Friday, February 15, 2008
What does community mean? community development?
I have been struggling over the issues of community for a while, especially after undertaking a reflection around the "communities" I thought I belonged to due to place of birth and residence, school, work, etc. Wrapping one's head around this is challenging but crucial because, according to me, it guides one's behaviour and attitude (two different things!) towards places or spaces one feels belonging or membership too...
Here's a paper I have written for a class at OISE called : Community Development : Innovative Models, a very inspiring one. The questions hard were though, comments are welcome and I would love to see discussion happen around the issues - particularly IDS and Facebook.
---------------------
The day before classes started this semester, I went to my friends’ house and came across a board game called “Community: Apprentice Game about Love and Peace” (Deacove ,1994). While my first impression of it was that is was slightly old-fashioned and idealistic, with its town hall at the core and solely cooperative businesses, it did ask important questions – e.g. are we our brother’s and sister’s keepers? – while getting players to try to develop a happy and complete village. People voted their dollars democratically and there was a strong emphasis on maintaining positive feelings – the game stops if anyone has more than 10 points of bad feelings, uncompensated by Love and Forgiveness – and on conflict resolution. Another thing that surprised me was that it was necessary to undertake a spiritual journey and hence grow personally through experimenting spaces of wonder. That was just the beginning of my surprises revolving around these themes. This class has challenged how I define and experience concepts of community and community development (CD). In this essay, I will explore issues in the field of CD, while focusing on definitions, virtual communities (VC), ICTs and external assistance in the discussion. My argument is that an emphasis should be on people and not on links or space in CD, and it is important to be critical about definitions and ensure the sub-definitions are also represented, because CD is an inherently political process, although this aspect has been downplayed by most authors.
To start with, let me introduce a working definition of community, suggested by (Christenson, 1994), that relates the key features of people, space, social interaction and identification: “people that live within a geographically bound area who are involved in social interaction and have one or more psychological ties with each other and with the place in which they live”. While this is a good effort, for the purpose of this essay, I shall modify it to embody what I personally understand as a community. This entails replacing “common space” with “common characteristics and interests”, an evolution pointed by Wellman (1999:336) and adding the semantic field of “security”, “identity” and “agglomeration benefits” (Logan & Molotch, 1987, c.f. Stoecker, 2005:17). While this definition captures the essential elements of “community”, it fails to describe how that translates into a lived meaning and how members relate to one another at the individual level, or to give any information about the diversity and intensity of members and ties. A good example of an active definition would that of the Unitarian Universalists: “Our community is a source of commitment and inspiration, which helps us live rich lives of dedication, compassion, and contribution to one another and to the larger world” (UU, 2007). I believe any definition should allow a variety of ties as well as degrees and types of participation in the community while guaranteeing a fixed set of social norms. This in turn translates into general reciprocity system not unlike that of Local Exchange Trading Systems (LETS) and other services exchange groups.
Scope is as much an issue in CD than definitions, and often the questions comes up as to what is the difference between a community and a social network (SN). When I think about a social network, I see nodes and variable ties, and I see people connected into a complex statistical map similar to the mathematical models Granovetter (1973:1361) points at. The same author says that weak ties help getting ahead (Granovetter, 1973), and it is suggested that they also provide tangible assistance, reinforce healthy norms and contribute to happiness (Putnam, 2000:327-332). Noting that the emphasis in SN is on the link, not on the person, I propose that they are narrower than communities, and involve less direct identification. They reduce it to its back-bone while disregarding how personality, work style, identity, power, etc. influence the structural holes and the politics of networking. It would be timely to point out here how obsessive can social networking sites like Facebook become, as people literally compete for being the one with the largest network, and then engage in a simple cost-benefit analysis to decide on which “friends” their time and energy is going to be devoted. That would not happen in a community. As such, “networks involve (almost by definition) mutual obligations; they are not interesting as mere “contacts” ” (Putnam, 2000:20), and it seems as though SN focus more on outcomes than process. For example, through my work at the Toronto Environment Office, I often hear how putting efforts into being active in a UN research network on Education for Sustainable Development doesn’t really “serve” our interests as a municipal government. Clearly the ideas of utility and return dominate that of capacity building and human relations development, which in my view is an important distinction between a community and a SN.
A discussion of issues in CD would not be complete without transcending the traditional question of scope and addressing which type of SN are communities. In other words, it is asked whether virtual communities (VC) – communities which “emerge from the Net”, creating “long enough” “sufficient human feeling” (Sem. 03, Slide 15) - can be included in the definition. My opinion is that the definition of community has to be inclusive and renewed to fit the current context, for “one’s “village” [can] span the globe” (McLuhan, 1965, c.f. Wellman, 1999:333). After all, VC replicate some characteristics of face-to-face communities: there are “lerkers”, people with different personalities and learning styles and different levels or types of participation. I agree with the statement that “communities do not have to be solidary groups of densely knit neighbours, but could also exist as social networks of kin, friends, and workmates who do not necessarily live in the same neighbourhoods” (Wellman, 1999:333), adding that they can live in the same virtual space. However, I think there are certain conditions for a VC to be included as a sub-division of community. It has to be people-centered, and its members have to identify with it. As such and like the broader definition of community, it is for each individual to operate in a case-by-case fashion. While there are drawbacks to VC - it can encourage cocooning, etc. – I think they can work if they start from the community’s needs and use technology as one tool amongst other adapted strategies of localization. A decentralized structure, resource pooling, knowledge sharing, and respect for local autonomy, couple with face-to-face contact (Fiser, Clement, and Walmark, 2006:3) can be key to the success of a VC like K-Net. In addition, Internet can help social marketing, because a strong cause, vision and engaged activism are still a crucial lens for mobilizing communities and even creating social movements, as shown by the Free Burma Movement (Zarni, 2000). We live in an increasingly globalized world, where ICTs dominate and participatory web is a new reality that allows more people to become emitters - not merely receivers - of information, which has a potential for democratizing and allowing for more efficient community organizing. But that is not to be taken for granted: technology needs to add value and to serve the purpose of the community, not the other way around. In any case, being part of a VC is not mutually exclusive with living an active face-to-face community life: they often complement each other. Nevertheless, there remains a need for ongoing follow-up or else communities can be transient or illusory. I experienced that after going to the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre in 2005: hundreds of thousands like-minded activists get together, there is this amazing feeling of bonding and the creation of a parallel universe… Then: nothing. No VC. In my view, time is more important than space when deciding whether a VC is a community: there needs to be genuine relationships for something to be deemed community.
Community, as defined above, is not a static concept but an evolving one. Key words for this process to be deemed community development are “involvement” and “change”. A definition of CD ought to be put forwards at this point, and once again for it to encompass my idea, this definition has to be a quilt of others. A good start is: “CD is positive change in the social, economic, organizational, or physical structures of a community that improves both the welfare of community members and the community’s ability to control its future. It entails a variety of citizen-led efforts, carried out within or on behalf of a community, to define problems, develop solutions, and attract the resources necessary to implement activities that address the identified problems.” (Centre for Urban and Community Studies, U of T, Sem. 01, Slide 23). It should be coupled with the definition of (Dunbar, 1972:43, c.f. Christenson, 1994): “a series of community improvements which take place over time as a result of the common efforts of various groups of people. Each successive improvement is a discrete unit of community development. It meets a human want or need.” In my view, it is easier to describe CD with the semantic field of “democracy”, “common problems”, “capacity building”, “empowerment”, “internal decision-making”, “common goals”. I would suggest that CD doesn’t have to be “local” per se, because of the blurry boundaries of place and space, as mentioned in the discussion on VC and as iterated by the following statement: “global connectivity de-emphasizes the importance of locality for community” (Wellman & Gulia, 1999:354). I would say “internal” instead. I chose this mix of definitions because I believe CD is limited if it only addresses the current wounds and acts like a Band-Aid rather than addressing the wider political and economic trends that made “development” necessary. CD as a collective social action process has to address public policy and aim to change paradigms; it is more like a “movement”/crusade in Christenson’s four-part framework (Christenson, 1994:13), but it has to struggle to remain true to itself and its principles in the process of achieving “development”. Need is also an important, but problematic, basis of CD. Everybody “needs” something. Which needs are priorities? Those at the bottom of the Maslow pyramid? Deciding this is fundamentally subjective. My stand is that an emphasis on fundamental needs should be put forwards to lead to a sufficiency for all rather than an excess for a few (EcoTrust, 2007).
It is crucial for CD to not merely stop at the individual need level, but to recognize the structural patterns in which these needs arose, e.g. diminishing government support, trends in capitalism, etc. A recurrent issue in this class has been the lack of politicization of CD, which in my view has to be broken down in different constituencies, who are often diametrically opposed ideologically. When speaking about CD, are we speaking about liberal, progressive or sustainable CD? This makes a huge difference in the approach, objectives and processes (Hamstead, 2005). What is the place for the public sector in CD? The private sector? Are communities to favour There-Is-No-Alternative (TINA) big businesses or endogenous growth through Local-Ownership-Import-Substitution (LOIS) businesses (Shuman, 2006)? It is becoming increasingly clear that there can be uneconomic growth, and that development for some can mean regression for others. CD has to acknowledge the issue that the notion of progress is problematic and ask “what is development”? Is it just “unfolding and unraveling through time”? Skocpol and Putnam would be the first to agree that evolution does not equate positive change, and I agree with them in that the civic life of the past ought to be revitalized if we are ever to live in a real democracy. There is a problematic gap in their analysis though. Putnam doesn’t address the real causes of community undevelopment; he says it is due to pressures of time and money, suburbanization, electronic entertainment and generational change (Putnam, 2000:283) without linking it to the broader context. Such a “box-thinking” approach can not work for CD. Relations ought to be made between the rise in consumer society and increased obsolescence of consumer goods designed by President Eisenhower siding with corporate power after World War II to revamp the economy and the decline of community life. Clearly people have less time on their hands, but that’s also because they need to work harder to have the living standards publicized on television. In that light, it is no wonder that both community and happiness went down in the 1950s…
One last issue that is salient to CD is that of leadership and sufficiency. In my academic circle of International Development Studies (IDS), CD is often associated with grassroots, bottom-up work, which amongst younger students is often given a sort of sanction protecting it from negative criticism. Those who prone CD actually have expectations on the lifestyle of others, and they make the assumption that a CD-oriented IDS student should own a plastic water bottle, be vegetarian and patronize thrift stores. There clearly are untold rules, and grassroots CD came become exclusionary. Taken to an extreme, this is own Nazism developed in Germany, that is, based on identification of people with similar characteristics brought under a strong leader proposing a clear message and set of behavioral rules (see The Wave, 1969). On another hand, IDS students going on overseas placements are taught to identify the gatekeepers – customary, religious or administrative authorities, local respected person, etc. - that will lead them in the community in which they want to do research. This idea of the “outsider” with a different culture brings about questions of positionality in doing CD work, be it locally or internationally. In my view, identity becomes political in the realm of CD and as an external agent, one has to be very critical and aware of their biases and the power differential often associated with being privileged compared to one’s clients/patrons. It is difficult for me to place a verdict on whether external assistance ought to happen, or if grassroots processes should be the norm, because they are both problematic in their own ways, as noted above. To me, self-help and technical assistance, that is, work “for” and work “with” people, are not mutually exclusive; it all depends on one’s leadership style, which is justly a popular topic nowadays for community workers of all ages. However, according to me, the biggest and most toxic issue in this question is one of ownership: if we are to accept the neoliberal system of property rights, then communities are not necessarily seen by the most powerful actors as owning the resources or the land where they are located, regardless of how long they have lived there. Situations in which a private developer comes in and build a Wal-Mart in an area not-zoned as commercial by city planners because they gained support from the Ontario Municipal Board follow. Thus, depending on the situation, power issues shape the debate over leadership and sufficiency.
In conclusion, while definitions of terms in CD are controversial and it is for each person to interpret them for themselves, it is my opinion that the field should remain people-centered, and focus on their needs in terms of development, instead of tending towards technological-determinism and exclusion. This requires a tremendous effort towards democratization of decision-making and inclusion. In order for this change to be significant, a shift in paradigms is necessary. The collection of assumptions, concepts, beliefs and values that communities increasingly cultivate to describe reality is increasingly focused on consumer goods. This results in thinking that economic development and growth in GPD is the epitome of the “good life”, at the expense of civil society, justice, health, and community. Putnam and Skocpol are right to denounce what I would call community misdevelopment, but they ought also to point out that sustainability of life style was a dominant paradigm created and then changed by people. Communities have the power to reclaim that vision so that CD can become meaningful to the majority again.
Bibliography
Christenson, James, Fendley, Im, & Robinson, Jerry. (1994). Community Development. In Community development in perspective, eds. Christenson and Robinson. Ames, Iowa: Iowa State University, 3-25.
Deacove, Jim. (1994). Community: Apprentice Game about Love and Peace, Board Game.
Fiser, A., Clement, A., & Walmark, B. (February 2006). The K-Net development process: A model for first nations broadband community networks. CRACIN Working Paper No 12, Retrieved November 2007, 2007, from http://www3.fis.utoronto.ca/research/iprp/cracin/publications/workinpapersseries.htm
Granovetter, Mark. (1973). The strength of weak ties. American Jounal of Sociology, 78(6), 1360-1380.
Hamstead M. P., & Quinn, M. S. (2005). Sustainable community development and ecological economics. Local Environment, 10(2), 141-158.
Putnam, Robert. (2000). Bowling alone : The collapse and revival of American community. New York: Simon and Schuster, 15-28; 48-64; 277-286; 319-335.
Quarter, Jack (2007). Seminar Slides for Community Development: Innovative Models, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, Sem. 01.
Ryan, Sherida (2007). Seminar Slides for Community Development: Innovative Models, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, Sem. 03.
Shuman, Michael H. (2006). The Small-Mart Revolution: How local businesses are beating the global competition, Berret-Koehler Publishers, Inc., San Francisco, 285 p.
Skocpol, Theda. (1999). Advocates without members: The recent transformation of American life. In Theda Skocpol and Morris Fiorina eds.,Civic engagement in American democracy. Washington, DC: Brookings Institute Press, 461-509.
The Story of Stuff. http://www.storyofstuff.com/, Page accessed on February 1st, 2008.
The Wave. (1969). http://video.google.ca/videoplay?docid=6295516544338309782, Page accessed on February 4, 2008.
Unitarian Universalists. (2007). Vision Committee: Working Paper, 11 p.
Wellman, B., & Gulia, M. (1999). Net surfers don’t ride alone. In B. Wellman (Ed.) Networks in the global village. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 331-336.
Zarni. (2000). Resistance and cybercommunities: The Internet and the Free Burma Movement. In A. De Vaney, S. Gance & Y. Ma (Eds.), Technology and resistance: Digital communications and new coalitions around the world. New York: Peter Lang, 71-89.
Here's a paper I have written for a class at OISE called : Community Development : Innovative Models, a very inspiring one. The questions hard were though, comments are welcome and I would love to see discussion happen around the issues - particularly IDS and Facebook.
---------------------
The day before classes started this semester, I went to my friends’ house and came across a board game called “Community: Apprentice Game about Love and Peace” (Deacove ,1994). While my first impression of it was that is was slightly old-fashioned and idealistic, with its town hall at the core and solely cooperative businesses, it did ask important questions – e.g. are we our brother’s and sister’s keepers? – while getting players to try to develop a happy and complete village. People voted their dollars democratically and there was a strong emphasis on maintaining positive feelings – the game stops if anyone has more than 10 points of bad feelings, uncompensated by Love and Forgiveness – and on conflict resolution. Another thing that surprised me was that it was necessary to undertake a spiritual journey and hence grow personally through experimenting spaces of wonder. That was just the beginning of my surprises revolving around these themes. This class has challenged how I define and experience concepts of community and community development (CD). In this essay, I will explore issues in the field of CD, while focusing on definitions, virtual communities (VC), ICTs and external assistance in the discussion. My argument is that an emphasis should be on people and not on links or space in CD, and it is important to be critical about definitions and ensure the sub-definitions are also represented, because CD is an inherently political process, although this aspect has been downplayed by most authors.
To start with, let me introduce a working definition of community, suggested by (Christenson, 1994), that relates the key features of people, space, social interaction and identification: “people that live within a geographically bound area who are involved in social interaction and have one or more psychological ties with each other and with the place in which they live”. While this is a good effort, for the purpose of this essay, I shall modify it to embody what I personally understand as a community. This entails replacing “common space” with “common characteristics and interests”, an evolution pointed by Wellman (1999:336) and adding the semantic field of “security”, “identity” and “agglomeration benefits” (Logan & Molotch, 1987, c.f. Stoecker, 2005:17). While this definition captures the essential elements of “community”, it fails to describe how that translates into a lived meaning and how members relate to one another at the individual level, or to give any information about the diversity and intensity of members and ties. A good example of an active definition would that of the Unitarian Universalists: “Our community is a source of commitment and inspiration, which helps us live rich lives of dedication, compassion, and contribution to one another and to the larger world” (UU, 2007). I believe any definition should allow a variety of ties as well as degrees and types of participation in the community while guaranteeing a fixed set of social norms. This in turn translates into general reciprocity system not unlike that of Local Exchange Trading Systems (LETS) and other services exchange groups.
Scope is as much an issue in CD than definitions, and often the questions comes up as to what is the difference between a community and a social network (SN). When I think about a social network, I see nodes and variable ties, and I see people connected into a complex statistical map similar to the mathematical models Granovetter (1973:1361) points at. The same author says that weak ties help getting ahead (Granovetter, 1973), and it is suggested that they also provide tangible assistance, reinforce healthy norms and contribute to happiness (Putnam, 2000:327-332). Noting that the emphasis in SN is on the link, not on the person, I propose that they are narrower than communities, and involve less direct identification. They reduce it to its back-bone while disregarding how personality, work style, identity, power, etc. influence the structural holes and the politics of networking. It would be timely to point out here how obsessive can social networking sites like Facebook become, as people literally compete for being the one with the largest network, and then engage in a simple cost-benefit analysis to decide on which “friends” their time and energy is going to be devoted. That would not happen in a community. As such, “networks involve (almost by definition) mutual obligations; they are not interesting as mere “contacts” ” (Putnam, 2000:20), and it seems as though SN focus more on outcomes than process. For example, through my work at the Toronto Environment Office, I often hear how putting efforts into being active in a UN research network on Education for Sustainable Development doesn’t really “serve” our interests as a municipal government. Clearly the ideas of utility and return dominate that of capacity building and human relations development, which in my view is an important distinction between a community and a SN.
A discussion of issues in CD would not be complete without transcending the traditional question of scope and addressing which type of SN are communities. In other words, it is asked whether virtual communities (VC) – communities which “emerge from the Net”, creating “long enough” “sufficient human feeling” (Sem. 03, Slide 15) - can be included in the definition. My opinion is that the definition of community has to be inclusive and renewed to fit the current context, for “one’s “village” [can] span the globe” (McLuhan, 1965, c.f. Wellman, 1999:333). After all, VC replicate some characteristics of face-to-face communities: there are “lerkers”, people with different personalities and learning styles and different levels or types of participation. I agree with the statement that “communities do not have to be solidary groups of densely knit neighbours, but could also exist as social networks of kin, friends, and workmates who do not necessarily live in the same neighbourhoods” (Wellman, 1999:333), adding that they can live in the same virtual space. However, I think there are certain conditions for a VC to be included as a sub-division of community. It has to be people-centered, and its members have to identify with it. As such and like the broader definition of community, it is for each individual to operate in a case-by-case fashion. While there are drawbacks to VC - it can encourage cocooning, etc. – I think they can work if they start from the community’s needs and use technology as one tool amongst other adapted strategies of localization. A decentralized structure, resource pooling, knowledge sharing, and respect for local autonomy, couple with face-to-face contact (Fiser, Clement, and Walmark, 2006:3) can be key to the success of a VC like K-Net. In addition, Internet can help social marketing, because a strong cause, vision and engaged activism are still a crucial lens for mobilizing communities and even creating social movements, as shown by the Free Burma Movement (Zarni, 2000). We live in an increasingly globalized world, where ICTs dominate and participatory web is a new reality that allows more people to become emitters - not merely receivers - of information, which has a potential for democratizing and allowing for more efficient community organizing. But that is not to be taken for granted: technology needs to add value and to serve the purpose of the community, not the other way around. In any case, being part of a VC is not mutually exclusive with living an active face-to-face community life: they often complement each other. Nevertheless, there remains a need for ongoing follow-up or else communities can be transient or illusory. I experienced that after going to the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre in 2005: hundreds of thousands like-minded activists get together, there is this amazing feeling of bonding and the creation of a parallel universe… Then: nothing. No VC. In my view, time is more important than space when deciding whether a VC is a community: there needs to be genuine relationships for something to be deemed community.
Community, as defined above, is not a static concept but an evolving one. Key words for this process to be deemed community development are “involvement” and “change”. A definition of CD ought to be put forwards at this point, and once again for it to encompass my idea, this definition has to be a quilt of others. A good start is: “CD is positive change in the social, economic, organizational, or physical structures of a community that improves both the welfare of community members and the community’s ability to control its future. It entails a variety of citizen-led efforts, carried out within or on behalf of a community, to define problems, develop solutions, and attract the resources necessary to implement activities that address the identified problems.” (Centre for Urban and Community Studies, U of T, Sem. 01, Slide 23). It should be coupled with the definition of (Dunbar, 1972:43, c.f. Christenson, 1994): “a series of community improvements which take place over time as a result of the common efforts of various groups of people. Each successive improvement is a discrete unit of community development. It meets a human want or need.” In my view, it is easier to describe CD with the semantic field of “democracy”, “common problems”, “capacity building”, “empowerment”, “internal decision-making”, “common goals”. I would suggest that CD doesn’t have to be “local” per se, because of the blurry boundaries of place and space, as mentioned in the discussion on VC and as iterated by the following statement: “global connectivity de-emphasizes the importance of locality for community” (Wellman & Gulia, 1999:354). I would say “internal” instead. I chose this mix of definitions because I believe CD is limited if it only addresses the current wounds and acts like a Band-Aid rather than addressing the wider political and economic trends that made “development” necessary. CD as a collective social action process has to address public policy and aim to change paradigms; it is more like a “movement”/crusade in Christenson’s four-part framework (Christenson, 1994:13), but it has to struggle to remain true to itself and its principles in the process of achieving “development”. Need is also an important, but problematic, basis of CD. Everybody “needs” something. Which needs are priorities? Those at the bottom of the Maslow pyramid? Deciding this is fundamentally subjective. My stand is that an emphasis on fundamental needs should be put forwards to lead to a sufficiency for all rather than an excess for a few (EcoTrust, 2007).
It is crucial for CD to not merely stop at the individual need level, but to recognize the structural patterns in which these needs arose, e.g. diminishing government support, trends in capitalism, etc. A recurrent issue in this class has been the lack of politicization of CD, which in my view has to be broken down in different constituencies, who are often diametrically opposed ideologically. When speaking about CD, are we speaking about liberal, progressive or sustainable CD? This makes a huge difference in the approach, objectives and processes (Hamstead, 2005). What is the place for the public sector in CD? The private sector? Are communities to favour There-Is-No-Alternative (TINA) big businesses or endogenous growth through Local-Ownership-Import-Substitution (LOIS) businesses (Shuman, 2006)? It is becoming increasingly clear that there can be uneconomic growth, and that development for some can mean regression for others. CD has to acknowledge the issue that the notion of progress is problematic and ask “what is development”? Is it just “unfolding and unraveling through time”? Skocpol and Putnam would be the first to agree that evolution does not equate positive change, and I agree with them in that the civic life of the past ought to be revitalized if we are ever to live in a real democracy. There is a problematic gap in their analysis though. Putnam doesn’t address the real causes of community undevelopment; he says it is due to pressures of time and money, suburbanization, electronic entertainment and generational change (Putnam, 2000:283) without linking it to the broader context. Such a “box-thinking” approach can not work for CD. Relations ought to be made between the rise in consumer society and increased obsolescence of consumer goods designed by President Eisenhower siding with corporate power after World War II to revamp the economy and the decline of community life. Clearly people have less time on their hands, but that’s also because they need to work harder to have the living standards publicized on television. In that light, it is no wonder that both community and happiness went down in the 1950s…
One last issue that is salient to CD is that of leadership and sufficiency. In my academic circle of International Development Studies (IDS), CD is often associated with grassroots, bottom-up work, which amongst younger students is often given a sort of sanction protecting it from negative criticism. Those who prone CD actually have expectations on the lifestyle of others, and they make the assumption that a CD-oriented IDS student should own a plastic water bottle, be vegetarian and patronize thrift stores. There clearly are untold rules, and grassroots CD came become exclusionary. Taken to an extreme, this is own Nazism developed in Germany, that is, based on identification of people with similar characteristics brought under a strong leader proposing a clear message and set of behavioral rules (see The Wave, 1969). On another hand, IDS students going on overseas placements are taught to identify the gatekeepers – customary, religious or administrative authorities, local respected person, etc. - that will lead them in the community in which they want to do research. This idea of the “outsider” with a different culture brings about questions of positionality in doing CD work, be it locally or internationally. In my view, identity becomes political in the realm of CD and as an external agent, one has to be very critical and aware of their biases and the power differential often associated with being privileged compared to one’s clients/patrons. It is difficult for me to place a verdict on whether external assistance ought to happen, or if grassroots processes should be the norm, because they are both problematic in their own ways, as noted above. To me, self-help and technical assistance, that is, work “for” and work “with” people, are not mutually exclusive; it all depends on one’s leadership style, which is justly a popular topic nowadays for community workers of all ages. However, according to me, the biggest and most toxic issue in this question is one of ownership: if we are to accept the neoliberal system of property rights, then communities are not necessarily seen by the most powerful actors as owning the resources or the land where they are located, regardless of how long they have lived there. Situations in which a private developer comes in and build a Wal-Mart in an area not-zoned as commercial by city planners because they gained support from the Ontario Municipal Board follow. Thus, depending on the situation, power issues shape the debate over leadership and sufficiency.
In conclusion, while definitions of terms in CD are controversial and it is for each person to interpret them for themselves, it is my opinion that the field should remain people-centered, and focus on their needs in terms of development, instead of tending towards technological-determinism and exclusion. This requires a tremendous effort towards democratization of decision-making and inclusion. In order for this change to be significant, a shift in paradigms is necessary. The collection of assumptions, concepts, beliefs and values that communities increasingly cultivate to describe reality is increasingly focused on consumer goods. This results in thinking that economic development and growth in GPD is the epitome of the “good life”, at the expense of civil society, justice, health, and community. Putnam and Skocpol are right to denounce what I would call community misdevelopment, but they ought also to point out that sustainability of life style was a dominant paradigm created and then changed by people. Communities have the power to reclaim that vision so that CD can become meaningful to the majority again.
Bibliography
Christenson, James, Fendley, Im, & Robinson, Jerry. (1994). Community Development. In Community development in perspective, eds. Christenson and Robinson. Ames, Iowa: Iowa State University, 3-25.
Deacove, Jim. (1994). Community: Apprentice Game about Love and Peace, Board Game.
Fiser, A., Clement, A., & Walmark, B. (February 2006). The K-Net development process: A model for first nations broadband community networks. CRACIN Working Paper No 12, Retrieved November 2007, 2007, from http://www3.fis.utoronto.ca/research/iprp/cracin/publications/workinpapersseries.htm
Granovetter, Mark. (1973). The strength of weak ties. American Jounal of Sociology, 78(6), 1360-1380.
Hamstead M. P., & Quinn, M. S. (2005). Sustainable community development and ecological economics. Local Environment, 10(2), 141-158.
Putnam, Robert. (2000). Bowling alone : The collapse and revival of American community. New York: Simon and Schuster, 15-28; 48-64; 277-286; 319-335.
Quarter, Jack (2007). Seminar Slides for Community Development: Innovative Models, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, Sem. 01.
Ryan, Sherida (2007). Seminar Slides for Community Development: Innovative Models, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, Sem. 03.
Shuman, Michael H. (2006). The Small-Mart Revolution: How local businesses are beating the global competition, Berret-Koehler Publishers, Inc., San Francisco, 285 p.
Skocpol, Theda. (1999). Advocates without members: The recent transformation of American life. In Theda Skocpol and Morris Fiorina eds.,Civic engagement in American democracy. Washington, DC: Brookings Institute Press, 461-509.
The Story of Stuff. http://www.storyofstuff.com/, Page accessed on February 1st, 2008.
The Wave. (1969). http://video.google.ca/videoplay?docid=6295516544338309782, Page accessed on February 4, 2008.
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