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Cím:	GLOBAL TRENDS IN COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT
Szerző:	Charlie McConnell
Ország:
A kiadás helye:
A kiadás éve:	2003
Kiadó:
Terjedelem:
Nyelv:	angol
Tárgyszavak:	közösségfejlesztés
Állomány:	Közösségfejlesztési partnerségépítés Közép-Kelet Európában
Forditas:	magyar
Megjegyzés:
Annotáció:
Leltár:
Raktári jelzet:	E

COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT PARTNERSHIP BUILDING IN CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPE CONFERENCE. 27TH MARCH 2003.

PAPER PRESENTED BY CHARLIE McCONNELL, SECRETARY GENERAL INTERNATIONAL ASSOCIATION FOR COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT.

GLOBAL TRENDS IN COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT

Introduction.

The title I have been asked to address at this conference is a daunting one to cover in forty-five minutes. So let me first say that I shall not be attempting to present you with anything like a detailed account of the ‘health’ of community development in the 170 plus countries of the world. My paper today will examine some common global issues and the ways in which community development practitioners and others that support the community development approach are addressing these.

I am looking at this from the perspective of an international professional association, which has over a thousand members – associations, organisations and individuals. The International Association for Community Development (IACD), has its origins in the work of Anglophone and Francophone development agencies operating in the developing world in the period of decolonisation since the nineteen fifties. In the nineteen nineties, the organisation was radically reorganised, following a conference in South Africa, leading to its re-launch in 1999 in the UK.

About IACD.

IACDs mission is to act as the recognised international forum for the promotion of:

· Community development practice, research and policy analysis;
· Community development values and approaches on relevant international platforms;
· Links amongst community development practitioners, associations, educators and policy makers.


As an international body, we believe that international networking and collaborative action is essential and complementary to local action.

IACD is an international voluntary association, run entirely by its volunteer members. My ‘day job’ is as the community development adviser to the Scottish Government. And as indicated above we have in our membership fieldwork practitioners, researchers, educators and policy makers. All share a commitment to strengthening communities through
promoting a community development approach to social change, whatever context we are operating in.


We believe in empowering people’s active participation in determining change, through the promotion of:

· Equality of Opportunities
· Social Inclusion
· Human Rights
· Respect for Diversity, and
· Democracy

Our approach is one of working and learning together with local people, to build stronger communities. For IACD community development is best understood as a way of working with individuals and groups within their communities. The aim of this work is to strengthen communities by improving people’s knowledge, skills and confidence, organisational ability and resources.

This is a people empowering approach to development, aimed at increasing people’s capacity to influence the conditions which affect their lives and of supporting people, young and old, to play an active part in civic life.

We recognise community development as a professional discipline. It is highly skilled work, requiring much of it practitioners, not least in terms of their need for continuous professional development to ensure that they are able to support communities at a time of rapid social, environmental, political and technological change within an increasingly inter dependent and global economy.

A wide range of practitioners (paid and unpaid) use the community development approach – from health workers and youth workers, to planners, architects, local economic development professionals and others engaged in urban and rural development, from cultural action workers, to community educators, from environmentalists to those concerned with crime prevention. For some community development is the main focus of their work, for many more it is an added set of skills to their existing disciplines. For all, it is about adopting a people empowering style of work, where the voice of communities become part of the solution not the problem.


So, what are some of the common concerns and issues that challenge those engaged in community development around the world? In preparing this paper I have examined the index of articles that have appeared over the past ten years in the international community development journal, prepared by IACD President Gary Craig. IACD has a partnership with the journal, which publishes papers coming out of our conferences. This is only one indicator of community development activity of course, reflecting the capacity and interest of those engaged in community development and research in different parts of the world to share ideas and practice.

Let me quote from the preface to the index.

‘..new themes are emerging which reflect the changing geo-political context within which community development is being discussed and practised. Global economic, political, environmental and social changes challenge community development workers to consider how local actions can confront and control the often destructive impacts of such change…..
‘ Some of the new themes, or those where there has been a growth of interest (as reflected in the number of articles reaching us and of those subsequently being published) demonstrate aspects of this concern and of local responses: articles on environmental change, on the economic aspects of globalisation, and on community responses such as campaigns against economic or environmental degradation… or on demands for sustainable transport and resource management. As economic and land pressures on First Nations’ resources have grown, so have campaigns to protect them and their inheritance…. The growth of inter-ethnic, racial or religious conflict and violence is, sadly, also reflected…

‘ Secondly, new forms of organisation and resistance have developed, often alluded to under the general heading of social movements; groups have been organised not just, as community development has traditionally been thought of, in terms of place, but across common identities: disabilities, race, sexuality, gender…

‘ Thirdly, new social issues have emerged as a locus for community development approaches: two contrasting examples of this are the growth of HIV/AIDS as an international and national health phenomenon requiring action both at strategic levels but also in terms of ‘bottom up’ campaigns and organisation; and the growing potential of new and information technology as a means of connecting groups and organisations separated by huge gaps of physical space but increasingly able to discuss, negotiate and campaign together via cyberspace.

‘ Fourthly, theorising about community development has not stood still. The specific themes of citizenship, post-modernism, partnership, social capital and communitariansim and more general questions about the place of community development in the changing political contexts of the newly emerging democracies of East and Central Europe and the former military dictatorships elsewhere in the world pose important questions for practitioners and academics alike.’

I would like to briefly examine four themes in a little more detail drawn also from discussions with colleagues at the many conferences and events which IACD has organised over the last five years. They are:

· Working in communities facing or emerging from conflict
· Supporting community engagement in planning and service delivery
· Thinking Global:Acting local i.e. bringing an international dimension into local practice.
· Training for community development.



Working in communities facing or emerging from conflict.

In South Africa in the latter nineties IACD brought together community development practitioners to address the issue of conflict resolution and peace building. It was a moving conference with participants from such countries as Rwanda, Palestine, Israel, Northern Ireland, the former Yugoslavia and South Africa. Here we shared experiences of working at the hardest edge of practice, amongst communities riven by ethnic or religious antagonism and in some cases by genocide. We explored the methods of mediation and conflict resolution that community development practitioners were trying to adopt. Some participants visited a local Truth and Reconciliation Commission meeting. We discussed the work of a Palestinian agency in Bethlehem working with Israeli community development colleagues trying to bring to build bridges across the two communities. We heard from Rwanda of the work of a community development agency seeking to bring reconciliation between neighbours following the genocide of the early nineties. We examined measures that community development practitioners could bring to tackling racism and racist violence. We discussed ways in which community development workers can confront these processes on behalf of the poorest and most marginalised people. And we shared the experiences of personal risk. There were no panacea answers I’m afraid. But there was a general consensus of the importance of adopting a mediation role, using informal education and group work techniques to assist people who would otherwise be in opposing camps to develop empathy and a deeper understanding of the concerns and hopes of their erstwhile hostile neighbours.

Supporting community engagement in planning and service delivery

In the more urbanised parts of the world, from Hong Kong to Glasgow, Boston to Sydney, community development practice has for many years supported communities concerned with opposing the planning decisions of public and private sector developers. In the sixties and seventies, in response to slum clearance, redevelopment and road building programmes, non-governmental community development became synonymous with community action campaigns by residents around the built environment.

Over the past two decades however, governments, national and local have begun to harness the community development approach as a way of engaging residents as active participants in shaping planning decisions and further, in taking over the management of former public services, such as municipal housing estates. Research over a number of years clearly confirms the value of engaging the consumers of services in the planning and decision making process, if such programmes are to be sustained. Built environments designed in this way are almost without exception, ones that are less likely to be vandalised, are more sensitive to the needs of young people, the disabled and elderly. Public participation is now an accepted feature of public policy. In my own country for example, recent legislation has not only strengthened the rights of communities to be consulted and engaged, but requires community planning bodies to resource that engagement through the provision of impartial community learning and development support. Municipal and federal governments across Western Europe, North America, South Africa and New Zealand are now significant employers of community development type staff or provide grant aid support to non-governmental and community-based organisations.

The term community, has become the prefix to what are now being seen as ‘enabling’ professions – such as community architects, community planners, community police, community housing, community health. Here community development has been harnessed by government as a way of building a partnership approach with local communities based upon resourcing extensive public participation in the shaping of towns and cities.

Thinking global:acting Local

A growing area of local community development practice in recent years relates to measures by which practitioners are beginning to link concerns around globalisation to work at local level. The Development Education movement, led by such international ngo’s (non governmental organisations) as Oxfam and the Red Cross has been actively engaged in bringing an international curriculum within schools and through youth work. Only recently however have community development projects begun to work with development ngos and others to bring an international education/action component to local work. Often this has been stimulated by concerns within a local economy, such as the closure of a factory and the transfer of capital, or around environmental issues. We have a number of examples of joint campaigns between communities in different parts of the world e.g. the Bhopal campaign and the work of the International Organisation of Consumer Unions and Health Action International based in Malaysia.

Foundations such as Soros and Mott as well as the European Union and OECD have for many years supported networking activities between community development practitioners, this event being one such example. These enable the sharing of practice and the development of comparative trans national projects around common concerns. The World Bank social development team provides an excellent source of advice on research and networking contacts around participative models of development. At the UN World Social Development Summit in Geneva in 2000, IACD convened a very well attended session again bringing together the sharing of practice. Civicus has led the way in using the internet to network and exchange. IACD has established an on line capacity to network European practitioners and there are literally hundreds of websites from which we can access practice support materials.

That said my impression is that the bulk of local community development policy and practice remains just that – local. Practitioners and policy advisers in our respective countries tend to be somewhat parochial, with too much re-inventing of wheels. Colleagues here in the Romanian and Hungarian Associations are I am afraid the exception, when it comes to encouraging international information sharing. Policy and practice in the West is rarely influenced by the experiences of others. This is perhaps again a symptom of the ideologically hegemonic nature of the globalisation of ideas – for example the rapid adoption of American thinking on social capital and communitarianism. This is not to argue that such ideas have no validity, but it is for us to challenge the assumption that the source of our thinking on community development lies somewhere in the mid Atlantic. The anglophone world in particular has not been good at listening to the ideas and solutions of others.


Training for community development


This brings me to the fourth of my themes – the issue of professional training. The first very clear trend is that the vast majority of community development practitioners, whether titled as such, are not professionally trained in this discipline. Training where it exists, particularly in the developing world is at best ad hoc and primarily learned ‘on the job’. Employers, particularly development ngos have designed some innovative training resources, relating to participative ‘bottom up’ development and around particular issues, e.g. health education. Community development training literature across the globe has been highly influenced by texts from the US and UK. Clearly the English language has been a major factor, with the dominance of English speaking publishing houses in this field.

Professional training is likewise most established in the US at both undergraduate and Masters levels. In the late 1990s we saw a resurgence of interest in community development related training in the US and there are currently some 40 graduate training programmes there. One commentator in the US has recently stated that this is a ‘golden era’ for community development. In Europe, especially the UK, Netherlands and Scandinavia community development has not been as successful in achieving a discrete professional status. Here it has been seen as an approach that has permeated primarily the training of social workers and informal community educators and to a lesser extent health workers and town planners. This permeation model has also been prevalent in the countries of the Commonwealth (the former British not Russian). There have been some significant exceptions however. In Quebec, Canada, Concordia University organises an extensive community development training programme, whist the South African Development Education Programme at the University of the Western Cape has been a major player in training practitioners throughout southern Africa.

We do not have an international database of community development training opportunities. One did exist in the seventies for Europe, but it has since closed, ironic given the supposed recognition of professional training within the EU. In the US the Community Development Society can advise on training opportunities. Generally practitioners and trainers in different parts of the world are left with devising their own training programmes or too often with adapting Anglo-American materials.

Using a SWOT analysis -Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats – we an urgent need for those engaged in community development in most parts of the world, to address the collective identity of this professional and highly skilled discipline. Again if I may be parochial, in my country, Scotland, we have recently announced the establishment of a government funded yet independent, practitioner led professional body for community development. This will quality control training, endorse and accredit pre service and continuing professional development training for practitioners at different levels of practice, including work-based experience, and register practitioners. In my view we have for too long accepted second best in this area and not been rigorous in ensuring that those who call themselves community development workers are competent to do the job.


Conclusion

I hope that this, inevitably snap shot picture of community development in different parts of the world has given you a flavour of its health. Irrespective of the language we adopt, participatory and people empowering development models have at least at the level of policy rhetoric become the established norm. The reality still has far to go, with the continued adoption by too many public authorities of top down urban and rural development programmes that pay lip service to the hopes and ideas of local communities. But I do believe that we are winning the arguments, not least because of the sustainability and cost effectiveness of participatory/partnership working. This presents an enormous cultural challenge to governments, national and local, to the private sector and indeed to ngo’s - to be better at working in an empowering way with communities and citizens. For professionals in the world of e.g. town planning, health care, the environment and education this requires the different mind set and skills set that community development at its best has devised. We now know how to do it. What we do not yet have are sufficient managers and field staff confident and skilled at adopting it or the policy and institutional support frameworks within most countries to ensure it becomes an embedded way of learning and working together.

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