000460612
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Arquitectura
• Categoría: Planificación urbana y paisajismo

International Community Development Practice provides readers with practice-based examples of good community development, demonstrating its value for strengthening people power and improving the effectiveness of development agencies, whether these be governmental, non-governmental or private sector. The chapters focus upon the making of the community development profession and the eight core competences required of the professional practitioner, as outlined by the International Association for Community Development (IACD), whatever their job title or host agency, in order to be able to undertake community development. These are concerned with the ability of the practitioner to:

• Put ethics and values into practice
• Engage with communities
• Ensure participatory planning
• Organize for change
• Support learning for change
• Promote diversity and inclusion
• Build leadership and infrastructure
• Develop and improve policy and practice

From a policy perspective, the book will reassert the role of community development approaches as related to a wide variety of global challenges, including poverty amelioration, climate change, human rights, peace building and social, environmental, political and economic development. From a practice perspective, the book will reassert the importance of high levels of professional competence building upon decades of experience in the field around the world by development practitioners working in community work, social work, health, adult education, environmental protection, local economic development, urban design, cultural work and other disciplines concerned to support effective community development.

Chapter 1

The Making of an Empowering Profession

Charlie McConnell

DOI: 10.4324/9781003140498-1

Part One: On Becoming a Community Development Practitioner

This book is about what professional community development practitioners currently do and have been doing around the world since the United Nations (UN) first promoted this work. It traces the making of this still relatively young field into the practice-based profession and academic discipline it is today. You may already be a community development practitioner or agency manager, someone who trains community development practitioners or a student seeking to enter a career in this field. You may be a development partner interested in or already funding community development programmes. Or you may be working for an international body such as the UN or one of its agencies, or for national or local government or a non-governmental organization (NGO) or a community-based organization (CBO) already supporting or interested in finding out more about what community development practitioners do. It is the story about the work of community development practitioners who, through education, organization and resources, support disadvantaged and vulnerable communities.

Community activists and community leaders are vital to the creation of stronger communities who through collective action stand a better chance at achieving changes people want to see. Being a community development practitioner is not however a synonym for being a community activist or community leader. The International Association for Community Development (IACD) sees the latter as volunteer active citizens, and the former primarily as trained professionals employed to support community action with technical expertise, funds and other assistance. The practitioner facilitates educational and organizational support, with people power at the heart of the process. This is not to imply that community activists are not often highly skilled, nor that all communities need the support of community development practitioners. More affluent communities can pay for such expertise. But for disadvantaged or vulnerable communities, educational and organizational support can be invaluable. And at a time of limited finances, providing free community development support to disadvantaged and vulnerable communities must be the priority. This book therefore focusses upon such work.

The two words “community” and “development” are perhaps the least clear in the English language. Academics have spent years trying to define them.¹ So, let’s keep it simple.

Community development agencies and practitioners use the word “community” in three interconnected ways.² Most community development agencies focus upon working within designated communities of locality, which can vary in geographic size and population. This means that you may be working at the level of villages, clusters of villages, towns or city neighbourhoods. There are also job opportunities for work with communities of identity, such as an ethnic or religious minority, people with disabilities, mental health problems or discriminated towards because of their sexual orientation. These jobs can be locality-based or involve working across a wider area. The third is working with communities of interest, which means supporting people who share a common concern such as poor housing and where the agency employing you focusses primarily upon that issue, perhaps with a peripatetic remit embracing a number of localities across a city or county. Community development agencies and practitioners use the word “development” also in three interconnected ways. It is used to mean facilitating socio-economic and environmental improvement in people’s lives. It is also used to mean supporting people through deliberative and collective action to deal with and ideally to shape change in their lives. And it is used to promote sustainability, helping people to address the challenges impacting upon their lives without compromising future generations.

Human communities can be complex systems and any developmental intervention needs to be thought through carefully with both professional colleagues and the residents and members you will be working with. There will always be both intended and unintended consequences in any community development activity. Over the past five decades, we have learned much about how this process, at its best, works and what interventions can lead to more successful and sustainable outcomes in people’s lives. Conversely, we have been able to observe poor practice and how by supporting colleagues through continuing professional development we can improve practice. The disadvantaged and vulnerable communities we work with are not apart from wider society and neither are the hugely complex interactions and power dynamics, positive and negative, this work creates. This is why, an understanding of the political, social and ecological sciences is so vital. As the great Beethoven said: “Don’t only practice your art but force your way into its secrets … ”³

Usually as a community development practitioner you will find yourself working in a team within the agency that employs you. Sometimes jobs can be quite isolated, especially in rural areas. Most community development jobs involve working in and with disadvantaged or vulnerable communities. These are communities which are daily faced with some huge challenges and problems, whether it be poverty, unemployment or in some cases oppression and conflict, together with communities which may not be poor, but which are, for example, especially vulnerable to discrimination or climate change. Working with such people will be hugely transformative – for you, the practitioner. People who have to deal daily with debt, with the premature death of their children due to polluted water, who have to search day in and out for work, who have to walk miles to school barefoot, who risk sexual violence, who regularly face systemic discrimination, are the most entrepreneurial and caring people you will ever meet. Such communities often contain high levels of what Putnam calls social capital. People don’t bowl alone.⁴ They help and care for each other in ways that more affluent people, living materialistic and atomized lives have forgotten to do, or pay others to do for them. This is not to take a rose-tinted view of being disadvantaged or vulnerable. As Karl Popper observed, “All life is problem solving.”⁵ And the problems such communities face can sometimes be life-threatening. But it is to recognize what a privilege it is to be able to work with them to overcome or at least try to tackle some of the challenges they face.

To obtain a job as a community development practitioner these days you will probably need to be a graduate, with a relevant degree or diploma. Not all employers require this, especially smaller NGOs and CBOs. But being able to demonstrate knowledge of community development and, even more so, skills and experience will be an advantage. The main community development course providers, Higher Education Institutes (HEIs), generally encourage and support mature applicants with experience as a community activist or volunteer. In a few countries you may find linked work and training opportunities, where you are in effect an apprentice working with a community development organization and spending a few days a week at college acquiring your qualification part time or online. In some countries training providers recognize and accredit the prior experiential learning that comes from being a community activist; and some employers positively encourage opportunities for activists from indigenous and working-class communities to be employed as community development practitioners. There are a wide variety of community development courses available around the world. Most of these include community development as part of another qualification such as social work or health work.

Community development practice is a career with a myriad of job titles determined by the focus of the employing agency. You will find practitioners specializing in health work, environmental work, local economic development work, social work, urban planning and design, cultural work and so on. Community development has in effect become a hybrid profession, with practitioners often merging two (or more) professional identities. Community development practice has been greatly enriched by the number of disciplines that both use and shape its methods. By looking through the holistic prism of “community”, traditional silos have cross-fertilized in hugely creative ways. Over the past decades thousands of people with community development expertise have moved through their careers into senior and more strategic posts in NGOs, local authorities and other public agencies, companies or government departments, hopefully taking with them these ways of working – looking at problems holistically and supporting people to work collaboratively to solve them.

Part Two: The Journey⁶

In 2018 IACD celebrated the sixty-fifth anniversary of the setting up of the association in the USA with a special issue of its magazine Practice Insights.⁷ This profiled over sixty pioneers of community development from around the world who had shaped our practice and scholarship over the past six decades. It was noted in the magazine that community development had always been a politically contested practice, with both conservatives and radicals adopting the term. The UN started promoting community development in the 1950s as a way of reaching out with technical assistance on the ground locally to developing and low-income countries, promoting economic opportunity and building up social development infrastructure such as primary education, health facilities, clean water supply, affordable housing, or introducing new ideas for agricultural production. The term (or in translation) became more widely adopted around this time in many countries. The 1950s generation of community development practitioners had been influenced by the 1930s depression, by the rise and defeat of fascism in the Second World War, by a belief in planning and the positive role of the state, by national liberation movements and by the vision reflected in the existence of the UN and its agencies. It was the period of decolonization and the creation of around a hundred newly independent states across Asia, Africa, Oceania and the Caribbean. It was also the early days of the Cold War ideological rivalries between Western liberal democracies “led” by the USA and Eastern communist republics “led” by the USSR, together with the non-aligned group of countries, “led” by socialist India. But whatever the wider political and ideological context, the drive was generally similar – to develop undeveloped poorer communities.

The UN established a Regional and Community Development Division and a Community Development and Organization Section within its Division of Social Affairs to encourage the dissemination ...

Índice

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• List of Contributors
• Case Study Authors
• Foreword
• Preface
• 1 The Making of an Empowering Profession
• 2 Putting Ethics and Values into Community Development Practice
• 3 Engaging with Communities
• 4 Ensuring Participatory Planning
• 5 How to Organize for Change
• 6 Learning for Change
• 7 Promoting Diversity and Inclusion
• 8 Building Leadership and Infrastructure
• 9 Evaluating and Improving Policy and Practice
• 10 The Way Forward
• Appendix: Towards Shared International Standards for Community Development Practice
• Index