Theorising the practice of community development - a south african perspective

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Theorising The PracTice of communiTy DeveloPmenT

Whilst the values of community development are – or should be – universal (social justice, equality, respect, dignity, etc.), the practice of community development needs to be grounded in a specific context. This rich and detailed book provides both an illuminating national case study (from post-apartheid South Africa) and also, as is missing from many texts, a solid and welcome attempt at theory-building.

gary craig, Durham university, uK

Anyone interested in community development approaches and community development work will benefit by reading this book. For anyone who wants to understand the different traditions of community development, but also the community development practice on the ground, will find the stories and examples of community development work within South Africa, as portrayed by Peter Westoby, fascinating and very illuminating for their own community development practice.

lucius Botes, university of the free state, south africa

000 Westoby book.indb 1 4/16/2014 11:30:11 AM

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a south african Perspective

PeTer WesToByUniversity of the Free State, South Africa and

The University of Queensland, Australia


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Printed in the united Kingdom by henry ling limited, at the Dorset Press, Dorchester, DT1 1hD

© Peter Westoby 2014

all rights reserved. no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher.

Peter Westoby has asserted his right under the copyright, Designs and Patents act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

Published by ashgate Publishing limited ashgate Publishing companyWey court east 110 cherry streetunion road suite 3-1farnham Burlington, vT 05401-3818surrey, gu9 7PT usaengland

www.ashgate.com

British Library Cataloguing in Publication DataA catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:Westoby, Peter. Theorising the practice of community development : a south african perspective / by Peter Westoby. pages cm includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4724-2309-2 (hardback) -- ISBN 978-1-4724-2310-8 (ebook) -- ISBN 978-1-4724-2311-5 (epub) 1. Community development--South Africa. 2. Community development--south africa--government policy. 3. community organization--south africa. i. Title. hn801.Z9c695 2014 307.1'40968--dc23

2014006159

ISBN 9781472423092 (hbk)ISBN 9781472423108 (ebk – PDF)ISBN 9781472423115 (ebk – ePUB)


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contents

List of Figures viiForeword by Frik de Beer ixPreface xiiiAcknowledgements xvList of Abbreviations xvii

introduction 1

ParT I aPProaCh To The researCh ProjeCT

1 Theorising the Practice of community Development 19

2 research methodology and the researcher horizon 25

ParT II ConCePTuaL Lenses for ‘reaDIng’ CommunITy DeveLoPmenT wIThIn souTh afrICa

3 Traditions of community Development 41

4 Guided by Frameworks 55

ParT III CommunITy-BaseD PraCTICes anD ngo sTorIes of CommunITy DeveLoPmenT

5 community Development, education and the hantam community education Trust 71

6 community Development, community cohesion and the nelson mandela foundation 81

7 community economic Development and the abalimi home and community garden movement 91

8 community Development, Political Practice and the southern cape land committee 105


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Theorising the Practice of Community Developmentvi

9 community Development, the ‘craft’ of community-Based education and Training and the ymca 119

interlude The Process of community Development: In Dialogue with Es’kia 131

ParT Iv exPLorIng sTaTe-LeD CommunITy DeveLoPmenT

10 The Dilemmas of south africa’s state employed Community Development Workers 141

11 community Development and cooperative Development within south africa 153

12 Training of Community Development Workers within south africa 165

conclusion 177

References 185Index 201


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list of figures

Figure 4.1 Government–community relations grid 65

figure 7.1 The farmer Development chain for organic farming projects 100

Table 11.1 community development and cooperative formation 155


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forewordFrik de Beer

This outsider–insider account of community development in South Africa is both refreshing and revealing. as an australian, Peter Westoby is an outsider writing about south africa. yet, with his frequent visits over an extended period, he is also, in a sense, inside south africa. for me, this brings a uniquely unbiased (as far as this is possible in the social sciences) exposition of community development in South Africa. Research for this book was clearly undertaken as a process of engaging in dialogue as stated by the author in chapter 2.

It is inspirational to read a book about a history I experienced first-hand over more than three decades. It is even more uplifting to read a book in which community development is not discussed as a method through which people are co-opted to become part of a blue print, designed by strangers with their own agenda: from the benevolent individual or non-governmental organisations (NGOs) wanting to help the poor or marginalised people, to corporate social investment (CSI) using it to meet official criteria and disburse money, its executives are obliged to contribute to ‘development’ (nowadays increasingly for community development). And, disturbingly, it is also used by the government as a way to co-opt people into their programmes, or as currently in south africa, to use community development to improve service delivery to ‘clients’, the communities. Like the term development, community development has been co-opted into the political jargon of politicians and governments alike. The dilemma of co-option becomes clear in the discussion of cooperative development in chapter 11. here the author touches a raw nerve by identifying the current approach to community development cooperative formation, ‘as an investment in supply-oriented development’ and not a process ‘that creates a demand for cooperatives from communities’. no wonder then that community development workers (CDWs) and the communities they work in experience despair. They are all, actually, set up for failure.

This book gives an analysis and an interpretation of community development that I have come to share during my working life in South Africa: experiencing the claims, fallacies and successes of practitioners of community development in south africa but also the delightful and often small achievements by people ‘drawing on endogenous resources’. Core themes addressed in this book are:

• Types of community development;• stories of possibilities and resilience of the people of south africa;• Poverty, power, opportunity and cooperation;


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• Development as a ‘qualitative change that focuses on people-centred processes rather than growth-centred outcomes’;

• community development drawing primarily on endogenous resources and secondarily drawing on exogenous resources;

• The precarious position of the community development worker.

It is easy to illustrate that community development does not work – numerous community development projects worldwide, and also in south africa, attest to the failure of community development. a perfect example is the Barberton commercial medicinal Plants Project (Tinjonjela) implemented by the former Mpumalanga Parks Board in South Africa. It was a spectacular failure. The project was initiated by very competent officials who saw a need and an opportunity to do nature conservation in a different, more community-sensitive way than in the past. in addition to the medicinal plants nursery, the project provided to each of the 200 traditional healers participating in the project a small vegetable garden. For financial survival the project relied on lavender and pineapples as cash crops. after raising the expectations of a few hundred people, ploughing millions of rands into a fertile piece of land near the village of Barberton, and implementing a well-planned infrastructure plan, nothing remains. my contention is that the project failed because members of the community were viewed as beneficiaries – passive recipients of something done for them (de Beer, 2010: 436). It is also the result of employers having their own motivation (nature conservation; setting up a measurable number of cooperatives – see Chapter 11) that harnesses community development practice to achieve their own goals.

The kind of community development envisioned by the apartheid government led in 1968 to the removal of the residents of District six in cape Town and the demolition of all the district’s structures, except for the Zeenatul islam masjid (Mosque). For the government at the time, this was successful community development. much more ‘community development’ of this nature was done in removing people in terms of the group areas act and the ‘homelands policy’; by administration boards that were tasked to clear ‘black spots’; and, by homelands’ governments under direction and supervision of head office in Pretoria, to ‘win the hearts and minds’ of black people in favour of the Bantustan policy.

On the other hand, ‘another’ community development took place in South africa: people-initiated community development as practised by the Zanempilo Community Health Clinic established by Steve Biko in the Eastern Cape and by ngos such as grassroots educare Trust in the cape Town area, Transvaal rural Action Committee (TRAC), the Surplus People’s Project and the Soweto Crisis committee, and many others. also, doing community-based cooperatives were the Africa Cooperative Action Trust (ACAT), the Development Resource Centre and the Environmental Development Agency (EDA). These examples of ‘another development’ (Ekins, 1992: 24) are the pioneers of the stories of possibilities, of the resilience of the people of south africa. This alternative community development is the story of people who do what needs to be done, regardless of


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Foreword xi

the government and big business; regardless of official policies and programmes; and regardless of corporate social responsibility investment. These are stories of enabling movements ((Ekins, 1992: 249).

Bezzie’s Brass Band provides an answer, i thought, to Peter Westoby’s question: ‘What kind of community development are you talking about?’ It is indeed a key question in the debate on community development. It is stories of hope like the one of Janet Bezuidenhout who started Bezzie’s Brass Band in a rural village in limpopo. she saw idle youth in gangs and started a brass band that helps give meaning and direction to young people participating. another example is community activism in my community where a group of residents coerced, through various actions, the metropolitan government to repair a dangerous sinkhole (not pothole!) threatening the safety of children and residents in an adjacent primary school and individual homes. These are the places where endogenous and exogenous resources come together. and the case studies discussed in chapters five to nine are excellent examples of good community development practice in south africa.

But, now, as Berner and Philips (2005) ask: ‘Do the feel good stories mean that communities should be left alone – left to their own devices?’ The answer is obviously no. communities cannot, and ought not to provide services (such as, at local government level) where government obviously has an obligation. And government cannot continue providing services, simply to be destroyed in service-delivery protests. The answer must be sought in the various axes and tensions identified by Westoby: growth-centred versus people-centred; endogenous versus exogenous; top-down versus bottom-up and service-oriented versus developmental. in these places a corrective to the service delivery model currently in place may be found and developed for south africa.

The legacy of dependence on government still characterises south african society. We, as beneficiaries, demand the government to provide. Within this context of expecting government to provide (often fuelled by promises made by politicians), community development workers are supposed to enable community development. Yet they work in an environment where:

• their performance appraisal and hope for a raise and promotion are measured by the number of cooperatives they established per annum (or the number of traditional healers ‘involved’ in a project; new clinics erected and so on);

• community development is a political metaphor used to manipulate ‘development’ as conceptualised by the government; and,

• budgets and incentives become straight-jackets, and not enabling resources.

It is no wonder that community development workers feel fraudulent and experience with communities a real sense of despair. is the answer in transforming the mind-sets of people? Or is the answer in transforming the mind-set of politicians and policy makers, and consequently, creating an environment conducive to endogenous, people-centred development, guided by the axes and tensions mentioned in this


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Theorising the Practice of Community Developmentxii

book? The issues listed above are ‘weaknesses’ in the work environment that must be accounted for but cannot be easily corrected by training.

To some extent Westoby identifies these broader impediments to training, recognising ‘broader issues such as organisational capabilities, structures, relationships, context and so forth’. and his analysis of the formal training of CDWs is accurate. The original CDW training was in a way legalistic–formalistic, preparing the learners for service delivery at the local level. While the institution i was attached to was awarded a training contract for some of the gauteng cDW trainees, the (non-formal) programme certificates awarded were never collected. our training deviated from the preferred focus and included more relational, context specific and reflective training. I suppose we failed well and truly to prepare the learners for service delivery.

The way forward described by Peter Westoby offers common sense and good practice alternatives. When engaged to train community development workers (for NGOs, para-statals and provincial governments), my colleague Hennie Swanepoel and i always reiterated the need for continuous in-service training, for regular opportunities where CDWs can meet, share and reflect on best practice experienced first-hand by them. We also insisted, seldom with success, that supervisors of the CDWs and policy makers in the organisation should be part of the dialogical, problem-focused training presented. in this way we hoped to help organisations to evolve into enabling institutions.

in the current debate on the professionalisation of community development, Theorising the Practice of Community Development: A South African Perspective, is a useful book. It should be compulsory reading for politicians, policy makers and practitioners of community development in South Africa. It is a gentle book, as its author is, dealing with insight, compassion and empathy with our south african community development space.

Frik de BeerProfessor of Development studies

university of south [email protected]


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Preface

In 1994, a couple of months after the official transition to a post-apartheid era, at the young age of 27, i arrived in KwaZulu natal, south africa. it was the start of four years of youth-oriented community work in a region south of Durban, from hibberdene in the far south, to Umlazi and KwaMakutha townships in the north.

During those first few months of working, when people asked me about my work background I would answer with something like the following: ‘In Australia I have worked as a community development practitioner for the past eight years …’. often the response to this answer resembled: ‘it is probably better that you do not talk about community development here in South Africa; it has a bad history’. Obviously I asked about the history and also stopped introducing myself as a community development practitioner (after all, one golden rule of community development is, ‘learn from the locals’). I quickly learned how, for many South africans, the association of community development was with apartheid era policy and programmes (de Beer and Swanepoel, 2012; Maistry, 2012), particularly ‘separate development’. i learned that in 1961 former President P.W. Botha was given the post of minister of community Development and coloured affairs, drawing on the 1960s United Nations definition of community development. Within that position he facilitated the removal of coloureds from District six and also presided over other forced removal activities under the group areas act.

over time ‘community Development’ was one name amongst several including ‘native affairs’ and ‘Bantu affairs’ that was ‘abandoned one by one as government tried in vain to shrug off the stigma of the department …’ (Kirsten, 2008: 50). according to some commentators, during the apartheid era much ‘development work’ was legitimised by the so-called ‘Black Community Development Act’ of 1984 (Groenewald, 1989). In many ways it could be argued that community development had become co-opted into the colonisation processes and discourses associated with native versus settler development as theorised by ugandan scholar Mahmood Mamdani (2012). Community development was for the natives while real development was for the settlers!

That is not to say that during the apartheid years there was not another deeply rich and emancipatory-oriented history and practice of community development, as per the work of Steve Biko during the 1970s and as articulated within the delightfully reflective writings of Mphahlele Es’kia (1992). However, most people i engaged with in those mid 1990s seemed to remember the apartheid version of community development rather than this emancipatory tradition and were steering clear of it.


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Theorising the Practice of Community Developmentxiv

In 1998 I left South Africa, having worked in youth development and organisational development (both acceptable fields of practice). Returning to australia, over the next few years i re-engaged with the theory and practice of my roots in community development and eventually obtained an academic position in community Development at The university of Queensland, australia. During the past 16 years since that initial 1998 departure from south africa i have kept returning, and what has struck me is the re-emergence, or more accurately described, the proliferation of community work and development initiatives. In 2003 the former president of South Africa, Thabo Mbeki, mandated, and then in 2005 launched, a national community Development Programme. The introductory quote below, from Jacob Zuma’s 10 February 2011 State of the Nation Address certainly affirms community development as a crucial part of the government’s approach to development:

… since we are building a developmental and not a welfare state, the social grants will be linked to economic activity and community development, to enable short-term beneficiaries to become self-supporting in the long run. (Zuma, J., 10 February 2011, State of the Nation Address)

Clearly community development in some form is back in South Africa.


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Acknowledgements

This research project would not have been possible without the support of staff and colleagues at the university of the free state, particular those within the Centre for Development Support (CDS). Special thanks to Willem Ellis, Lochner Marais, Doreen Atkinson and Anita Harmse of CDS. Particular thanks also to Professors Frans Swonepoel and Glen Taylor for making financial resources available to conduct this research within south africa over a three-year period. However, I offer a heartfelt and full thanks to Professor Lucius Botes for making this all possible. it is his passion for community development scholarship and teaching, along with this love of people and enthusiasm for life that has kept me engaged.

To fellow sojourner in the mysteries of life, Verne Harris, what can I say? Those weekends in the mountains, endless email dialogues and Melville celebrations fed/feed the soul.

Thanks also for the hospitality, friendships and engaged conversation of so many South Africans – but special thanks go to Allan Kaplan and Sue Davidoff, Ana Agostino and Jairo Arrow, Sipho Sokhela, Mike Cuthbert, Mpume Zama, Angela Conway, Frik de Beer, Ian Goldman and Rubert van Blerk. Without each significant contribution it wouldn’t have been possible.

Special and specific thanks go to many people for generously giving me their time to accompany me in seeing the stories of their work – accounted as case studies within this book. They include:

• rob small of the abalimi home and community garden movement;• Angela Conway, Phumi Booysen, Patrick Sambo, Amos Dyasi, Nettly

Maarman, Chriszanne, Oom Elias Rens, Oom Arrie and Oom Jaffie, and members of Baviaans Land and Agrarian Forum (BLAF) of Southern Cape land committee;

• sello hatang, mothomang Diaho, Ken mutuma and imara ajani rolston from the nelson mandela foundation;

• Doug Reeler, Sue Soal and James Taylor at CDRA;• anne hope and sally Timmel from the grail centre;• sam chimbuya from Khanya-accid;• lesley osler and so many other un-named staff of the hantam community

education Trust;• Thabo Mosukela and Mahlomola Mahloba, Public Participation Officers,

at the Department of cooperative governance and Traditional affairs;


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Theorising the Practice of Community Developmentxvi

• Members of Dillo Disabled Primary Cooperative, Makawe Financial Services co-op, halala Basadi Primary cooperative, Thaba Blinds cooperative and mamello support group.

To the many people of the Department of social Development who were constantly gracious within the partnership we developed. Particular thanks to Sadi Luka, Mpontseng Kumeke, Mbulaheni Mulaudzi, Lindiwe Mahlangu, Harry Diamond, Makhetha Thabana and Lucy Xaba.

Also a special thanks to the Centre for Community Action and Social Justice at Durham University, UK – particularly Professor Sarah Banks for welcoming me into their space and providing an office and library access. And also thanks to Julian Kotze for generously hosting me in her country cottage to work on this manuscript.

finally, to my partner both in life, and in accompanying me to the many south African places visited, a special thanks. Your support, encouragement and many delicious soups made this journey so enjoyable and rewarding.


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list of abbreviations

aBcD asset-Based community DevelopmentAIDS Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndromeanc african national congressaPf anti-Privatisation forumasgisa accelerated and shared growth initiative for south africaausaiD The australian agency for international DevelopmentBCM Black Consciousness MovementBEE Black Economic EmpowermentBlarf Baviaans land and agrarian reform forumBlP Better life options ProgrammeBrics Brazil, russia, india, china and south africaCBER Council for Black Education and ResearchcBo community-Based organisationcce community capacity enhancementcD community DevelopmentcDP community Development PractitionerscDPP community Development Practitioner ProgrammecDra community Development resource associationcDs centre for Development supportCDW Community Development WorkerCDWP Community Development Worker ProgrammeceDPa centre for Development and Population activitiescoPe congress of the PeoplecoPac cooperative and Policy alternative centrecsa community supported agricultureDFID Department For International Development (UK)DTi Department of Trade and industryecD early childhood DevelopmentEPWP Expanded Public Works ProgrammefeDuP federation of urban Poorgear growth, employment and redistributiongiZ Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit, the german society for international cooperationhDi human Development indexHIV Human Immunodeficiency Virushoh harvest of hopeiDasa institute for a Democratic alternative in south africa


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iDPs integrated Development Plansingo international non-government organisationKaP Knowledge, attitude and PracticesleD local economic DevelopmentleTs local economic/energy Trading schememiT massachusetts institute of Technologyngo non-government organisationNPO Non-Profit OrganisationNQF National Qualification FrameworkPhP People’s-housing Process Pla Participatory learning and actionPlaas institute for Poverty, land and agrarian studiesrDP reconstruction and Development ProgrammeSAQA South African Qualification Authorityscar southern cape against removalsSDI Shack Dwellers InternationalseDa small enterprise Development agencysei supplementary education initiativesla sustainable livelihoods approachsmme small and medium-sized enterpriseTfT Training for TransformationuK united Kingdomun united nationsunDP united nations Development ProgrammeunfPa united nations Population fundusa united states of americava voluntary associationvufa Vukuzenzle urban farmers associationymca young men’s christian organisation


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introduction

In conceptualising this book, my starting point has been that, since 1998 during back and forth travels to South Africa, a period in which community development has flourished, I have sensed what I might also call a ‘conceptual fuzziness’ around the field of practice. This fuzziness echoes the analysis of Biddle (1966) written in the 1960s within the uK context. one might want to call this conceptual fuzziness the research problem. from this problem the accompanying aim has been to try and ‘see’ and also ‘make sense of’ what is happening in the field of community development practice within South Africa, hence the title of this book Theorising the Practice of Community Development: A South African Perspective, with my views on what both ‘theorising’ and ‘practice’ mean discussed in chapter 1. on the surface a simple task, but in fact fiendishly challenging, for reasons having to do with the diversity of South African contexts – urban, peri-urban, rural, place-based, interest-based and so forth – and the proliferation of different kinds of community practice.

I however argue that despite the difficulty of the task, it is one worth trying to undertake simply because of the seriousness of the challenges facing the poor and other progressive social change agents in south africa. cleavages of race, gender and class are as ever pertinent; crime, violence and corruption are a shadowy present reality; inequality continues to grow, and many service systems are toxic in their lack of responsiveness to people. A community development response to these issues is crucial.

The research also embraces two goals beyond the ‘seeing and making sense’ tasks. The first alludes to the kind of statement a dear colleague of mine Dr Lynda shevellar recently heard at an international conference. on stage were some academically credentialed presenters. responding to a question about community development, one of the presenters, an miT global policy leader and researcher, stated, without blinking an eyelid, that, ‘the research shows that community development does not work’. One goal has been to then write a book and theorise community development in a way that such an ignorant statement could be shown to be patently untrue. As will be shown in this book such a statement can only be untrue simply because the statement fails to deal with the complexity of traditions, frameworks and approaches to ‘community development’. Obviously to such a statement a reply would be, ‘what kind of community development are you talking about?’ and ‘considering all the community-led or community-based initiatives around the world that continue to impact profoundly for good on people’s lives, in what way does it not work?’


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Theorising the Practice of Community Development2

The other goal refers to an attempt to concretise the vision and hopes articulated by the (late) South African scholar-activist-humanitarian-revolutionary Neville alexander, who recently argued that:

… besides the ongoing political and economic class struggles in which we are willy-nilly involved, and by means of which we attempt to create and consolidate more democratic space in the short to medium term, we have to go back to the community development tasks that the BCM [Black Consciousness movement] initiated so successfully, if not always sustainably owing to the ravages of the apartheid system. (Alexander, 2013: 199)

he goes onto argue that:

… we have to rebuild our communities and our neighbourhoods by means of establishing, as far as possible on a voluntary basis, all manner of community projects that bring visible short-term benefit to the people and that initiate at the same time the trajectories of fundamental social transformation. … These could range from relatively simple programmes such as keeping the streets and public toilets clean, preferably in liaison with the local authority, whether or not it is “delivering” at this level, to more complex programmes such as bulk-buying clubs, community reading clubs, enrichment programmes for students preparing for exams, teachers’ resource groups at the local level and, of course, sports and cultural activities on a more convivial basis … (2013: 200)

This is a strong vision, but one grounded in what my research indicates is happening in some south african spaces. There is a huge number of community-based and community-led work occurring within South Africa, and there are numerous networks, linking, or converging – as Alexander puts it – into a vibrant socio-political space where alternative worlds are being imagined and created. This expression of community agency at times assimilates, and at other times accommodates or resists hegemonic neoliberal trajectories for development. The point is they do exist, however fragile or vibrant – and Alexander’s vision is being made true, and the miT professor’s analysis is found to be banal and false.

an analytical framework

Returning to the main research aim, and in responding to the difficulty of seeing and making sense of community development practice within South Africa, I bring an analytical framework that I believe can help. As will become clear, the


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Introduction 3

analytical framework provides a useful conceptual lens which I hope can bring interpretive clarity to understanding how people are organising themselves, or are being accompanied in organising, using community approaches to social change. Within this analytical approach I draw on a framework with five dimensions.1

Firstly, I have set the task of examining what is occurring within the field of actual community development practice – that is, taking a look at what is going on, rather than what should be going on. This is not therefore a normative text on what community development should be in south africa, but rather a series of essays reflecting on what I interpret as going on. my efforts contrast with the numerous normative texts on community development within south africa (see for example, Schenck, Nel and Louw, 2010; Swanepeol and de Beer, 2011; Weyers, 2011).

secondly, i draw on what might carefully be construed as universal community development concepts in conducting my analysis. While recognising there are some particular South African ideas and contexts that influence community development, I nevertheless approach the task at hand by arguing that there is a deep normativity (discussed in more depth in Chapter 3). This ensures there is some orthodoxy within south african community development practice that resonates with what is going on elsewhere in the world. The particulars of local practice – historically and contextually shaped – do interact dialectically with global discourses, however contested, about community development.

Thirdly, the framework draws on a multi-disciplinary approach – recognising that community development is not only a political or social activity, but also an economic, cultural and even emotional practice. my analytical frame provides the conceptual space to engage with any or all of these dimensions of community development practice as encountered.

Fourthly, the framework is comparative, arguing that how the poor are organising themselves, or at times being helped or accompanied in organising, within South Africa, should be recognisable, and comparable with what is taking place in other parts of the world.

Finally, the framework is historical and contextual, recognising that, as per the beginning of this introduction, community development has a particular history within South Africa. To research what is taking place in the present does not require the rendering invisible of memory. To the contrary, many current ways in which the poor are organising for the purposes of community development have historical and contextual roots.

Working within this analytical framework the guiding research questions have been:

1. how are the poor organising themselves using various forms of community development? Or, in some cases,

1 I acknowledge the work of Patrick Chabal and Jean-Pascal Daloz in Africa Works (1999) as triggering my thoughts about the analytical framing of this research.


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2. how are the state or other non-state actors attempting to organise, engage or accompany the poor through community development?

3. how can the practice of community development be theorised inductively, drawing on answers to the previous questions?

in considering such questions i have also drawn on several concepts of community development that have emerged as important in my own work, reflection on my practice, and from the literature. They include, along with others, concepts such as: traditions and frameworks; poverties and power; relational, communicative, organisational and systemic practices; and, dialogue and dilemmatic spaces. such concepts help illuminate, or make sense of the practices of community development within south africa. such concepts provide crucial theorising possibilities and also shape the way i attempt to navigate the territory.

however, before moving into further discussions about community development and the research and writing project it seems appropriate to step back and briefly consider the South African broader context.

The south african Context and Community Development

When thinking and writing about the context of South Africa and community development practice I was initially struck by a dilemma – which story or narrative should be highlighted? Like most social scientists and many community practitioners it could make sense to start with ‘need’, ‘problems’, ‘challenges’ or the likes. This is a narrative angle that most development workers would be familiar with. in an earlier paragraph of this chapter i found it very easy to write the following: ‘cleavages of race, gender and class are as ever pertinent; crime, violence and corruption are a shadowy present reality; inequality continues to grow …’. To these problems many more could be added.

however, as per the strengths or assets approach to community development (Mathie and Cunningham, 2008), or drawing on the research paradigm of appreciative inquiry, it could also be worth starting with a narrative that highlights ways in which south africa is overcoming serious historical and contemporary challenges: naming what it has done well. or put another way, by my north american colleague and friend Dr Polly Walker, ‘we must sing up’ the efforts and resilience of the people. For David Denborough (2006, 2008), an experienced community practitioner at the australian based Dulwich centre, this requires listening to the ‘double story’ embedded within people’s experience – generating a more complex tapestry of both resilience, agency, action, and suffering, poverty, distress. Double listening, originally conceptualised by michael White and his colleagues of the australian-based Dulwich centre, was understood as an important tool within counselling. However, Denborough (2008) has rethought this frame in relation to collective and community-based work and I have particularly appropriated it in terms of research methodology, as per the work of Auckland-based scholar Jay


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Introduction 5

Marlow (2010). Within this frame of double listening the research and writing task has involved listening for two stories. The first includes the problems and challenges of community development within south africa; the second story indicates the possibilities. in the same vein i am focused on both:

• The resilience of people, the successful changes since apartheid, the possibilities of individual and collective agency, the experiences of community life and community ‘experiments’ that have transcended apartheid’s objectives and continue to forge a transformative space;

• The enduring poverty and inequality, the legacy of apartheid’s separation/s, and so forth.

So firstly, I will briefly overview what could be considered to be going well within south africa. at the outset it should be noted that many more people have access to clean water, sanitation, and housing than prior to 1994. Despite what some analysts call ‘native nostalgia’ (Dlamini, 2009) – analysing some people’s backwards-looking gaze towards the so-called better days of apartheid – the ANC has ‘delivered’ many social and economic goods (Marais, 2011: 1), albeit within a cultural context of rising expectations. it has reformed much of the public service, reallocating resources away from previous places of privilege, and instead towards the underprivileged. The anc has also succeeded by many international standards. A country that was close to economic bankruptcy in 1994 is now flourishing – and is a member of the Brics club! south africa has proven to be adept and successful at managing an economy along the lines of the so-called Washington consensus, combining that economic success with the design and development of an effective and adaptive social protection framework and system that is the envy of Africa. As a result there is significant flow of foreign investment, international tourism grows, and financial markets reward the nation. A key indicator of the success of south africa’s capacity to manage systems was the hosting of the 2010 World Cup – the first on the African continent. One of the participants within this research project, a senior practitioner from the community Development resource Association (CDRA), stated it very well, although with a clearly critical frame:

The ability of the south african state and government’s ability to operate systems is good. They have done extremely well doing what the world is shaped to do. Their macro economics is good – the fact that it creates more unemployment and more inequality is success – it is success, not failure – the models are out there, it is not an aberration. RSA was bankrupt in 1994 economically and it had this enormous expectation of delivery and these guys [ANC leaders] have jumped into management mode and have done it well in terms of the dominant paradigms. Unfortunately for me they don’t work. But you have to give credit; we have proved we can pull it out the hat in terms of infrastructure, stadiums … (CDRA, 2011, personal communication)


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so credit must be given, from within a particular paradigm.secondly, and the above participant’s narrative starts to venture into this

territory – in relation to the normal concerns of ‘development practice’, within South africa, poverty is enduring and development is uneven. unemployment grows and inequality stretches, and as acclaimed Kenyan author ngugi wa Thiong’o (2007: 760) aptly puts it: ‘potholes multiply and garbage mounts up’. Even more concerning is that South Africa’s Human Development Index (HDI) rating is heading downwards (Buhlungu et al., 2007: 2).2 However, for the purposes of this book, rather than list a whole heap of demonstrable statistics, all that really needs be said is that the great majority of south africans continue to experience profound levels of social distress and social suffering (Bourdieu, 1999). French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s notions of social distress and social suffering are alluded to as a way of highlighting the structural disjuncture that sits between people’s aspirations and the barriers that exist for people to realise their ‘life-projects’ (Blaser et al., 2004) and the felt pain resulting from that disjuncture. People’s aspirations, amplified since 1994, are being thwarted by the enduring trajectory of poverty and inequality (Seekings and Nattrass, 2006; Marais, 2011: 2). There is an increasing sense of social injury (Brown, 1995) that leads to frustration, humiliation and growing rage. in some places the rage is evidenced through phenomena such as increased violent crime and so called ‘service-delivery protests’ (Botes et al., 2008).

Thirdly, the post-apartheid context for development requires a sophisticated understanding of the complexity of the challenges. Development cannot be reduced to either economic, social, political, cultural or spiritual/moral factors. Clearly the enduring state of what Chilean economist Manfred Max-Neef (1991) calls ‘poverties’ requires an equally sophisticated understanding of the holistic and systemic nature of the challenge. for example, south africa’s development challenge has not emerged just from apartheid’s racial policies, but also from the ongoing exploitative class formations of a particular kind of capitalist development (Alexander, 2013; Andreasson, 2010; Marais, 2011; Mbeki, 2009). People interviewed within the research project argued for many kinds of analyses. for example, one senior practitioner argued that the main challenges facing South Africa are threefold, dealing with: (i) the failure to transform the education system; (ii) the failure of land reform; and (iii) the failure to transform patterns of corporate ownership and power. Another argued that South Africa lay at a key juncture at this historical moment, focusing on an analysis of the state – with one direction being where the state would fragment and slumber into failure; the other where the state would rise with the best and brightest of human resources.

Fourthly, the perspective of this book also takes into account that post-apartheid South Africa represents a post-conflict context. South Africa experienced many

2 albeit this decline in hDi is mainly due to the increase in hiv/aiDs and the associated decline in life expectancy, the loss of assets in looking after people with HIV and the phenomenon of young people, particularly girls having to leave school and become carers of people suffering, or survivors.


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Introduction 7

years of what can be considered as low-intensity warfare in which ongoing lines of separation were reinforced through state and non-state violent actions. fear was a constant companion amongst many constituencies (fear of the state–military nexus, fear of the unknown ‘others’, fear about the future). Such conditions also make contextual and particular demands of South African community development practice and theory. These demands sit within the realms of community healing or ‘memory-work’ (Harris, 2011), undoing the poverty of separation and fear, bridging social capital across racialised boundaries, communalising the trauma of violence (Jansen, 2009) and healing memories (Lapsley, 2012). Theorising the practice of community development within south africa therefore needs to incorporate an understanding that is inclusive of such analyses and perspectives. Good examples of work taking these issues into account would be the Community Peace Programme established in Cape Town (Froestad and Shearing, 2007), Michael Lapsley’s Institute of Healing Memories work (2012), and, drawing on a broader frame of integrating socio-economic and psycho-cultural elements, is the story of Bokfontein and the Community Works Programme (Langa and von Holt, 2011).

attuned to this perspective, community development would need to also sit within a conflict transformation framework. Taking into account literature on conflict management, resolution and transformation, this book frames social change through a conflict prism. Such an analysis leads to the proposition that the apartheid state was focused on managing escalating conflict and violence through myriad mechanisms. The late 1980s and early 1990s saw a process of conflict resolution leading to a ‘negotiated’ transition, with the new 1996 constitution providing the platform for genuine transformation. since this period south africa has been immersed in a process of conflict transformation whereby attitudes, practices and structures related to the legacy of apartheid are shifting. here issues of reparation, reconciliation and reconstruction therefore take place within a context of individual, social and structural change processes, or instead fail to do so, with accompanying social and political vulnerabilities arising. Some stakeholders resort back to a conflict management framework, utilising the discourse of transformation, while in fact drawing on an approach that puts displacement at its centre (for example, transformation equals displacing ‘whites’). Resorting to such a conflict management frame – that is, managing change processes, rather than engaging in deeper attitudinal, behavioural and structural change processes – is one easy way out, albeit potentially a route to more conflict. Other stakeholders of course resort to reactionary ways of undermining transformational change, focused on entrenching ‘white’ power, primarily in the economic sphere but also within the attitudinal–cultural sphere.

Finally, as a part of this context discussion I also briefly point to the concerns around the lived experience of indigenous people in south africa. reorienting community development practice in a way that it re-centres indigenous people ensures that a crucial frame of reference for theorising and practice is an understanding of ongoing processes of colonisation and decolonisation. Within


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south africa an understanding of colonisation and decolonisation is very complex and needs to take into account both the clashes between European expansion and bantu people – see for example the account by Noel Mostert in Frontiers (1992) of clashes between Xhosa and European peoples – and also the legacy of the original inhabitants such as the broadly termed Khoi and San peoples (Prah, 2013).

leaning in a slightly different direction, for authors such as guardiola-Rivera, South Africa, like many places in the world, is in the midst of a ‘war’ of paradigms, namely between an industrial and indigenous paradigm (guardiola-Rivera, 2010). The industrial paradigm represents unfettered expansion of modernity (Bauman, 2011), ‘globalisation from above’, developmentality (Deb, 2009), capitalist surplus accumulation (Harvey, 2012), control over natural resources and so forth. community development, when aligned to such a paradigm becomes simply a tool of modernity’s impulse and trajectory; primarily a concern of economic growth and modernisation, albeit at a more local level. community development, then, focuses on what can be described as first order social change: enabling people to ‘survive’ the current capitalist economic system through practices such as micro-finance, attracting tourists into their community, and the development of small and medium sized business. alternatively, community development, when ‘guided’ by an indigenous or decolonisation paradigm, is enacted by radical and robust practices such as resistance to (some) aspects of modernity, reconnection to nature/mother earth, revitalisation of the commons, and humanisation. The focus would be more on what can be understood as second order social change attempting to challenge the fundamental ordering of capitalist political economy. Theorising the practice of community development within south africa requires discernment around which paradigms are framing practice, either consciously or unconsciously. The question arises, has community development become a part of modernity, or is it still a practice that incorporates at least some element of resistance?

This indigenous versus industrial paradigm also alludes to Polanyi’s (1944) seminal work, understood through his lens as the first movement: orienting the research methodologically to examine both the way modernity and capitalism continue to expand, commodifying social spaces; followed by counter-movements to this process, as people cooperatively and relationally attempt to accommodate and/or resist the first movement. From the perspective of this research project, and theorising the practice of community development, such a frame enables examination of community development practices which complement and align with modernity and capitalism, contributing to the expansion of commodification (for example, community development practices focused on attracting investment and creating jobs within a neoliberal frame). However, the research also examines community development practices which offer an alternative, and/or resist modernity and capitalist expansion, through for example, social mobilisation or the creation of autonomous spaces.

it is into such a context that community development practice is one contributor amongst many of social change work approaches. Community development


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Introduction 9

practitioners sit alongside lawyers, educators, unionists, activists and others in utilising different traditions, approaches and methods of social change. it should also be noted that whilst this book focuses on community development practice within South Africa I understand community development work as a small humble contributor to social change. from the perspective of a more macro or national level, particularly drawing on more state and economic centric orthodox views of development, community development would appear to be marginal. it would be easy to argue that the core ‘developmental process’ of South Africa is being worked out within the class-based struggles represented by mining and agricultural related worker struggles. Here is endogenous development at its crux, as South African workers struggle for their fair share of the surplus generated by the capitalist development trajectory of one of the BRICS nations (Forslund, 2013). The 2012 Marikana minor workers strike, and accompanying state-led violence, was a crucial moment in highlighting these ongoing class-based struggles (Pillay, 2013).

In contrast most community development work occurs at the margins, among what has been previously described as surplus people (Bauman, 2004). And I tend to agree. however, from less orthodox development perspectives, those that are more oriented towards the post-structural and post-development, (esteva, 1987; McMichael, 2010) (see Chapter 2 for more discussion) community development represents an important people-centred tradition of social solidarity (Sennett, 2012), one that experiments with social change initially on a small-scale, but which can grow significantly with appropriate inputs and support, and also offer visions and actions of ‘contested development’ (McMichael, 2010). McMichael’s vision coincides with neville alexander’s vision for community development, as per my quotes earlier within the chapter.

This research and writing project seeks to speak to the community development contribution for social change work within South Africa, offering an appreciative and critical analysis of what is occurring. however, before engaging in the main body of the book, a brief overview of the current state of play of community development within south africa is now provided.

The Current state of Play of Community Development in south africa

While the previous section oriented the reader towards the context of south africa, and also briefly provided a sense of the perspective offered by this book, this next section discusses the historical and contemporary use of community development within South Africa. It starts with a brief historical overview and then briefly considers the current policy, programme and professionalisation context.

A Brief Historical Perspective

Frik de Beer and Hennie Swanepoel (1998: 2) provide a very useful overview of the history of community development, tracing it back to the various claims


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made about community development within the usa and india. for some commentators the origins of community development were in the early 1900s within the usa. however, this has been contested and most commentators now agree that the origins of what would be recognised as some kind of orthodox community development are India, particularly in the 1920s. This work started with the Institute for Rural Reconstruction and flourished under the Gandhian rural reconstruction experiment of the 1930s (ibid.: 2). Importantly, such work was then institutionalised within the British Colonial Office, both within India, and then in their African colonies in the 1940s (Maistry, 2012: 30). As de Beer and Swanepoel (1998: 2) say, ‘By the end of the 1940s, the term “community development” was in use worldwide’.

While acknowledging the official use of the term Community Development, as per P.W. Botha’s appointment as the minister of community Development and coloured affairs, according to de Beer and swanepoel, community development was never really popular within south africa. it was mistrusted by those in government due to its potential for political change (de Beer and swanepoel, 1998; Maistry, 2012: 31). After the then named Department of Cooperation and Development was tasked with studying the international experience of community development, the apartheid regime initiated a series of efforts within the former homelands, embedded within the policy of separate development. returning to my experience as a new practitioner arriving in south africa in 1994, accounted for within the Preface, this was the suspicion-laden historical context i arrived into.

however, while government mistrust and misuse of community development took place, other traditions of ‘unofficial’ or popular community development were seeding and flowering (Maistry, 2012: 32). There has been a long tradition of ngo, civic, church and labour organisation for community development within South Africa. Organic forms of self-help and mutual aid work such as Stokvels (self-help savings and loans groups/burial saving societies) proliferated. From the 1920s Gandhi deeply influenced forms of community organising within South Africa (Goswami, 2009). During the 1970s more experimental and radical forms of community development oriented towards adult education also emerged through the work of Steve Biko’s drawing on Paulo Freire’s philosophy and practice (Mangcu, 2012).

Since the 1990s community development has flourished, with the activities representing a range of different community development traditions and frameworks, which is the focus of my analysis captured within chapters 3 and 4. A brief overview is however provided now.

Current Policy Context

As already stated, 2003 provided a watershed moment for official community development with the then President Thabo Mbeki announcing the formation of a National Community Development Programme. This was officially launched in 2005 and since then there has been a proliferation within the discursive field


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Introduction 11

of community development. This has culminated with more recent pushes to develop a National Community Development Policy Framework. This latter task and process has been led, or facilitated by, the National Department of social Development from 2008 through to 2013, and at the time of writing is still unfinished.

Sitting behind the development of such a policy have been significant efforts to understand international, national and sectoral policies relevant to community development. for example, the Department of social Development conducted an audit of policies relevant to community development in 2008, and many of their findings are well summarised in the article, ‘The institutionalisation of community development in democratic South Africa’ (Luka and Maistry, 2012). such a national community development policy is also situated within a broader legal policy context. Some key policies include The South Africa Constitution and a Bill of rights, The White Paper for Welfare services of 1997 and The White Paper for local government 1998. This policy context leads to what many community development workers I have talked to call an ‘enabling environment’. There is recognition that at a legislative and policy level there are many reasons to celebrate – the state has been heading in the right direction creating a context for effective community development work.

Having briefly outlined the policy terrain the programme context is now also briefly discussed.

Current Programme Context

firstly, there has been a proliferation of sectoral government-led community work and development initiatives, focusing on particular sectors or issues; for example, agricultural extension work, community health nurses, adult education work, and the very successful ‘care groups’, an initiative of health officials. This has continued beyond the 1990s into the present.

some other important community development programmes, albeit focused on service delivery, include the integrated sustainable rural Development and urban renewal Programmes, both of which aim to promote coordinated service delivery across all spheres of government to improve the lives of very poor communities. There is also the Extended Public Works Programme which aims to create job opportunities while the participants are gaining skills for further placement in various long-term jobs in the industry.

Also, during the 2000s another kind of community development has emerged from the state, one which could be understood as place-based or generic community development. The two main ones are the already mentioned national Community Development Worker Programme, an initiative managed by the Department of cooperative governance and Traditional affairs, and the national community Development Programme situated as a sub-directorate within the national Department of social Development. Both of these can be characterised as ideally focused not so much on predetermined sectoral concerns or issues, but


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rather concerns or issues emerging from the local place-oriented context. ideally, the latter programme determines these concerns, actions and potential initiatives using community-based planning processes (combined with the sustainable Livelihoods Approach); and the former through processes of household profiling, establishing local municipal participation structures and building local capacity to engage with government stakeholders. Part IV of this book focuses heavily on research conducted within these two programmes.

moving on from state-led processes there continues to be a tradition of ngo-led community development focused on service-delivery using participatory understandings of development. An example would be Mvula Trust’s work fast tracking delivery of sustainable water and sanitation services to communities, drawing heavily on Robert Chamber’s (1983; 2008) philosophy and techniques of participatory development. Others could be identified particularly within the housing field, health, adult education, youth and so forth.

as we will see in chapter 3 other traditions of community development also continue to flourish or flounder. I do not discuss them here to avoid repetition.

Training and Professionalisation Context

accompanying the current community development policy and programme proliferation is also an increasing focus on training and professionalisation of community development workers and practice. A 2012 edition of Africanus – a journal dedicated to South African Development Studies – was dedicated to exploring the issues involved in such professionalisation. The national Department of social Development, at the time of writing, was facilitating the development of a community Development occupation category within the Department of labour, and standards for community development practitioners within the social service Professions Policy have been articulated. The Department of Public service Management has been tasked to regulate the community development field. With leadership coming from the social Development Department, in collaboration with key individuals, there is also a ‘push’ to formalise a Community Development association and even potentially create a community Development council.

Linked to such professionalisation agendas is the upgrading and standardisation of community development training and education. again, the Department of Social Development has taken the lead and, in 2012, working with the South African Qualification Authority (SAQA) and the Department of Higher Education and Training, has accredited both National Qualification Framework (NQF) levels four and five certificates in community development and NQF level eight bachelor’s degrees in community development. at the time of writing, this department was working with numerous universities around the country to develop and implement both qualifications.

Such an agenda is linked to a particular analysis of the status of community development within South Africa. In attending a June 2013 workshop the Community


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Introduction 13

Development Chief Director (within the National Department of Social Development), argued that:

• community development is only an emerging discipline that is not yet fully recognised or accredited as an occupation or profession;

• Community development practitioners are not adequately skilled;• Due to the multi-sectoral nature of community development, facilitated

by numerous government departments, there is a plethora of definitions, leading to confusion;

• There is an absence of standardisation, which blocks the development of career pathways;

• community development is currently dominated by a ‘service-delivery’ mentality or approach, with a limited focus on actual empowerment;

• The practice is inappropriately resourced and is therefore not making its potential contribution to development;

• There is, as yet, no association or professional body.

This analysis has galvanised on-going efforts to address each point with a growing network of people, endeavouring to build a recognised and formidable ‘community of practice’.

Chapters of Book

I now briefly outline what each chapter contributes to the research-writing project.Part I of the book consists of chapters 1–2 and lays the foundation for the

research monograph. Chapter 1 of the book discusses the approach to theorising and practice within this book. As per the title, the focus of the book, whilst wanting to provide an appreciative and critical analysis of community development within south africa, focuses more particularly on the theorising of practice that emerges from that appreciative and critical analysis.

chapter 2 outlines the multiple methodologies employed in this research and also discusses my horizon as a researcher. as stated within this introduction the primary research questions are, ‘how are the poor organising themselves using various forms of community development?’ or, in some cases, ‘How are the state or other non-state actors attempting to organise, engage or accompany the poor through community development?’ and ‘How is the practice of community development theorised inductively, drawing on answers to the previous questions?’ The first two questions align with what Raj Patel (2009) argues is the core work of social science, that is, understanding how the poor are organising themselves. i do however add to this what I understand as a second major task of social science, which is to also understand how the powerful are organising themselves (often, but not always, against the poor) in attempts to entrench their own interests. The first part of the chapter discusses both the overall frame for the research methodology,


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namely bricolage, and also the more orthodox social science methods that are utilised. The second part of the chapter discusses my horizon as researcher and author ensuring that the reader is aware of my perspective.

Part II of the book draws on the conceptual ideas of traditions and frameworks as a way of examining the kinds of community development practices being drawn upon within south africa.

chapter 3 provides a ‘reading’ of community development history and contemporary practice within south africa through the conceptual lens of ‘traditions’ (Campfens, 1997; Westoby and Hope-Simpson, 2011). This chapter both carefully introduces the reader to those key concepts and discusses the findings of the historical and contemporary analysis of community development. Traditions such as social guidance, social mobilising and social learning are considered as well as linkages with the specific work of people such as S. Biko and m. gandhi.

chapter 4 then provides a ‘reading’ of community development history and contemporary practice within south africa through the conceptual lens of frameworks. As per the previous chapter the reader is carefully introduced to those key concepts and then findings are discussed. Examples of frameworks utilised-in-action include community-led development, assets-based community development and the sustainability livelihood approach.

Part III of the book focuses on the monograph’s findings in relation to community-based organisations’ (CBOs) and non-government organisations’ (NGOs) community development work. This part of the book has been structured into five chapters (chapters 5–9), each discussing in detail a case study of practice relevant to the ‘pathway’ mentioned – that is, educational, economic, socio-cultural and so forth. Each chapter also articulates the findings in relation to particular community development practices, such as micro-method, structuring the work, and group analysis.

Chapter 5 considers the significance of community development addressing educational issues within south africa. many interviews highlight the importance of education as a vehicle of social change within south africa, and yet the educational system continues to be in crisis 20 years after the end of apartheid. The chapter particularly focuses on the case study of the hantam community education Trust, an exemplary piece of community practice located in the rural Karoo area of the eastern and northern cape. The chapter locates its story in the context of the educational crisis of South Africa, and also the literature that links community development and education. Finally the chapter discusses some key elements of the case study relevant to community development practice focusing on the micro work of relational, communicative practices alongside collective forms of transformative leadership.

Chapter 6 considers the significance of community development addressing social cohesion issues within south africa. The chapter particularly focuses on the case study of the nelson mandela foundation, using community conversations methodology to address issues of hiv and also social cohesion. The chapter


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Introduction 15

locates the story of this work in the context of the xenophobia crisis of South Africa, and also the literature that links community development and social cohesion work. Finally the chapter discusses some key elements of the case study relevant to community development practice focusing on the processes of community analysis.

Chapter 7 considers the significance of community development addressing economic issues within south africa. The chapter particularly focuses on the case study of The abalimi home and community garden initiative, an exemplary story located in the Cape Flats area of Western Cape. The Abalimi Initiative works with 3000 plus women creating economic and livelihood initiatives. The chapter locates their story in the context of the unemployment crisis of south africa, and also the literature that links community development and local economic development. Finally the chapter discusses some key elements of the case study relevant to community development practice such as locating practice within an action learning-action research frame.

Chapter 8 considers the linkages between community development and political practices focusing on the case study of the southern cape land committee, based within the Western and eastern cape. The story is located within the ongoing challenges of farm workers and land reform within South Africa and also unpacks the community development practices known as meta-level work, that is, the building of networks, coalitions and federations to tackle trans-local issues.

Chapter 9, the final CBO/NGO-oriented chapter, focuses on the linkages between community development and youth/gender issues. The chapter tells the story of the south african ymca Better life options Programme, one focused on the ‘girl-child’, adolescent reproductive health and rights. The story also provides a context to consider the challenges of scaling-up (Chambers, 2005b) or scaling-across (Wheatley and Freize, 2011) good practice, community-based education and the idea of community development as a craft.

The Interlude – in dialogue with Es’kia – focuses on community development processes. The chapter departs from the empirical research and instead enters into an analysis of a piece of text about community development from the writings of South African exile and activist Es’kia (Mphahlele, 2002).

Part IV of the book considers the research findings in relation to state-led community development, particularly the national community Development Programme (CDWP) and also the Community Development Practitioner Programme (CDPP).

chapter 10 focuses on the ‘dilemmatic space’ of state-employed community development workers. The chapter traces the long tradition of government-led community development and provides some appreciative and critical analysis. Crucial concepts, such as ‘dilemmatic space’ (Hoggert et al., 2009) are carefully considered and then interpretive data, particularly from interviews, are discussed. The chapter particularly reports on the political challenges of working as a state employee.


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chapter 11 considers my investigation into the interaction between supply-oriented state-led community development and cooperative formation. cooperative formation is a crucial element of the south african national development plan and has been well integrated into the national community development programmes. The chapter considers the challenges of state-led strategies such as cooperative formation particularly when linked into a supply-oriented chain.

The third and final chapter of Part IV, Chapter 12, focuses on training of community practitioners within government departments. again the focus is on the national cDW programme training. again the literature on training and community development is explored, the findings are reported and discussion then considers the crucial issues relevant to community development training within South Africa. These discussions are also linked to the current debates taking place within South Africa in relation to community development as an official occupation, standards and what i refer to as the ‘architecture of professionalism’ (de Beer and Swanepoel, 2012).

Finally, the Conclusion engages with some key points of discussion emerging from the overall findings, particularly in relation to theorising the practice of community development. in summary this theorising consists of four dimensions: firstly, that community development is a practice; secondly, that it is helpful to imagine community development practice as immersion in an ‘event’ or/and ‘story’; thirdly, that community development practice requires a particular kind of practitioner ‘practice wisdom’; and fourthly, this research has distilled a particular set of community development practices.


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ParT i approach to the research Project

Part I of the book consists of chapters 1–2 and lays the foundation for the research monograph. chapter 1 discusses the approach to theorising and practice within this book. As per the title, the focus of the book, whilst wanting to provide an appreciative and critical analysis of community development within south africa, focuses more particularly on the theorising of practice that emerges from that appreciative and critical analysis.

chapter 2 outlines the multiple methodologies employed in this research and also discusses my horizon as a researcher. The first part of the chapter discusses both the overall frame for the research methodology, namely bricolage, and also the more orthodox social science methods that are utilised. The second part of the chapter discusses my horizon as researcher and author ensuring that the reader is aware of my perspective.


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chapter 1

Theorising the Practice of community Development

Considering the title of the book, this chapter briefly discusses what ‘theorising’ and ‘practice’ mean as they relate to community development, orienting the reader to a particular set of perspectives. Both are considered in turn.

on Theorising

In the same way that the analytical framework described within the Introduction is indebted to chabal and Daloz’s Africa Works (1999), this section is highly indebted to both the philosopher H.G. Gadamer’s work and also Chabal’s thoughts from The End of Conceit: Western Rationality after Postcolonialism (2012).

My first comment is that being aligned to a dialogical tradition, my task of theorising, researching and writing is primarily hermeneutical. This is understood as an interpretive process of seeing and understanding the field of community development writing and practice within south africa. The research project has in no way set out to use a universal scientific method to examine or research community development within south africa, thereby creating the theory of community development as per Weyers (2011). Instead, a theoretical attitude (Gadamer, 1998: xxix) towards the idea of ‘community development’ as a whole has been applied, trying to make sense of the experience and observation of community development, whilst also recognising that ‘making sense of’ requires a philosophical and historical approach. in a sense then the theorising alludes to gadamer’s notion of ‘bearing witness to’ practices of community development, combined with the equivalent of ‘contemplation’ (Gadamer, 1998: 21). Within this two-step frame, community development practice is theorised through ‘bearing witness’, that is, getting close to people doing it, and getting close to stories accounting for the practice, and then writing carefully about it – ever conscious of the language used as an interpretive tool. The ‘contemplative’ dimension recognises that, as researcher, a distancing is also needed, requiring a critical and reflective pause. In research practice this means not simply taking what people say or do at face value, but recognising that their saying and doing itself represents a limited perspective – a horizon so to speak.

However, the research perspective offered in this book goes a step further, arguing that the theorising is also informed by the notion of a ‘theory of uncertain theories’ (Chabal, 2012: 255), whereby the theorising task works on an


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assumption that community development only works under certain conditions, whilst also understanding that we rarely can know or replicate those conditions. What remains is a theorising exercise that is ever-contingent, only enabling people to ‘muddle’ along in their community development practice even if ever conscious of useful theory. Hence, a researcher–writer can only have limited goals in theorising community development practice within south africa (or anywhere for that matter). While the research recounted within this book should illuminate much practice wisdom, it will not answer questions such as ‘how do we ensure community development is effective?’ (a question many people like to ask – remember the MIT professor?). It can only illuminate that, under certain conditions, combined with particular practices, community development efforts are more likely to lead to outcomes that people seek.

The theorising also ensures that a more inductive approach is brought to the research. The research has not started with a set of hypothesis that has then been tested (deductive), albeit some of my assumptions and subjectivities are made (or will be made) transparent. Instead an inductive approach has been foregrounded, building a theoretical architecture from the careful examination of some community development practice. Put another way, the research work has aimed for a ‘thick description’ of community development practice (alluding to clifford gertz notion of ‘thick’ analysis).

Despite these caveats on theorising, I do hope to help policy makers and practitioners alike to be clearer about what inputs, conditions and practices are more likely to see community development efforts among the poor succeed in achieving particular goals – with full awareness that the goals themselves are one of the most historically and contextually constructed, and therefore, contested elements within that hope. i am also ever conscious that uncertainty remains due to the impossible number of contingent variables at work in any social situation that community development work occurs within. So, I am not making a case for evidence-based practice – bolstering the arsenal of results-oriented managers and policy makers. Instead a case is being made for a community development practice that is conceptualised as conscious-as-possible muddling-along, always responsive to the situation at hand while cognisant of the theories that might help.

Finally, in my reflections on theorising, Chabal’s four dimensional framework of how social science can be reimagined are attended to. firstly, my assumptions are made explicit. This was initiated within the introductory chapter but is expanded upon within chapter 2. secondly, my inevitable subjectivities are also elucidated. if not clear yet, i am a white middle-aged male, english born, but australian by citizenship (my family migrated there when I was 13 years old). I have worked on and off within South Africa over a 20-year period whilst also working in myriad other contexts, including australia, vanuatu, india, the Philippines and Papua New Guinea. Additionally, I bring a background of having been a community practitioner for 18 years prior to engaging with academic endeavours (which i have been now doing for the past several years). And my aspirations are to write a book that contributes to the kind of practice wisdom alluded to above. Thirdly,


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Theorising the Practice of Community Development 21

there are clear limits to the theorising this book hopes to achieve. Without repeating what has already been stated, the limits are those of social science as a whole – to construct a contextually, historically and contingently understood notion of south african community development practice. fourthly, the choice of language is central to this project. The earlier discussion on double stories itself alludes to the power of language in interpreting what is seen in the field. Does a researcher see suffering or resilience; does a researcher see success or failure? Whatever is seen is then written or spoken about using language that itself moves with history. for example, doesn’t max-neef’s notion of poverties as opposed to poverty not shape the very nature of investigation? Of course, for although the two words are essentially only different grammatically – plural and singular – that difference is powerful in shaping research and then writing. Therefore, this theorising project attempts to become attuned to the language deployed to understand and talk about community development practice within south africa.

on Practice

attention to practice is also crucial to this research project. again, stating my subjectivity upfront, practice in its most obvious and simple form is what people do – but I like to think of it ideally as ‘skilful means’. Ideally it is not just what people do but also what thoughtful and empathic people using community development theory reflectively and reflexively do in subtle and skilful ways.

However, at a more complex level, practice for community development, like practice in many people-centred ‘professions’, requires more substantial thinking. To do this I have engaged with the work of Dublin based academic-philosopher Joseph Dunne, with a particular emphasis on his notion of ‘professional wisdom’. In my following reflections about the practice of community development I am either explicitly or implicitly drawing on some of this work.

Firstly, like Dunne, when using the notion of practice I allude to what can be understood as a MacIntyrean perspective (1984). Drawing on this lineage, Dunne (2011: 14) refers to practice as:

… a more or less coherent and complex set of activities that has evolved cooperatively and cumulatively over time, and that exists most significantly in the community of those who are its practitioners – so long as they are committed to sustaining and developing its internal goods and its proper standards of excellence.

nevertheless, i would add the above refers to an ideal of practice. such a definition of practice suits community development alluding to a long ‘tradition’ of practice that has accumulated knowledge and skills (depositories of knowledge would include journals, web-sites; and skills would include those acquired at workshops, university courses, on-the-job and so forth), and also to various forms


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of ‘communities of practice’ such as associations, co-operatives, standard bodies, networks, and professional bodies.

Returning to the definition above, by internal goods Dunne means both: (i) the ‘desirable outcomes characteristically aimed at through a practice’ (ibid.: 14). For example, and related to community development, they might include: collective processes of social change, increased confidence and capacities for a group, further achievement of human rights, and a project initiated to the satisfaction of the participants (and one can see that the issue of desirable outcome is one of the most contested and complex issues within community development theory and practice); and, (ii) the kinds of internal goods that ‘reside within the practitioners themselves’ (ibid.: 14), such as the competencies of a community worker, and also the kinds of virtues required of the practitioner (such as patience, humility, tenacity and care). For Dunne, while such internal goods are the constitutive core of a practice, there are also external goods, mainly to do with pay, standards, recognition, or what a colleague and i have previously called the ‘architecture of the profession’ (Westoby and Shevellar, forthcoming). It should be noted that at its best, the external goods, or institutional structures of community development, can serve the practices’ internal goods. however, there is often substantial compromise as the former colonises the latter.

such a conceptualisation of ‘practice’ can also be distinguished from aristotle’s original notion of praxis, which Dunne argues refers to:

the open set of activities through which one strove to live a worthwhile life in the light of some conception of the overall human goods, or of flourishing as the ultimate goal of all one’s living; and one did this precisely not as an expert in any particular field – and, if in any role, simply as a citizen … (Dunne, 2011: 15)

It’s of importance to say here, that within the field of community development practice can be understood to instantiate both of these senses of practice: on the one hand, as an enclave of specialised community development theory and practice; and on the other hand, as an enclave of non-specialist human endeavour to bring social change through citizen effort. i have in previous writing alluded to community development as both a professional and citizen project to encompass this full and inclusive understanding of practice (see Westoby and Dowling, 2013). Within this book an inclusive framework is also utilised recognising the role of both professional community development workers and also citizens who understand themselves as community workers, but the focus of the research task was primarily on professional community workers.

secondly, practice of community development needs to be informed by a clear notion of the kinds of knowledge that people-oriented practices ideally embody. for Dunne, such people-oriented practices primarily draw on ‘practical knowledge/rationality’ and contrast it with the acquisition and use of technical knowledge (see Westoby and Shevellar, 2012: 19). He refers to it as ‘practical


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Theorising the Practice of Community Development 23

wisdom’ (Dunne, 2011: 17), a topic that will be explored more in the Conclusion chapter of this book.

finally, practice drawing on theory can be imagined ideally as both reflective and reflexive. It is reflective in the sense that a practitioner is able to pause and contemplatively check as to whether what they are doing is what they intended to do. Questions can be asked: ‘is the practice what I intended it to be?’; ‘is space opening up for diversity and plurality?’; ‘am I responding carefully to this unanticipated event?’ Moreover, practice that integrates a theoretical attitude is also reflexive practice, understood as going that one step beyond theory–practice congruency (a question of intention and reflective capacity), and adds to the process a questioning of theoretical assumptions – such as awareness of the eventful-like and story-like realities of a community development process.1

however, and this is the crux of it, researching community development practice entails observing the potential for such ideal practice, but also incorporating, or seeing what people actually do, and even being open to the possibilities that the ideal type discussed above is constricting. in this sense, theorising the practice of community development, with a focus on south africa, also alludes to some deeper challenges of practice. For example, as will become clear within this book, much of South African community development practice is deeply influenced by the ‘external goods’ of practice, particularly the institutional and organisational structures that shape the work. The institutional structures – government monitoring regimes, donors’ requirements of evidence and results, the motivations of joining the community development profession as a career move – lead to a practice regime that does not necessarily embody the kinds of practical wisdom, or reflective/reflexive practice described above. Practice can quickly be reduced to practices of compliance, of recipes and procedures, whereby the particular is subsumed within the general, and practice-proofed practitioners are sought and rewarded! Theorising the practice of community development then becomes a fraught exercise, influenced by my own subjectivities and perspectives on what, for example, makes a desirable end for community development work.

such a sentence provides an apt spot to turn to the next chapter, one that explores both the methodology of the research and also explicates some of my subjectivities and perspectives.

1 It should be noted that the idea of reflexive is used in different discipline fields in completely different ways. For example, psychology often uses the idea of reflexive to mean action without reflection, driven by patterns/complexes and so forth.


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chapter 2

research methodology and the researcher horizon

Introduction

as articulated within the introduction the primary research questions are, ‘how are the poor organising themselves using various forms of community development?’ or, in some cases, ‘how are state or other non-state actors attempting to organise, engage or accompany the poor through community development?’ and ‘how is the practice of community development theorised inductively, drawing on answers to the previous question?’ In exploring these research questions within a hermeneutical tradition, the idea of bricolage was utilised to provide the overall frame, alongside more orthodox research methods.

Bricolage

an idea popularised by the great french anthropologist claude levi-strauss, bricolage is associated with the bricoleur, ‘a tinker, an improviser working with what was at hand, cobbling together solutions to both practical and aesthetical problems’ (Wilcksen, 2010: 249). The idea accurately and aptly describes how I have approached the overall task. Bricolage as a method rests on the epistemological assumption that no single body of data can provide the ‘truth’ about community development within south africa. That is, within south africa there can be no exactitude when thinking about, or researching community development theory and practice. Ultimately there is no agreed upon definition of community development, nor is it necessarily helpful to try to find one. From a researcher’s perspective, what is more important, or more interesting, is how community development theory and practice is deployed as an idea, and in action.

community development, as should already be clear from my writing, eludes definition because it takes a variety of forms, and draws on various traditions, traces and frameworks. Furthermore, community development operates in the world of dreams and aspirations as well as materiality and action. community development then needs to be understood historically, discursively and materially and in terms of the latter, it might be best to think about community development, like Brent (2009), as ‘being conjured’ and as per comments in the concluding chapter, as a story and an event. Such an approach builds on the thinking of several key theorists. For example, Wittgenstein (1976: 41) argues that, ‘[inexact] does


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not mean unusable’. it is not inexactitude that gives words or ideas their meaning, but their use and the practices enveloped within that use. in a similar vein, young argues that it is often a Western desire to conceptualise things ‘together into a unity, to formulate a representation of the whole, the totality’ (Young, 1990: 39). Such a desire reaches towards definition, towards easy compartmentalisation, which goes against the trajectory of this work, undermining a space for heterogeneity and difference within understandings of community development.

Furthermore, philosophers such as Derrida remind us that any ‘signified concept is never present in and of itself, in a sufficient presence that would refer only to itself … every concept is inscribed in a chain or a system within which it refers to the other, to other concepts, by means of the systematic play of differences’ (Derrida, 1982: 11). Such a conceptual frame leads to a more nuanced basis for ‘reading’ what is occurring in terms of community development practice within South Africa. Definitions of community development do not have an a priori existence, but are continually being created and struggled over in relationship to other ideas and concepts. in some ways, south africa is the perfect place to locate such an approach to research about community development. The story in the Preface, in which i was told that i should not introduce myself as a community development practitioner, is illustrative of the complex struggle surrounding community development discourse and practice.

orthodox methods of Data Collection

However, drawing on more traditional social science ideas – contextualised by the idea of bricolage – the main methods employed in this research and writing project are now briefly articulated. The methods can be described in the context of discussing the three stages of: (i) desk research; (ii) in-depth interviews and focus groups; and (iii) case study documentation. These orthodox research methods sat alongside an interpretive ‘meaning making’ tradition which also included autobiographical reflection on several years of personal experience of community development practice within south africa consisting of volunteer work, consulting, paid employment and participation in numerous workshops and conferences about community development.

Stage One: Desk Research

Stage one of the research task involved a systematic review of previously published work – journal articles, book chapters and grey literature – on community development and associated work within South Africa. This involved many hours of work, searching libraries, databases and journals. A rich tapestry of writing was accumulated providing historical depth and contemporary breadth.


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Research Methodology and the Researcher Horizon 27

Stage Two: In-depth Interviews and Focus Groups

Stage two consisted of two cohorts of interviews. The first cohort was composed of key informants involved in community development either as experienced practitioners or long-term observers of development and social change work. The second cohort consisted of current community development workers and practitioners within the national Community Development Worker Programme within the free state and Western cape1 and several districts of the community Development Practitioner Programme of the free state Department of social Development.

Within the first cohort (experienced practitioners, or long-term observers) 15 people were interviewed and the sample criteria included: approximately five from government related community development initiatives, five from academic or training institutions and five from NGO/CBO contexts; each person interviewed had a minimum of 10 years’ experience, ensuring they had a historical perspective and also ample time to reflect critically on their own practice and also the practice context; they were able to speak English, enabling the researcher to conduct the interviews himself; they were representative of at least four provinces, ensuring some national perspective was provided.

Within the second cohort, 30 people were interviewed and several also participated in focus groups. The sample criterion for this cohort consisted of: each person had worked/was currently working within either the national CDW or CDP programmes and had a minimum of two years’ experience (providing some time to reflect critically on their own practice and also the practice context); they were able to speak English; and that they were representative of at least two provinces, ensuring some comparative perspective was provided.

For the first cohort, a snowballing approach to sampling was utilised. Drawing on my personal networks which have been accumulated over 18 years of working in south africa, people were contacted for interviews. each of these contacts was, at the time of their interview, also asked if they knew of anyone else that met the sample criteria and might be open to an interview.

for the second cohort, cDWs and cDPs were accessed either via the provincial government coordinators/managers or networks developed through provision of training to cDWs and cDPs. individuals were approached initially through email and phone calls. The research project aims were explained to each potential participant along with the ‘guidelines’.2

1 This included collaboration with Rubert van Blerk, with him conducting interviews of cDWs in the Western cape.

2 Guidelines refer to participant knowledge and understanding that:• Participation was voluntary;• That each interview would be recorded by taking notes;• They would be able to withdraw their support at any time of the research project;• They would be de-identified within the transcription process;


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Additional research relevant to Chapter 12 – focused on training of CDWs – included a discursive analysis of training documents and reports relevant to the CDW programme, a focus group with six more community development workers, an interview with a trainer into the cDW programme and a further interview with the manager of the Free State Programme. Finally, the research included reflection on two days of in-service training provided for 30 cDWs by the researcher (in March 2011).

relevant documents were accessed from the national web site (community Development Unit), such as A Handbook for Community Development Workers (2007), Grassroots Innovation: A Guide for Communities about Community Development Workers (2007), and The Free State Province Five-year Master Plan (2010) and modularised training documents.

for chapter 12, research was also conducted in the Western cape as well as the free state. interviews were conducted using a purposeful sampling process ensuring representation from various wards in the free state province. in the Western Cape a convenient sampling was taken out of two districts, one rural and one urban. Personal notes were also taken throughout the facilitated training process. all of the interviews, and the focus group were conducted face-to-face. The interviews and focus group were transcribed and analysed manually. several colleagues and respondents read and commented on the initial findings.

Stage Three: Case Studies

The third stage and method involved collecting case studies of innovative community development practice. The researcher engaged both secondary literature and conducted primary fieldwork. Again, this fieldwork included two cohorts of study. The first cohort consisted of examining case studies of work initiated by the state-employed cDWs or cDPs discussed above. The cDPs took me into the field and we visited six cooperatives. Overall, approximately 30 members were engaged in storytelling and group discussions.

The cooperatives engaged with ranged from worker through to financial service cooperatives. The longevity of the cooperatives ranged from being established only two years ago through to being 14 years old. in all cases one of the two government-led cDW or cDP community development programmes had been substantially involved in inception or ongoing support. This research is reported in in chapter 11.

The second cohort was of NGO-led work, identified by the researcher as exemplary community development practice. These stories or case studies were

• The transcript would be sent to them for validation – to check that the transcription is accurate;• There would be no remuneration for participation (either financial or other);• Digital recordings would be kept in a password accessible only computer, and that any printed copies will be kept in a locked file cabinet.


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accessed through the personal relationships of the researcher. my choice of these case studies in no way indicated that there were no other exemplary sites of practices. They simply reflected my choice based on knowledge and relationships. These NGO-oriented case studies are the focus of Part III of the book and include: The hantam education Trust; The nelson mandela centre of memory; The abalimi home and community garden movement; The southern cape land committee; and The south african ymca.

Data analysis

all of the interviews, informal discussions and focus groups were conducted face-to-face. a semi-structured interview guide was used to acquire quality information in a flexible way without losing track of desired key issues (Berg, 2001; Fossey et al., 2002). In relation to the community workers, questions were asked both about everyday work and also the successes, tensions and difficulties they experienced within their roles. The interviews and focus group were transcribed and analysed manually with a thematic analysis (Maxwell, 2005: 96–7), identifying organisational, substantive and theoretical issues.

Data analysis was conducted drawing on an appreciative inquiry framework, looking for both the positive experiences of community work, but also identifying participants’ critical feedback.

ethical Considerations

There were several dilemmas that the research project was confronted with. Whilst, due to limited space, they cannot be discussed in depth, these included: recruiting participants in a way that interviewees did not fear reprisal from their managers; ensuring that reporting of all findings would be unidentifiable; ensuring participants understood i was conducting research as an engaged scholar (not an evaluator); and, also taking into account my positionality as a white researcher that is shaped by complex historical patterns of relating.

It should also be noted that the researcher has no formal links with the national community development worker or practitioner programmes, nor any of the ngos involved.

finally, both the university of free state faculty of humanities ethical review committee and several south african government departments provided ethical approval for the research.


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a Caveat: The Bricoleur and a ‘responsive Dance’

in drawing on bricolage as an overall framing the role of the bricoleur cannot be ignored. as per hermeneutically oriented research, there is a no false pretence of objectivity. as a bricoleur i was a wandering researcher, at times moving up blind alleys, occasionally getting blocked in cul-de-sacs, and sometimes finding gems. Choices of where to go and what to see were also deeply influenced by who i am and where i come from. in many ways, i approached the bricolage process research task as I approach community development: as a process of engaging in dialogue with what is seen and encountered and responding to those events/stories by asking further questions, and seeking new directions.

in doing this i have attempted to ‘read’ or see the complex phenomenon of how community development theory and practice has been deployed in material, practical and discursive ways. i have come to that dialogue with a set of prejudgements which are explained honestly and transparently within the next section of the chapter. However, in bringing forth those prejudgements – my horizon so to speak – they are put at ‘risk’ with a willingness to let go of them, to be persuaded by the ‘data’ in other words. The task is then approached with a provisional perspective of how community development is understood, and my reading of the seen phenomena allows for a further provisional reading of community development, whereby assumptions can be challenged. The research task, therefore, has been a process of ‘responsive dancing’ whereby the methodology itself has taken the lead from the object of study. The object of study is a living social phenomenon – complex, alive, constructed by relationships and contestation. my methodology has attempted to engage that living space with full awareness of what i bring to it, how i am shaped by it, and my reactions to it.

Conceptual Interlude – my horizon

as per the above methodological discussion, in engaging in this research and writing project it is important to therefore introduce the reader to my horizon, making explicit my bias and perspectives when researching community development theory and practice within South Africa. One can think about it as making several frames transparent, which I now attempt to do, informing the reader about the tradition of community development which i tend to align myself with within theory and practice.

Firstly, after 26 years of involvement with the field of community development, i have become increasingly convinced that community development, at its core, is about poverty, power, opportunity and cooperation. That is, about how to reduce people’s poverty through both experiencing cooperative or collective power, and also challenging the ‘powers’ that be, particularly in relation to agenda-setting, decision-making and resource-allocation. As stated within the Introduction, the notion of cooperative or collective power is premised on the possibility of


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community. Without either the pre-existing conditions of community (relationships, trust, care, reciprocity and so forth), or the creation of spaces and practices where community can emerge, it is often impossible to enact cooperative action. in this sense, community development is not only about addressing poverty and power (‘development’), but is also about community emergence or formation. As we will see, different frameworks of community development tend to emphasise either the ‘community’ or ‘development’ dimension. Below i also provide my perspective on both these terms community and development.

one of the things that has intrigued me in my time within south africa is that, during several facilitated workshops with community workers and policy makers, there was surprise that I wanted to spend the first couple of hours examining ideas and experiences of community. People were keen to talk about development but seemed surprised when i argued that without community (a quality of cooperation and care between people) much ‘community development’ fails. In these workshops there were significant discussions about: memories of healthy community, what characteristics lead to a sense of a healthy community, the shadow side of community (after all, the Klu Klux clan members would experience a sense of community within their organisation), and theories of community such as social capital and complexity theory. We examined the ‘common’ and ‘unity’ elements of community, but also Derrida’s notion of community as a paradigmatic site of struggle between exclusion and hospitality (Derrida, 2001). It was usually agreed that many of our wilful efforts are too quick to focus on the ‘development’ component of community development at the expense of ‘community’. With this in mind my views on community are now discussed.

rethinking Community

at the centre of my understanding of community is an understanding of ‘community as dialogue’ (as informed by the work of philosopher Martin Buber), a notion that I have unpacked in detail in my book Theory and Practice of Community Development: International Perspectives (2013), co-written with my colleague gerard Dowling. however, i also understand community in two other distinct but interconnected ways: community as hospitality and as collective practice. each are now considered in turn.

Community as Hospitality

In the early days of my community work, I learned about the practice of hospitality from my friend Dave Andrews (1992, 2007, 2012), compatriots at a local ‘hospitality house’ of the Catholic Workers, and from reading the likes of Canadian humanitarian Jean Vanier (1979) and Dutch priest Henri Nouwen (1975). These authors invited me to reflect on collective spiritual life. However it has been more recent reading of the mexican ‘de-professionalised intellectual’


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Gustavo Esteva (1987) and French philosopher Jacques Derrida (2001) who have enabled me to identify hospitality as central to my framework of community development. hospitality orients towards relationship that is welcoming of the other. Strangers and intruders are welcome into the kind of community that I advocate. community is a space where people have created a climate and culture of hospitality. When people close themselves, their groups, their spaces from others, then they are no longer experiencing a Derridean community, but some other kind of closed collectivity.

from a mexican perspective, gustavo esteva shares insight on post-development as hospitality, arguing that hospitality orients towards the principle of non-intervention and ‘co-motion’. The inhospitable and instrumental practices of intervention and ‘pro-motion’ tend to mean that many professional development practitioners have predetermined what they are going to do with and for people or communities (Esteva, 1987: 149). In a similar spirit to Esteva, North American authors Margaret Wheatley and Deborah Frieze (2011: 161ff) articulate a community development approach that advocates for friendship as opposed to intervention. such an approach calls for an opening up of spaces with people and to be part of the people, not only with them but among them. This kind of hospitality involves the creative regeneration of spaces where people can interact and find common ground.

in no way could such practice be considered as easy, especially within the current context of modernity. The italian political philosopher roberto esposito, more than anyone else, has helped me recognise the difficulties that I myself experience attempting to extend hospitality. In his challenging book Communitas: The Origins and Destiny of Community (2010), Esposito reminds me that at the heart of community is the notion of munus, which entails a gifting and obligation. We gift one another, extended as hospitality, but this comes with obligation. yet the problem for most ‘modern’ people is that they do not want obligations. There is often hostility to obligations. The whole socio-economic system is geared towards individual life-projects, free of obligations. richard Kearney and Kascha semonovitch’s meditation on Phenomenologies of the Stranger: Between Hostility and Hospitality (2011) echoes much of Esposito’s thought. They remind us of the ongoing universal dilemmas of welcoming strangers and recognise it as having an ongoing ‘edge character’ where there can be no ‘infallible guide to action’ (Casey, 2011: 48). They argue that people can at least maintain openness to strangers and awareness of the subtle complexities at work in every new encounter despite the unknown challenges and potential obligations.

Community as Collective Practice

Secondly, and working on the assumption that people can maintain openness and trust for some time, i also recognise that within community development theory and practice, community usually signifies collective processes of social change. for me, community, emergent through people’s efforts in dialogue (accounting


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for difference) and extending hospitality (to other), becomes the platform for collective social change efforts. it is the collective approach that differentiates community development from many other approaches to social change. People work cooperatively together (Henderson and Thomas, 2005) and in choosing to trust one another, they consequently hold each other accountable (through mutual obligations), working together to bring their strategies and tactics to bear for social change.

collective practices have received renewed interest since the already mentioned, Nobel Prize winner Elinor Ostrom and her colleagues’ seminal work, represented by such publications as Working Together: Collective Action, the Commons, and Multiple Methods in Practice (Poteete, Janssen and Ostrom, 2010) were published. Their research shows how, under certain conditions, people are able to work cooperatively, particularly as user groups in relation to managing commons. Within community development theory and practice, ‘community’ also signifies this collective process, while ‘development’ signifies the vision for the social change desired.

reimagining Development

Development is a troublesome notion. sometimes i want to ditch the word altogether. Like sociologist Phil McMichael I sense that ‘development is not only in crisis but is at a significant turning point in its short history as a master concept of (Western-based) social science and cultural life’ (2012: 2). I have been involved in initiatives that have purposefully been called ‘community animators’ or ‘community building’, simply to avoid the complexity of the term development. Like Swiss scholar Gilbert Rist (2011), I am aware of the devastating histories and practices of development. Like Indian ecologist Debal Deb (2009), I am cognisant of the colonising mindset of ‘developmentality’. Like Columbian-American anthropologist Arturo Escobar (2010), I constantly grapple with the ongoing traction of assumptions and paradigms that underpin developmentalist practices. however, as i locate myself within the citizen and professional project of community development there is no escape from the concept. it is important to make sense of it and at this historical moment I continue to use it.

In reflecting on the theory and practice of development, my primary response is to re-imagine development in two ways. firstly, development can be understood as a metaphor signifying a qualitative change (Kaplan, 1996, 2002; Escobar, 2010) that can be contrasted with the quantitatively-oriented metaphor of growth still underpinning most practices and mindsets. as stated above, it is a qualitative change that focuses on people-centred processes rather than growth-centred outcomes, albeit the complex way that both processes interact with one another without our complex capitalist economies is an open question. Qualitative questions also focus practitioners on some of the most pertinent ‘development’ related challenges of our times, such as:


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• how do we ensure all people on the planet have a decent quality of life, without being hostage to the current model of economic growth that is so fossil fuel reliant? Or put another way, how do we create the conditions for Just Transitions? (Swilling and Annecke, 2012).

• how do we direct resources to women’s literacy, enabling individual women to make more decisions about their lives? (Sen, 1999).

• how do we create sustainable livelihoods for the almost inevitable exponential growth of numbers of young people living in urban slums? (Pieterse, 2013).

• how do we reduce consumerism in a global context among those of us who are wealthy, thereby reducing both the planetary footprint and social inequalities?

As briefly discussed in the Introduction, this final point begs the question of whether community development becomes a tool of modernity’s impulse and trajectory, aligned to an industrial paradigm, or alternatively, whether community development can be guided by an indigenous or decolonising paradigm. in this latter paradigm, it would potentially contribute to more radical and robust practices of resistance to (some) aspects of modernity, reconnection to nature/mother earth and revitalisation of the commons.

furthermore, development is reimagined as within the post-development and post-structural tradition (McMichael, 2012). Namely, what Arturo Escobar identifies as the:

… possibility of visualising an era where development ceased to be the central principle of social life. … the post, succinctly, means a de-centring of capitalism as the definition of the economy, of liberalism in the definition of society and polity, and of state forms of power as the defining matrix of social organisation. This does not mean that capitalism, liberalism and state forms cease to exist; it means that their discursive and social centrality have been displaced somewhat. (Escobar, 2010: 12)

To align myself with the post-development tradition is to be consistent in my reflections on practice. In examining community development within South africa i see many diverse practices aligned to different visions of the good life, different ‘competing political visions … of the ideal society’ (mcmichael, 2012: s3) or different ‘life projects’ (Blaser et al., 2004). That is, different visions of ‘development’. When i observe diverse forms of community development practice, i see an alternative pluralistic vision for development whereby people collectively, associatively, cooperatively and individually can have control over decisions that impact on their lives, thereby determining their own futures.


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re-orienting Community Development

With these thoughts on ‘community’ and ‘development’ in mind, my perspective of community development is also oriented by consideration of a number of axes, each of which names a tension within the process of theorising and practice. some of the many tensions are:

• growth-centred versus people-centred development;• endogenous versus exogenous development;• Top-down versus bottom-up practice;• service-oriented versus developmental practice.

Conceptualising these tensions as axes provides the space to think in terms of primary and secondary rather than either/or. for example, i see community development as primarily drawing on endogenous resources (that is, resources internal to a community), and as secondarily drawing on exogenous resources (that is, resources supplemented from outside); and again as primarily bottom-up, even if the animating resources (for example, a community worker) are provided within a top-down initiative. In relation to the first axis, I am resolved that community development sits at the people-centred end of the tension, but i am also conscious that without a growth-oriented model of development there could well not be enough taxation to provide the resources to support people-centred development; albeit there is a substantial body of scholarly work challenging the inevitability of growth-oriented development models (see particularly the innovative work of the New Economics Foundation).

Referring to the penultimate axis, a useful framework that can help re-orient community development practice is discussed by Burkett and Bedi (2007) from the International Association of Community Development. The framework clarifies one key paradigmatic struggle within community development, understood through the lens of a developmental approach versus service-delivery approach.

The contrasting of developmental versus service delivery enables clarification of some key issues. Firstly, much of the language of community development is used by ‘development practitioners’ when they are in fact engaged in social development or service-delivery work. Such social development practitioners are working with models, ideas, predetermined ‘packages’ of development goods. They are often similar to William Easterly’s (2006) description of planners as opposed to searchers. and do not get me wrong, some of these are very good (depending where the plan/model/idea emerged from). However, such work is not grounded in the relationally-oriented work of a developmental approach. That is, if someone works in a community with a predetermined notion of what needs to be done, or what model of development is required, then that someone has moved into a social or service development modality of development work developed by an expert-led social analysis of the situation.


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in contrast, a normative version of a developmental approach starts with people, engaging in relationships first and foremost, reaching to be conscious of achieving some kind of understanding of the people’s situation as they see it (Kaplan, 1996; Westoby and Dowling, 2009, 2013). I often say to students, ‘If you go into a community with a good idea of what to do, or a good model of what will work, then you have moved into social development or service-delivery mode with development processes and goods emerging from your own social analysis of the issues a hand’. clearly, a well-trained professional will have such a social analysis, however, within the developmental tradition i align myself to, it is crucial for development practitioners to put any such ideas or models ‘on hold’, ‘carrying their analysis lightly’ so to speak, enabling them to first and foremost enter into relationships with people to ‘see what the people see’ (see Lathouras, 2010). It is the relational work between the practitioner and people and the relational work between people themselves that creates a community of people enabled to conduct collective work – which sits at the very heart of such community development work. Creative ideas and great models might then come into play, but ideally they are the ‘people’s’ ideas, or a model the people have developed. or one they have learned about through hearing, or searching for stories from other contexts, thought about in contemporary language as horizontal learning.

It is in the context of such practice that I understand the work of community development practitioners as primarily relational, communicative, emotional and educational work, and secondly technical work. To engage with people relationally requires strong communicative and emotional capacities, and to enable groups to ‘move’. That is, to think beyond the hegemony of what is, often requires some kind of educational nous. Any community development practice reduced primarily to the technical has been co-opted by an instrumentalist or reductionist approach to community development, whereby community development is understood through the lens of ‘input’, and ‘output’; in other words, the logic which says that an investment, or transfer of money, skills and projects into a community setting leads to good results.

alternatively, it is in a non-instrumental sense that community development sits within the people-centred tradition of post-development theory and practice. With people as the primary resource, relationships are centred within the practice alongside responsiveness to the inevitable shifting relationships (Westoby and Kaplan, 2013). The practice becomes one of creating spaces and platforms for co-motion, rather than intervention (Esteva, 1987). If people cannot cooperate, or people engage in destructive kinds of conflict then community development processes will fall apart, hence the very fragile nature of the work. Technically-oriented community development work usually puts financial resources at the centre of practice, with programmes or projects determining the development trajectory. People themselves remain at the periphery, subjected to being objects, as ‘participants’ or ‘beneficiaries’.

furthermore, it is worth noting that my horizon or perspective is also underpinned by a bias towards understanding the role of a community development


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worker as being either: of, with or amongst the people; a stance that is troubled by the idea of working for communities, or on their behalf. The kind of work within which practitioners inhabit a stance of ‘for’ or ‘on-behalf of’ is usually community-service oriented, or community-brokering-liaison oriented. In the former, a worker ‘services’ local people, providing information for people, or locating funding for them, or initiating good projects for them. In the latter community brokering role, a community worker is brokering access to other systems resources, information or networks. Again, both are important roles, but from my tradition somewhat different to the core role of a community development practitioner.

This understanding of a developmental approach to community development, building on Allan Kaplan’s work (1996), has been supplemented in my previous writings with a dialogical and deconstructive approach (Westoby, 2010). Developmental work then focuses practice on relationships, as per the above discussion. Dialogical practice focuses both on Martin Buber’s (1947) philosophy and structure of humanising dialogue, connecting practitioner and people in non-instrumental relations; and also Paulo freire’s critical dialogue ensuring dialogue also has a critical edge or making sense of the forces shaping our social worlds (Westoby and Dowling 2009; 2013). Alongside such developmental and dialogical approaches, deconstructive thinking is an attitude that constantly looks to destabilise a habitual gaze and discourse, looking beyond the ‘taken for granted’ hegemonies of so called ‘common sense’ (Mayo, 1999).

alluding to a few of the comments made earlier, my horizon is also informed by a commitment to community healing, particularly within the context of a post-conflict South Africa. Community development is therefore also concerned with collective healing or reconciliation, as well as reparation. The conditions of colonisation and the apartheid era remain spectral within the south african present, haunting individual and collective processes at all levels. reparative requirements of justice provide one narrative that could inform a tradition of community development within south africa, while reconciliatory narratives and practices are also crucial. an important consideration for community development is how to create platforms for people who have been historically separated in order to come together, to meet one another, to dispel prejudices built on ignorance, overcome fear of the other, and to move from tolerance to welcome (see the work of the Centre of Memory in Chapter 6). Such platforms allow a particular kind of community to be built, enabling possibilities of collective action to emerge which crosses old boundaries. Both recent readings of neville alexander’s Thoughts on the New South Africa (2013), and Jonathon Jansen’s Confronting Race and the Apartheid Past: Knowledge in the Blood (2009) resoundingly reinforces this perspective for me.

having made transparent some of my biases, or perspectives, i hope it becomes clearer why i commenced this research and writing project within south africa. for example, when i read documents of the national community Development Worker Programme within South Africa I am struck by how technically-oriented


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the ‘training package’ is that is provided to those workers.3 There is little training material addressing the relational, communicative or emotional work of community development practice. most of the training is focused on project-cycle processes, or clarifying roles/responsibilities and so forth. The subtext to such training is that if all roles and responsibilities are clear, and people are well coordinated, then a well-run project will be effective. community development is then seduced by ‘project bias’ (Chambers, 2008: 33). Such training reflects a tradition of community development, of which i personally and professionally have a great deal of trouble with, albeit I acknowledge that it does reflect a ‘legitimate’ approach, and therefore must be approached as a ‘social fact’ requiring engaged critical research and reflection.

Conclusion

This chapter provides the reader with a sense of where the researcher is coming from both methodologically and in terms of perspective and therefore bias. it is hoped that my horizon and subjectivities have been made more transparent, which in turn enables the reader to interpret the findings, analyses and conclusions embedded within the whole book through an understanding of the lenses applied. it is posited that such an approach constructs the possibility of a more honest dialogue between author and reader.

3 chapter 12 will provide a more comprehensive analysis of the national cDW training documents.


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ParT ii conceptual lenses for ‘reading’

community Development within south africa

Part II of the book draws on the conceptual ideas of traditions and frameworks as a way of examining the kinds of community development practices being drawn upon within south africa.

chapter 3 provides a ‘reading’ of community development history and contemporary practice within south africa through the conceptual lens of ‘traditions’ (Campfens, 1997; Westoby and Hope-Simpson, 2010). This chapter both carefully introduces the reader to those key concepts and discusses the findings of the historical and contemporary analysis of community development. Traditions such as social guidance, social mobilising and social learning are considered as well as linkages with the specific work of people such as S. Biko and m. gandhi.

chapter 4 then provides a ‘reading’ of community development history and contemporary practice within south africa through the conceptual lens of frameworks. As per the previous chapter the reader is carefully introduced to those key concepts and then findings are discussed. Examples of frameworks utilised-in-action include community-led development, assets-based community development and the sustainability livelihood approach.


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chapter 3

Traditions of community Development

When attempting to make sense of contemporary community development within south africa one immediately runs into a problem. The diversity or proliferation of the discursive field of community development leads to a conceptual challenge. for example, because someone says, ‘i’m doing community development’, does it mean they are? Is it then worth studying what they do? How does one judge practices to be community development practices, as opposed to some other practice?

i understand this conceptual problem in relation to the question of normativity. On several occasions I have talked about normative community development. however, embedded in my use of the term normativity is a decision about whether to subscribe to what i have come to call a ‘shallow’ or ‘deep’ normativity in terms of the norms and customs of community development. shallow normativity is a way of thinking about community development in terms of a limited normative set of principles or orthodoxies. The discourse of such approaches is something like, ‘community development practice is always locally-oriented’, or ‘community development is a participatory practice’. Within this approach the norms and customs, that is, normativity, of such community development thinking/practice, is said to be shallow because there is no discussion of where these norms come from. They are discussed as being self-evident and are usually framed ahistorically. Alternatively, deep normativity is a way of rethinking community development in terms of a diverse set of norms and customs that are situated within diverse historical traditions of community development. The norms and customs of practice, also potentially discussed in terms of principles and orthodoxies, do not determine what community development is, but what a particular tradition of community development is. There is depth to the norms, because they are grounded in the historical and other dimensions that are particular.

Another way of discussing the issue is to think in terms of essentialising versus traditions of community development. in relation to the former option, to say something either is, or is not community development, as per shallow normativity above, is to revert to the essentialising or defining solution. Within this approach writers or practitioners of community development predetermine what is ‘true’ or ‘authentic’ community development, as per a particular dogma or ideology. They then evaluate community development practice through this lens and assess what is going on. many different authors of community development theory and practice tend to drift in this direction through outlining key principles (Lombard, 1991; Ife and Tesoriero, 2002; Kenny 2011a), or using the essentialising language of ‘authentic’ community development (de Beer and Swanepoel, 2012).


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Some benefits can be seen within this approach. It gives theorists and practitioners alike some certainty about what community development is and is not, what is ‘in or out of the community development family’ so to speak. Community development academics such as Bhattacharyya (2004) argue that for community development to be universally relevant, the essence of the term community has to be extracted, so that it is not limited by common usages and definitions. Alluding to the introductory chapter of this book, and particularly to my methodological reflections on horizon, the reader could potentially discern my own drifting towards this approach. I have explicitly identified some key elements of community development, contrasting developmental versus service-delivery; and also clarified what I understand as the key role of a community development worker. However, it will become clear as I continue this discussion that my positions or understandings about community development do not arise from an essentialist or definitional stance of saying ‘this is community development’ and ‘that is not community development’. instead my perspective simply states where i am coming from based on clarity of the tradition i situate my practice within, and a framework that I think and work from.

This brings me to the key point then of this discussion. The second way of dealing with the question of diversity and proliferation is to carefully theorise the notion of ‘traditions of community development’. Within this approach theorists and practitioners do not so much worry about what is real or authentic community development, but about what tradition of community development is being talked about, written about, deployed or operationalised materially or discursively within a particularly piece of work or writing. The task becomes deconstructive rather than definitional. This is not to remove the normative, because in many ways each tradition of community development, as has been said, has core orthodoxies or principles, within its own historical trajectory; but it is to resist a shallow understanding of normativity and instead insist on the depth of understanding norms and customs of a community development tradition.

Moreover, the benefits of this approach is that more space is provided to ‘read’ or make sense of what is actually going on within the discursive field and material practices of community development, rather than assessing what to look at (‘real community development’) and possibly dismiss (‘non-real community development’).

The Literature: The gift of Traditions

Moving beyond the conceptual argument for rethinking community development in terms of traditions it is also proposed that the notions of community development traditions are a gift to community development theorists and practitioners because:

• Firstly they provide a linkage to the historical past – both in terms of intellectual traditions underpinning diverse community development thinking


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Traditions of Community Development 43

and practices; and also in terms of methodologies of community development that emerge from historical practice – such as those proposed and practised by Mahatma Gandhi, Paulo Freire, Saul Alinsky and so forth;

• secondly, they provide clarity about those historical roots, ideological assumptions and methodological approaches;

• Thirdly, they link practitioners into a ‘community of practice’ with others who share a tradition and also are intellectually engaged in dialogue about differences with those who hold to a different tradition. such a community of practice ensures that community development practitioners/theorists are not on a subjective journey, discovering their own community development practice, but are linked into a collective project, as per my definition of macintyrean ‘practice’ in chapter 1.

in examining notions of community traditions, a colleague, hope-simpson and I (2011) have previously conducted a meta-analysis of use of ‘tradition’ within community development literature, and beyond, arguing that there are three main ways of thinking about community development traditions. They have been discussed in terms of geographically-defined, methodologically-oriented and intellectually-rooted, and are briefly outlined here.

Geographically-defined Traditions of Community Development

This use of tradition describes community development organisations, movements or groups of practices that are long-standing, and tied to a particular region or location, a cultural group within a region or more generally, to rural or urban areas. The geographical scopes of these traditions vary, ranging from those with a specifically regional focus, to those with universal span. For example, MacAuley (2001) refers to and critiques the idea of an ‘Eastern Nova Scotia’ tradition of community economic development that consists of two regionally-based movements, both of which are concerned with external control over local economies. Varley and Curtin (2002) use the concept of geographic location to discuss two ‘rural’ traditions of irish community development.

Methodologically-oriented Traditions of Community Development

Tradition has also been used to emphasise the different methods of precipitating social change. in this case, tradition is used to refer to disciplinary professions, such as the anthropological or social planning traditions (Thorns, 1982; mccreary and Shirley, 1982) or to well-known models of community work with instantly recognisable core methods and historical lineage, such as the Alinksy tradition or the Settlement House tradition. The concept is also employed by Sites et al. (2007) to describe the historical development of the community intervention field in the United States. Sites et al. (2007) categorise the spectrum of community


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practices into three broad traditions – community organising, social planning and community development – and use them as lenses through which to analyse the impact of political-economic shifts on different approaches to community work.

Campfens (1997) in his discussion of the many intellectual traditions that underpin practice, also groups process-oriented works into overarching traditions. He reviews the key intellectual figures and methodological traditions in the greater ‘societal guidance’ and ‘oppositional movements’ traditions. he then reviews the ways in which these traditions, one ideologically conservative and the other radical, conceive of and envision social mobilisation and social learning in the community development setting. Within the discussion of oppositional movements and their treatment of social mobilisation, Campfens further classifies the ideological/intellectual traditions according to the political and social strategies they espouse. so, while the oppositional movements are united in their aim to change power relations, their strategies differ and campfens groups them into strategies with ‘confrontational politics’, ‘politics of disengagement’ and ‘politics of free association and mutual aid’ (1997: 28–33).

Intellectually-rooted Traditions of Community Development

as stated above, in this case ‘tradition’ is used to refer to the various, historically sustained, often contradictory bodies of thought that comprise the roots of community development practice (Campfens, 1997). Some authors simply refer to individual intellectual traditions, which can be traced back to a single figure but which have been developed comprehensively over time, such as communitarian anarchist Economic thought (Knowles, 2005) or Anarchism itself (Oppenheim, 1982). On the other hand campfens, in reviewing the many disparate intellectual traditions that underpin the field of community development, categorises them into the broader traditions of ‘societal guidance’, ‘social mobilisation’ or ‘social learning’ thought, based upon what their key agenda for society and social change is. This approach groups various intellectual families into an overarching tradition based upon their core normative agendas, assumptions and prescriptions about social change. Through my research within south africa i also posit another intellectual tradition conceptualised as a social reconstruction tradition. i will discuss this below when considering traditions within south africa. for now, let us return to the literature.

For Campfens firstly, the societal guidance agenda of community development is underpinned by the ‘power of technical reason’. For example, Rostow (1960) sits within this tradition and as such, practitioners/theorists tend not to question existing power relations. They are sometimes known as ‘institutionalists’, focusing on weaknesses of existing organisations and institutions to deliver a ‘programme of development’.

secondly, there is the social mobilisation agenda of community development. For Campfens (1997) within this overarching family are a further three categories: ‘confrontational politics’ as reflected, for example, in the work of Saul Alinsky


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(1964, 1971) – see his classic books Rules for Radicals and Reville for Radicals; the ‘politics of engagement’ reflected in the Utopian work of activists such as Robert Owen (Claeys, 1991); and finally the ‘politics of free association and mutual aid’ reflected in the work of social anarchists such as Proudhon (1979) and Kropotkin (1989).

Thirdly, the social learning agenda of community development draws on a diversity of practices and ideas including: american empiricism, particularly the pragmatism of John Dewey (1946, 1963); ‘action learning’ and organisational development; mao Zedong’s essay On Practice (1968), which was viewed as a critical juncture representing a social learning tradition that integrated ‘theory and practice’ through class struggle; popular education, particularly theorised and practiced by Paulo Freire (1970) as critical consciousness through dialogue; liberation theology with its preferential ‘option for the poor’; and finally, reconstructing the ‘development expert’ within social learning.

An Interlude: Thinking About the ‘Trace’

However, when thinking about community development and traditions my own work with Hope-Simpson (2010) also argues that Derrida’s idea of the ‘trace’ should be used as a way of avoiding narrow interpretations of tradition. an understanding of Derrida’s use of trace is that it is a ‘past that has never been present’ (Derrida, 1982: 21) and this interpretation is useful to ensure that thinkers/practitioners do not fall into the trap of imagining a ‘pure’ past version of community development that never actually existed. for example, a practitioner might imagine a complete Alinskian version of community development, intent on ‘getting it right’. however, Derrida’s notion of trace invites us, or warns us, to understand that any notion of tradition must be held in tension with the ongoing disruptive shifts of historical processes of struggle and contingency. for example, any notion of Alinskian community development, a tradition informed by Saul Alinsky’s thinking, of which there most certainly is one, must be equally disrupted by the ‘fact’ that contemporary readings of Alinsky will provide a new reading, and that the traces of vernacular struggle within the idea of a Alinskian community development tradition, provide a kind of permission for people to keep engaging with Alinsky’s thinking as they reinterpret and rethink their community development practice. The temptation is for people to become ‘more Alinskian than Alinsky’ and to lose the initial life-giving force that the tradition represents. The conceptual idea of trace works against this possibility reminding people of the many readings.

findings: Traditions and south african Community Development Practice

i have not been able to discern a particularly south african geographical tradition, nor a methodological one, albeit traces of a ‘developmental approach’


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(Kaplan, 1996) could be identified as South African, hence I have chosen to use campfens’ idea of intellectual traditions to make sense of what is going on.

A Social Guidance Tradition of Community Development within RSA

applying the conceptual lens of social guidance to south african community development immediately illuminates many of the state-led community development programmes. They are drawing on a societal guidance tradition, whereby the state determines priorities and allocates resources accordingly. Within south africa, the goals of such programmes are development, growth and modernisation – to ‘lift people from economic and material poverty primarily’, although the unstated goal is often ‘jobs, jobs, jobs’. for example, the particular role of cDWs is to draw communities into the terrain of the paternalistic or ‘developmental state’ activities, aligning people’s goals with their own.

clearly, as per my brief historical account within the introduction, there has been a history under apartheid of state-led community development situated in a particular social guidance framework. Whilst drawing on 1960s United Nations definitions of community development, the guide was predominantly influenced by the logics of apartheid thinking – that is, community development as separate development. There have been substantial changes since the end of apartheid, but it could be argued that the social guidance tradition has continued, albeit within an emancipatory frame. at the time of writing, examples of programmes that embody this social guidance tradition include:

• The high profile, and already referred to National Community Development Programme. This programme was launched in 2005 under the Presidency of Thabo Mbeki and continues during the Zuma era. It is coordinated by the national Department of cooperative government and Traditional affairs. It employs upwards of 4 000 community development workers, with the goal being one cDW per local municipality ward;

• The Community Development Practitioner Programme (CDPP) is hosted by the Department of Social Development. Community workers in this programme focus on: household and community profiling; developing new, and supporting existing Non-Profit Organisations (NPOs), (with some) focused particularly on early childcare Development centres; and using community-based planning processes based on the sustainable livelihoods approach to develop initiatives such as community-based cooperatives and community gardens;

• The Community Works Programme (and Expanded Public Works Programme (ECWP)), also recently placed within the Department of cooperative government and Traditional affairs. The focus of this programme is linking communities into the Local Economic Development Programme and particularly the development of cooperatives. however,


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it is primarily a social protection initiative supplementing people’s grants with a small wage;

• A large community health worker and community care initiative, focused on primary health practice and hiv-aiDs amelioration;

• a long-standing agricultural extension programme, using community-based trainers to support small-scale farmers, usually only in sporadic short-term ways; although critics argue the extension programme is still focused on supporting large-scale commercially-oriented farms, rather than small-scale emerging farmers;

• The Rural Development Strategy with its five key directions, namely: sustainable agrarian reform, home-garden and food security, improved service-delivery models, establishment of economic livelihoods and creating enabling institutions;

• Urban Renewal initiatives targeted at different places – for example, alexandra special Presidency Project;

• Neighbourhood Initiatives – as per the work of the Neighbourhood Unit; and• numerous adult education programmes over the years, with the most recent

named the Kha Ri Gude campaign, focused on adult literacy.

Many NGOs also initiate similar kinds of community development programmes and employ community workers, essentially working for the same state goals. such ngos essentially act as subcontractors of the state. alternatively some ngos simply become subcontractors of international non-government organisations (INGOs), guiding communities into the kind of development envisaged from outside. The social guidance is not so much linked to state goals, but the stated goals of each ingo with their strategic hopes, often aligned to international donor hopes (a good example would be the MDGs).

however, some ngos draw on more reformist and radical traditions of community development, taking their compass points as Freire’s and Alinsky’s ‘radical turn’. it is to these that we now turn.

The Social Mobilisation Tradition

clearly within south africa the social mobilisation tradition has had a rich history. The anti-apartheid movement engine room consisted not only of politically-oriented liberation movements such as the ANC, but the grassroots networks of civil society community-based organisations. many such grassroots organisations were involved in both self-help or self-reliance oriented work, but also supported people in struggle work.

However, the post-apartheid years have also seen a flowering of social mobilisation, or social action. one obvious manifestation of this tradition is the so-called service-delivery protests (Botes et al., 2008; Buhlungu, 2007: 13). These are often depicted by the south african state as illegitimate expressions of resistance against the liberation movement, but are interpreted by others as


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expressions of effective organising and mobilising, usually led by inspiring and committed young leaders. such mobilisation is indicative of people’s growing impatience with their enduring experiences of social distress. People’s life dreams are being thwarted by lack of effective services, delayed infrastructure, corruption and so forth. some people’s impatience is being directed into what Dlamini has named as ‘native nostalgia’, a somewhat destructive backwards looking gaze at so called ‘better days of apartheid’. other people’s impatience is being directed more constructively into the service delivery protests. Questions do arise over the use of violence, mainly towards property, but for many people their analysis is that, based on experience, violence alone triggers a responsive government. To avoid violence is to be ignored.

other manifestations of the social mobilisation tradition include social movements such as the well-researched Durban based abahlali movement (Patel, 2009; Gibson, 2011). The Abahlali movement is also associated with Shack Dwellers International (SDI), which, while being an international movement existing in over 30 countries, has offices within South Africa. For some commentators the particular stand-out approach of sDi is to argue that ‘self-responsibility, or self-help is a foundation for the mobilisation needed to claim rights and draw the state into being a co-producer of services, rather than a deliverer of development’ (The Second Barefoot Collective, 2011: 9). Their practices include: moving from self-help to self-reliance; using community-to-community solidarity; self-research and self-knowledge; community visioning; and engaging the state in co-creation.

A similar social movement, called the Federation of Urban Poor (FEDUP), also aligned to SDI, has been researched and documented by Swilling (2013). For Swilling, what is significant about FEDUP’s approach is that it, ‘explicitly acknowledge[s] the complex and relational nature of the state and the need, therefore, to both engage it and contest the focus of its interventions, as well as the need to preserve and protect an autonomous base within the poorest homeless communities’ (2013: 501). The mobilisation then is not just towards the state, but also towards creating their own platform for dialogue within an autonomous space. Such an approach could be said to reflect an evolution of the mobilisation tradition, reaching beyond Alinsky and other trade union oriented practices.

another important expression of this tradition of social mobilisation was The Coalition Against Water Privatisation and Johannesburg Water (Veriava and Naidoo, 2013). According to Dale McKinley, one of the founding directors, ‘as a result of the privatisation of water provision … poor communities in and around Johannesburg found themselves unable to access and/or afford water and [have] responded with active resistance’ (ibid.: 85). He argues that, ‘one of the new social movements that arose to lead such resistance is the anti-Privatisation forum (APF), an umbrella organisation for grassroots community groups mostly located in Gauteng Province’ (ibid.: 85). Here again is an example of local community groups, realising they cannot act effectively on an issue that is ‘beyond the local’, and therefore come together in a coalition.


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at the time of writing, an emerging social movement, particularly focused on the Karoo region, is the anti-fracking coalition or movement (Fig, 2013). This movement is against underground gas exploration and extraction (led by Shell), and is organised within both the Karoo and at a national level. While the abahlali and feDuP movements, well documented and discussed internationally and locally (see Patel, see Swilling) are movements of the poor, focused on the obvious and immediate need of secure shelter and housing, the anti-fracking coalition is a movement that brings a lot of different players together, crossing traditional class and race barriers.

The Social Learning Tradition

In 1972, Steve Biko approached community animators/educators Anne Hope and Sally Timmel to help the Black Consciousness Movement. Their task was to train some adult educators in the Freirean literacy method. Biko had become aware of this method through his readings of freire’s then recently published Pedagogy of the Oppressed and was impressed with the potential relevance to south Africa. Sally, with Steve, developed a one week per month training programme implemented through most of 1972, equipping 15 adult educators, selected by Biko, with the literacy method. However, most of these people, along with Biko, were imprisoned by christmas of that same year. The freirean approach was part of Biko’s hope for a holistic community development approach based on social learning.

anne hope and sally Timmel went on to write the celebrated Training for Transformation (1984) educators’ manuals which represent the thinking of one manifestation of the social learning tradition applied to community development. having used them since starting my community development journey in the late 1980s, I was keen to connect with authors Sally Timmel and Anne Hope at The grail centre in the small cape beachside town of Kleinmond, and did so in 2011.

Talking with Anne and Sally provided some delightful history and insight into the social learning tradition as manifested within south africa today. firstly, the grail centre is still a live beacon of such a tradition, not only for south african development practitioners, but also for many other development practitioners. approximately 35 participants come each year for two live-in periods of two months to learn the Training for Transformation (TfT) methodology. While doing this they also continue their community development practice, with a mentor, in their own context. This TfT is steeped in Paulo freire’s approach to social change, community development and adult education. Their centre acts as a beacon resourcing this animator approach to development practice.

other apartheid-era manifestations of such a tradition include ngos such as Progressive Primary Health Care and Umtapo (Ngcoya, 2009). More recent


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examples of such practice include (the then) IDASA’s1 grassroots popular education initiatives, mvula Trust’s citizen voice initiatives and reflecT groups run by the INGO, ActionAid. This latter exemplary work is worth considering further. sitting within the social learning tradition it combines collective learning and social change. As stated within the CDRA’s Barefoot Guide (2011: 11), on using the REFLECT approach, ‘people sit together in Circles (groups), analyse different problems and find solutions – Action Points. Techniques such as drawing, drama, songs, dance, writing, speaking, numbers and visuals, for example calendars, maps and matrices, are used. These tools enable people’s capacity to think about their lives more actively and to collectively organise to engage with the world’. in many ways, this statement about reflecT groups represents the core processes of the social learning tradition for community development. The generalised lessons include what can be understood as: circle work (people sitting in ways that enable dialogue rather than monologue); discussion leading to analysis, where sometimes the discussion needs codes, or practical exercises to trigger new learning and new analysis (as it is particularly easy for people to get stuck in old analyses); and, finally, a choice, based on the analysis, to act in particular strategic ways. Writing with a colleague lynda shevellar, such approaches to social change have been explored in depth drawing on experiential, elicitive, spiral, participatory learning and action (PLA) and narrative approaches (Westoby and Shevellar, 2012).

Gandhi, Biko and Es’kia: A Social Reconstruction tradition?

I first learned about Mahatma Gandhi’s work as a young community worker in australia. in studying community development at The university of Queensland, australia, i was both inducted formally into the gandhian tradition through the teaching of Anthony Kelly (Kelly and Sewell, 1986), who was a student of Sugata Dasgupta (a contemporary of Gandhi), and informally through the mentoring of Dave Andrews (1992, 2007, 2012), who lived and worked in India for 25 years before returning to Brisbane. This approach can be understood as a ‘reconstructive’ tradition.

This reconstructive tradition of community development, which aligns means and ends, focuses on nonviolent but purposeful relationships, includes both intentional community development (as per Gandhi’s ashrams) and also practices of self-reliance, stewardship and trusteeship within village-level and national-level development. such an approach resonated with my philosophy of living and social change. it is also an approach that recognises the intersections between cultural liberation and economic/political liberation. gandhi himself recognised that india’s political liberation from British colonial rule would not necessarily lead to better lives for the poor unless it was linked to economic and cultural liberation.

Having worked for six years in Brisbane (1988–1994), learning about such practice, i then moved to south africa. While residing near Durban for three

1 iDasa closed its doors in 2013.


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years it was easy to observe the significance of Gandhi’s years in South Africa (Goswami, 2009). Indeed, most analysts would argue it is safe to say that Gandhi’s satyagraha approach to social change was developed within the crucible of south Africa’s early struggle years (Guha, 2013). During those three years near Durban I also worked in the township area of Adam’s Mission, a location famous for hosting Luthuli College, a training school for South African’s black teachers. Luthuli college is named after Albert Luthuli – one of the founders and a key leader of the ANC – who was also a ‘passionate disciple of Mahatma Gandhi’ (Mandela, 2010: 52) and understood his nonviolent approach to social change in terms of principle.

During my reoccurring trips to South Africa I have often mused over the links between Luthuli, Mandela and Gandhi, thinking about Gandhi’s reconstruction approach to social change. However, as Luthuli and Mandela (the ANC) became more aligned to an activist approach to social change rather than community development (luthuli representing the elders’ hope for non-violent social activism, and mandela representing the new guards’ loss of hope about non-violent efficacy and instead advocating for violence), I found few practice links. It was nevertheless my eventual re-engagement with the work of Steve Biko and then my subsequent discovery of the work of Es’kia Mphahlele that I found some intellectual traces which seemed to form an intellectual tradition which could be aligned with gandhi’s social reconstruction.

Within my initial readings of both Biko and Mphahlele’s approaches to community development, i was tempted to simply see a social learning approach, particularly when considering both their emphases on formal and non-formal education within community development practices. certainly my account of the social learning tradition in previous pages discusses Biko’s desire to draw on the social learning trace of Freire, with his focus on adult education and literacy work. However, a closer reading of Biko’s and Mphahlele’s work has led me to conclude that while the form of the community development work might be understood within a social learning frame, the intellectual roots are different. for mphahlele the roots were what he called African Humanism (Mphahlele, 2002: 185ff) and for Biko it was Black Consciousness, informed by the likes of Malcolm X, Frantz Fanon and James Cone. Such intellectual roots in turn have a similarity to Gandhi’s thinking about the significance of Indian consciousness within the quest for independence and self-development.

For example, for Steve Biko a key rationale in setting up health clinics was that they were health clinics run for blacks, and by blacks, both in terms of black medical staff, and also black management. The health clinic was important per say, but for Biko, what was more important was ‘reconstructing’ a cultural consciousness that blacks can manage and run their own affairs. The key ‘developmental’ problems were cultural – if black people only see good things coming from white people then they will inevitably develop a sense of inferiority that saps the soul; and structural – recognising the role of capitalist modes of production and accumulation within exploitation. Development activity then was focused on the practical, but


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also on the cultural-conscious. Biko, drawing on Fanon’s insights, recognised that many ‘black people were operating from … a position of non-recognition. To be black was to be rendered invisible and illegitimate’ (Mangcu, 2012: 200). In turn, this required engaging with a ‘psycho-cultural challenge’, with a transformation such ‘that black people needed to believe that they were worthy of freedom and its responsibility’ (Mangcu, 2012: 278). Biko himself states that:

We try to get blacks in conscientisation to grapple realistically with their problems, to attempt to find solutions to their problems, to develop what one might call an awareness, a physical awareness of their situation, to be able to analyse it, and to provide answers for themselves. The purpose behind it really being to provide some kind of hope; I think the central theme about black society is that it has got elements of a defeated society; people look like they have given up the struggle … now this sense of defeat is basically what we are fighting against; people must not give in to the hardship of life, people must develop a hope, people must develop some kind of security to be together to look at their problems, and people must in this way build up their humanity. This is the point about conscientisation and Black Consciousness. (Stubbs, 1978: 85)

From such a quote it is clear that, like Gandhi, Biko understood cultural independence as important as political independence.

Conclusion

at the heart of the rationale for this chapter is the idea that theorising the practice of community development requires practitioners to have an astute understanding of traditions. several reasons can be articulated and argued for. firstly, such an understanding ensures that a practitioner understands the possible traditions of community development that exist, enabling them to consciously work within one, or across several. secondly, it ensures that they understand their own approach historically, being knowledgeable of the norms and customs associated with their tradition of practice. in a sense then they are released from trying to do any ‘pure’ or ‘authentic’ community development, but can instead reflect on the congruency of their stated norms and customs and actual practices. Thirdly, it enables a community worker to deliberate with other practitioners more carefully, making their own tradition more transparent and eliciting an understanding of others’ perspectives within the deliberative process. This disrupts the possibilities of talking at cross-purposes ensuring that people elicit each other’s associated meanings with concepts used. finally, theorising practice in a way that is inclusive of tradition provides a rationale for creating ‘communities of practice’ whereby community workers can come together with others who share their tradition (and with those who do not) to enhance reflective and educational spaces.


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As a final comment in this chapter, what has struck me as a practitioner and engaged scholar within the south african context is the rich source of local material available to South African community development workers. Gandhi matured here within South Africa; Biko was a shining light – someone who drew on important ideas from people such as P. Freire, Malcolm X and F. Fanon – but who put them together in a concrete expression of the Black Community Programmes; and then Es’kia articulates the practice beautifully, as will be explored more thoroughly in the Interlude of this book. These endogenously oriented traces, situated alongside the classic social guidance, social mobilisation and social learning traditions provide a solid ground for reflection, learning and action.


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chapter 4

Guided by Frameworks

A useful starting point for this chapter is a quote from scholar Jim Ife’s text on community development, whereby he states that, ‘every community worker will conceptualise practice in a different way, and will build a different practice framework that will develop and change with experience’ (Ife, 2002: 265). In this statement, ife recognises that community development cannot be objectivised and is far more than a set of propositions. coming to an understanding of community development requires practice, constant effort and reflection based on a person’s own experience and context. he further argues that:

To seek to impose a single framework on all community workers is to fall into the positivist and modernist trap of assuming there is only one “right” or “best” way to do community work. This would be contrary to the principle of diversity and the need to establish “bottom-up” constructions of wisdom. it is important to develop one’s own framework … (ibid.: 265)

The set of skills and knowledge commonly associated with community development, which can be construed as a mix of propositional and procedural knowledge, along with ‘practice wisdom’, usually portrays a set of social practices through which workers assist, enable, and facilitate groups of people or community members to build relationships, develop analyses and work together to address issues impacting on their lives. This sometimes requires some change in societal structures, albeit this dimension will often be deeply influenced by the community development tradition influencing the practitioner (see previous chapter). However, adding a personal dimension to practice frameworks suggests that, with experience, people reinterpret or shift their relationship to such common sets of propositions to bring them more into line with their own worldview, their various experiences, their awareness of recurring practice dilemmas and their understanding of the contexts of practice.

Within this chapter i argue that various community development practice frameworks are available to South African community development workers. These include academically-diffused (within the literature) frameworks and also policy-oriented and organisationally-diffused frameworks. These frameworks could be integrated with the personal, to develop personal practice frameworks but this appears to rarely occur within south africa as practitioners are strongly focused on the policy and organisational framework ‘given to them’. However, before further discussing any conclusions, this chapter firstly dips into the literature on academic frameworks and then considers some of both the policy-oriented


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frameworks for ‘development’ within South Africa, and the organisational ones. finally, i consider the possibility of practitioners developing personal practice frameworks within the South African context.

Locating the Idea of frameworks within the Literature

There are many community development frameworks or approaches (and I use the two terms interchangeably here) which have been developed, articulated and diffused by academics. Examples include: ‘human rights from below’ (Ife, 2009), a networking approach (Gilchrist, 2004), a critical approach (Ledwith, 2005; Butcher et al., 2007; Rawsthorne and Howard, 2011), a neighbourhood-based approach (Twelvetrees, 2008; Henderson and Thomas, 1980), dialogical community development (Westoby and Dowling, 2009/2013; Kelly, 2008) radical empowerment (Craig and Mayo, 1995), community organising (Alinsky, 1969; 1971; Deacon et al., 1985), non-directive approaches (Batten and Batten, 1967), community-building approaches (Kelly and Sewell, 1986; Andrews, 2007), human-scale development (Max-Neef, 1991) and so forth. Each framework considers practice through different lenses and highlights different aspects of theory that can provide signposts for practice. While these are not examined here, readers can draw on the references to explore the particulars of each one. however, as per the introduction above, my research indicates that many community workers within South Africa are less cognisant of these academically developed and diffused frameworks and are instead more familiar with policy and organisationally-diffused ones.

findings

in analysing policy documents, visiting prominent community development organisations and interviewing community workers, several key findings can be discussed. They include: the kinds of policy-oriented frameworks influencing practice; the main organisationally-diffused frameworks; and finally, some reflections on the possibilities of personal practice frameworks.

Finding 1: Policy-oriented Frameworks

There have been at least four development frameworks that the post-1994 South african government has adopted in its effort to improve the lives of its citizens. These approaches have been identified within the draft National Community Development Policy Framework – and most recently by Sadi Luka and M. Maistry – as the income, basic needs, social exclusion and the sustainable livelihoods perspectives (Luka and Maistry, 2012: 14). Each of these frameworks has been both operationalised in terms of pragmatic initiatives, programmes and projects, and has also been deeply influenced the way in which community


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Guided by Frameworks 57

development practitioners, particularly those employed by the state, understand their work.

The income framework was grounded on the logic of economic poverty; reasonably arguing that people are recognised as poor if they fall below a defined income line or if they do not hold income-based employment. Despite the limits of such a frame, interventions based on income have been a significant part of the south african government’s approach against poverty. for example, south africa’s social protection policy, operationalised primarily in social welfare grants, but also in anti-poverty jobs and wages, has been diffused through various policy instruments including gear, asgisa, social assistance and the extended Public Works Programme.

The basic needs framework focused assistance to the poor in supporting their access to sanitation, security, clean water, shelter, education, appropriate clothing, health and such other necessities. south africa, primarily through its rDP policy and accompanying programmes, has attempted to operationalise this perspective. evaluations indicate that the impacts have remained largely patchy, uncoordinated, disorganised, poorly integrated, lacking consistency or focus and incoherent. however, such a framing of development policy and programmes remains important considering the level of marginalisation from access to such basic needs.

The social exclusion framework seeks to seal the cracks of deprivation, vulnerability and inequality that can coexist with wealth creation and adequate social welfare systems. Within South Africa, the key policy instrument situated within this framework is the Bill of Rights within the Republic of South Africa’s Constitution (Act 108 of 1996). This seeks to address the systemic and structural results of racism, sexism, geographical isolation as well as cultural and political exclusionism. other relevant policy instruments include the south african human rights commission and the commission on gender and equality.

finally, the sustainable livelihoods framework focuses practice on the requirement for ordinary people and communities to be assisted, through the construction and strengthening of an appropriate ‘asset base’, enabling them to pro-actively identify, define and practice particular strategies for coping with their conditions of poverty, vulnerability and hardships. This is the key policy and programme ‘framing’ on current discourses of community development at the time of writing. it is central to the newly developed community development policy framework as well as many initiatives of the Social Development Department.

Such policy-oriented frameworks frequently determine the direction of programmes and practice, at least in theory anyway. often when interviewing community development practitioners it was easy to discern the influence of such frameworks and their accompanying languages. People would often talk about income, needs, rights or assets as if I shared the same framework and as if it was assumed knowledge. Moreover, sometimes it was not clear that people understood the language, or more precisely, i was not sure in what way particular language was being used. in some ways, the policy environment had become almost spectral


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to their practice, haunting it, or conjuring up the way practitioners talked about their work.

Finding 2: Organisationally-diffused Frameworks – ‘The Big Four’

The research project however, did illuminate how practitioners were primarily influenced not so much by these policy-oriented frameworks but by what I call organisationally-diffused frameworks. Practitioners used some of the words of the policy frameworks, but their actual practice was more aligned to those frames diffused through the organisations they worked for. What became abundantly clear when reading about, talking to, and visiting community development practitioners, was that people were more familiar with these kinds of community development frameworks than other kinds. The most commonly occurring organisationally diffused frameworks were:

• The framework of community-driven or community-led development, internationally championed particularly by the World Bank (Everatt and Gwagwa, 2005). Within South Africa this approach is being used by NGOs such as Khanya-acidd. other examples of this would be the People’s-Housing Process (PHP) – ideally a self-help and community-driven approach for delivering housing to people;

• rights-based community development, again diffused internationally by numerous INGOs (e.g. ActionAid) and some UN Programmes, are being used by ngos such as iDasa;

• The Asset-Based Community Development (ABCD) approach, researched and internationalised by the coady institute, has also been drawn upon within South Africa (Schenck, Nel and Louw, 2012: 62). For example, Susan Wilkinson-Maposo (2008) writes about the work in Jansenville in the eastern cape, as an example of a community development process drawing on the aBcD approach;

• The Sustainable Livelihoods Approach (SLA), diffused by the UK DFID and drawing on the research and writing of robert chambers, is used extensively by the Department of social Development, particularly within their community Development Practitioner Programme. Drawing on the training of Khanya-acidd they have been integrating the SLA framework as a tool of analysis within a community-based planning approach.

These four ‘big’ frameworks dominate the discursive field within South Africa and most community workers are familiar with the language of one or several of these organisationally-diffused frameworks. Although, practitioners often seemed to think the framework they understood, (one of the above), was ‘real’ community development. They were not necessarily aware that there were other frameworks available. Practice seemed to be reduced to being able to utilise the


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steps, procedures or methods of the framework understood (usually having been inducted into it ‘on the job’).

a Caveat: needs-based versus rights-based frameworks – Towards a Catalytic approach?

Several senior practitioners interviewed argued that the key frameworks guiding community development practice within south africa could be loosely and broadly categorised into either needs-based or rights-based frameworks, showing again how it is internationally and institutionally-diffused frameworks that are dominating the discourse. for example, one senior practitioner discusses it astutely in the following way:

so in all the different practices that we’ve come across, to distil them down rather crudely, they’re either needs-based or rights-based. so the needs-based stuff – and that itself is a caricature, as is the rights-based – but if you look at it, a lot of the stuff has come as needs-based. When you look at the communities – what do they need? And as a response to a critique of the needs-based approach, the whole rights-based approach was developed. It [needs-based practice] lacked a concept of power and they believed that every need could be interpreted as a right. including the need for love …

i certainly appreciate the rights-based approach and the beginning of power critique and I think it’s had some interesting effects but I think it’s been too crude in its implementation. in south africa it’s always been rights-based because it came out of struggle so the notion of rights is pretty obvious especially in the kind of constitution we’ve got. So we came across rights-based stuff mostly in other parts of africa. not in south africa. it came late here because it was already here. it was too obvious.

and i’ve witnessed many debates between people … and the closer they are to the community the more they talked about it as a needs-based approach. And the closer they were to a more activist frame, a legal frame wanting to engage the state, the more they talked to a rights-based approach. Or the closer they were to their donors, because their donors demanded and put them under lots of rights-based indoctrination. (DR, 2011, personal communication)

Many people I talked with seemed to identify one of these two ideas, rights or needs, as guiding their work. However, the same senior practitioner as quoted above argues that for new frameworks, and in particular for what he called a third way:


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So this for me, this provides a really interesting and kind of third way which takes the best of both and the notion that communities are first of all doing what they can for themselves (and it’s the assets-based approach) and out of that building a sense of their own self-worth and through that surfacing leadership. But, they are also breaking beyond the boundaries of community and community development at some point. and many people have told us, that staying within your own practice you become stagnant after a while, the community can become stagnant. But if you start connecting, new life starts.

It’s [this new approach] not just as a methodology but itself a form of development. it’s a core process of change. The need for development is vast. The opportunities for those that want to help it from above are really limited. a catalytic approach is another way to look at it.

For this commentator, such a ‘new’ third framework is one in which an assets-approach (building on what a community has and can know) combined with a horizontal learning approach (exchanges, story-sharing with other communities) comes together to be what he calls a ‘catalytic framework’.

other organisationally-diffused frameworks

However, there are a few frameworks being diffused not via large government or multilateral aid institutions (as per the big four above), but through smaller South African organisations. The research project identified several South African frameworks being developed, and then diffused, usually through training, to different sectors of community workers. I have chosen to focus briefly on three of these, including: the work of Community Development Resource Association (CDRA) and its ‘developmental approach’ or organic approach; the work of The Grail Centre and the ‘Train-the-Trainer’ (TtT) approach; and the work of Khanya-accid and their work in promoting an integration of the Sustainable Livelihoods Approach (SLA) within community-based planning methods (albeit, it is acknowledged that they are working closely with the Department of Social Development).

CDra and a Developmental framework

The developmental approach has best been articulated within a 1997/8 annual report of CDRA (1998). This report, written in the form of an extended essay, considers some of the problematics of what is named as the conventional development paradigm and then argues for an alternative developmental paradigm. for example, in discussing the conventional paradigm, the essay considers many of its assumptions and practices such as (among others):


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• development can be created and engineered;• development is then something that is brought to, and for some, by others

who are presumably more developed;• development can be done on behalf of third parties – that is, development

practitioners bring interventions which are designed and financed by third parties, not by communities, who are the subjects of intervention;

• ultimately the paradigm is fundamentally about the ‘delivery of resources’ (see CDRA, 1998: 8–9).

The essay then goes on to outline an antithesis to the conventional development paradigm. at the core of this paradigm is an understanding of ‘development that is an innate and natural process found in all living things’ (ibid.: 13). In this sense then development workers do not ‘bring’ development, but intervene into development processes that already exist. The key practice for community development practitioners then is to be able to ‘read’ or discern where a community or organisation is on its own development pathway. The shift is from ‘bringing resources’ to ‘facilitating resourcefulness’ (ibid.: 17). Contrasting with some of the key tenets of the conventional paradigm identified above this developmental paradigm argues that:

• development cannot be engineered – it exists independently of the practitioner;

• in turn, a development practitioner can only facilitate processes that are already in motion;

• development practitioners can only assist in the flow of a development process, nothing more;

• interventions can only emerge from an accurate and sensitive reading of a situation;

• because situations are constantly changing, a development practitioner must remain responsive and flexible, able to reflect, learn and manage such change (ibid.: 17–18).

The intellectual traces of this framework have then been gradually forged into a developmental framework through more than 20 years of work within the Cape Town based CDRA (Fowler and Ubels, 2010) and more recently ‘The Proteus Initiative’. CDRA’s work has been diffused during that time both within south africa and internationally through consulting and facilitating learning programmes. such an approach to social practice has been most clearly articulated by Allan Kaplan (2005; 2002; 1996) and more recently within a collection of writings Capacity Development in Practice (Ubels et al., 2010).

When interviewed for this research, Kaplan talks directly about the intellectual roots of the approach:


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It comes out of a tradition of the Netherlands Pedagogical Institute (NPI). Part of my life has been turned around through books … someone gave me a book that turned my life around. It was a book called The Developing Organisation (1973) by Bernard lievegoed; he was a Dutch professor of pedagogy who founded NPI which comes out of an anthroposophical tradition – but he specifically only used the aspects that could be translated into what he termed “sensible social concepts”. An institute emerged – it is much smaller now, but had its heyday in the 60s and 70s. CDRA was built on some of the work of the NPI work in Holland. And some of the understandings and perspectives of my first book [The Development Practitioner Handbook (Kaplan, 1996)] have been developed out of that tradition. and somewhere behind that tradition lies rudolf steiner, and behind that goethe.

another development practitioner at cDra also extrapolates on the intellectual traditions informing their work, particularly Goethe and Steiner. For her, Goethe provides the intellectual roots of needing to observe, and particularly learning to ‘read’ social situations or phenomenon as they are. she explains how,

goethe’s argument is that life has its own energy and force and you’ve got to connect with that if you want to make any kind of contribution that might be considered useful … if you want to be useful you’ve got to connect with what’s going on and in order to connect with what’s going on, you’ve got to be able to “read” what’s going on and not imagine that this is a dead system like a machine. (SS, 2011, personal communication)

The intellectual tradition of this social practice has also drawn on the new sciences such as complexity theory, chaos theory and systems theory (see for example, Wheatley and Frieze, 2011).

As a whole this framework then provides guidance to a community practitioner in how to think about the social phenomenon of a community/organisation, how to observe, how to make sense of the dynamics of community/organisation and change, some of the possibilities of change processes and finally the arts and design of actual practice.

Training for Transformation: Critical framework

as discussed within the chapter 3, the social learning tradition of community development has a long history within south africa. one of the cornerstones of that tradition is Paolo Freire’s intellectual work, which has vastly influenced community work. Within this section I have chosen to focus on Anne Hope and Sally Timmel’s interpretation of his work, as they have, through writing and training, sustained the diffusing of a particular approach over a long period of time.


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Hope and Timmel (1984) have taken the core of Freire’s work on adult education, integrated it with other sources of practice (for example, organisational development, social analysis, human relations practice), and have created an accessible workable practice framework for community development workers within their resource Training for Transformation: Books I–IV.

When interviewed for this project anne and sally explained that for them ‘development is primarily a spiritual practice’ and freire’s combination of spiritual awakening and social justice is what makes it Frerian. Their comments also referred to people often wanting to take ‘bits of Freire’, either his spiritual practice, or his justice work (literacy), but not all. They believe the real power in Freire is the combination – the ‘whole package’ so to speak.

They both met Paulo freire when studying at Boston in the late 1960s as adult educators, and then again in Tanzania. These encounters consolidated their understanding and commitment to the approach. in 1973 sally was out of the country and found she could not return and so ended up in exile until 1990. During the exile years she and Anne worked for many years in Kenya and other parts of east africa. it was during these years that they developed many handouts (using old stencils) for Training for Transformation (TfT) and the first volume of the eventual four-volume manual was developed from these handouts. it was then restructured when working in Zimbabwe and published by Mambo Press. They also argue that the success of their work in Kenya was partly achieved by working through the catholic church structures, giving them access down to village level, enabling a movement to grow. Their analysis is that currently within south africa the work is unfortunately fragmented, as there is no structure to ‘carry the work’.

Their long-term links have been not only with Freirian adult education but also the international women’s movement, particularly the grail organisation, with about 1,000 members around the world. in 1999, the south african grail centre was set up in Kleinmond, Western cape, and in 2002 they started the TfT Diploma in partnership with the centre for Development studies at Kimmage college, ireland.

At the heart of their TfT framework are the following signposts for practice:

• Work with the poor and oppressed, not for them;• Development is an awakening process;• let the people grow;• Build up the people’s solidarity;• Build up the people’s organisation (1995, Vol. 1: 27).

Within this framework the community worker acts primarily as an animator – enabling critical consciousness, group learning and organisational development – through a constant process of action-input-reflection.


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Khanya: Integrating sustainable Livelihood approach with Community-based Planning

The main focus of Khanya has been the training of community development practitioners within the south african Department of social Development, but also other ngos, particularly emphasising the integration of the sla approach with community-based planning. They have developed numerous community-based planning tool-kits (available on the Internet) and also facilitate community-based economic development courses (over two to three week periods).

For Khanya SLA theory is the conceptual framework for the practice of community-based planning and their main goal is to connect community to government using these tools. While arguing that government really needs to adopt community-based planning (CBP) approaches, practitioners at Khanya are also critically reflective, arguing that:

… the missing bit in cBP is immediate local action based on what they have thought through themselves. The reason this is happening is that – the shortcoming is when the dialogue is a little limited. Within the cBP the central question was not given enough time to be discussed, it was pushed too fast to get result. I still like CBP – but I’ve said we need a “slow brew” CBP. We have these dialogues, but we should take more time, give space for people to reflect on their own and then come back and reflect on the process. In hurrying it through it was really consultancy-driven, not community-driven; that is the pace of the dialogue. Another day or longer would be fine … that “slow brew” would be more sustainable at a community level. This is hard to sustain from a government view. if run by consultancies then it is expensive; but if it was government employees then it would be cost-effective. Community health workers, CDWs and CDP (DSD) are three appropriate people to do this. They have time and can afford to have a slow brew approach. (SC, 2011, personal communication)

Their overall analysis is that there is a desperate need to connect the micro-community level to meso level local government, and also to macro level national government. Khanya works with each level of the system. In short, in community development, they are looking for maximum community participation and maximum government support. One interviewee argues that the key metaphor is ‘walking together’, and this refers to the idea that for community-driven development to happen there has to be active community participation, but also active professional and government support.

Within this frame the following diagram helps make sense of their analysis of what is happening within south african community development. The picture is depicted in a grid formation with firstly, an axis of engaged or disengaged communities; and, secondly, another axis of government/ professionals identified as supportive through to non-supportive. Pictorially it can be depicted in the following way.


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Their senior practitioner, when interviewed, explained that,

If you look at the history of RSA before 1994 there were communities engaged themselves but there was only disengaged government. Development was slow, community-driven, but without support [see top right-hand box]. Post 1994–2005 we moved from this to a position of perception of good government support and a community that was disengaged [and] into another box of government-driven development and non-engaged communities. it could be described as the hand out/entitlement era [see bottom left-hand box]. In my organisation we call this “walking behind” government – a process of entitlement, with people saying, “Government should do this. If the house breaks, government will come to fix it”. But we are now seeing situations in which shifts occur, in communities, where they see government is not working; and in this situation sometimes there

figure 4.1 government–community relations grid


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is “walk apart” – people want to go alone. We see there is no hope for walking alone, walking apart, or walking behind. The only sustainable community-driven development is “walking together” where communities and government is engaged, from a different viewpoint, from a supportive role – really together, doing things together with them [see top left-hand box].

This analysis provides a useful frame for understanding the dilemmas of community development work, particularly the community–government interface.

Conclusion: Towards Personal Practice frameworks

In finalising the analysis of community development frameworks, it is apt to return to the opening quote by Jim Ife, that ‘every community worker will conceptualise practice in a different way, and will build a different practice framework that will develop and change with experience’ (Ife, 2002: 265). This quote alludes to the diverse kinds of practice frameworks that experienced community workers will develop. In previous writing with Ann Ingamells (Westoby and Ingamells, 2011) we have called these ‘personal practice frameworks’ as a way of describing how practitioners eventually combine the wisdom of numerous policy, organisational, and academically diffused frameworks, along with their personal experiences. Ideally, experienced practitioners then combine tacit knowledge, learned ‘on the job’ so to speak, with the knowledge learned from these frameworks. Such personal practice frameworks usually enable practitioners to combine elements of the ‘self’ with more abstract knowledge and skills, and develop what I have called in the Introduction chapter ‘practical wisdom’. The framework then provides conceptual guidance to the worker, enabling them to be responsive to the situation at hand, drawing on the resources of self alongside diverse frameworks.

Within this research what was clear to me was the lack of personal practice frameworks. People tended to adopt one of the policy-oriented or organisationally-diffused frameworks discussed above, or to have no coherent framework at all.

It is argued that what is needed for community workers is both a clear organisational community development practice framework (so a worker can locate themselves within their organisational context) and recognition that such an organisational framework will be interpreted and re-interpreted by practitioner’s in situ. The integration of a normative organisational practice framework with such factors as context, personality and experience, leads to a personal practice framework that over time should be easily articulated publically by practitioners.

This is the core material for communities of practice to then create opportunities for mentoring, supervision and training – oriented towards reflective practice, constructing a personal practice framework that mixes community workers’ personal experience with the organisational framework (see Westoby and Ingamels, 2011; Ife, 2002). Such practice frameworks should:


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• enable people to understand their tasks and activities in the light of key community development movements and processes, such as: from ‘I’ to ‘We’, from working for (servicing) to working with (supporting and facilitating); conceptually understand key ideas such as community, development, poverty, empowerment and capacitation – both within a historical and contemporary perspective. That is, being aware of the community development traditions available;

• engage different academic frameworks of practice such as: assets-based approach, sustainable livelihoods approach, dialogical approach, rights-based approach and so forth;

• navigate the complex contexts that they find themselves embedded and enmeshed within.

At present there appeared to be little space provided within workplaces for community workers to reflect on how those frameworks could be integrated into the personal, (their own histories and so forth). The consequences were that when accompanying many practitioners into the field, when social situations occurred that were beyond the bounds of the framework – such as, the procedures of community-based planning – the community worker was found wanting. The craft of community work, the capacity to dance a responsive dance (as Allan Kaplan puts it) was lacking.


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ParT iii community-Based Practices

and ngo stories of community Development

This part of the book discusses findings distilled from case studies of community development work initiated or supported by NGOs. Stories have been chosen on the basis of both diverse themes, that is, economic, educational, cultural and so forth, and examples of practice within south africa. in some ways the stories and practices reflect both my own meditations on some of the crucial issues facing South African community development and also the confluence of issues and serendipity that is part and parcel of research work; in other words, the stories that I have stumbled across during the fieldwork. I have not attempted to engage with all directions that community development can go in; that is not the primary purpose. if i were to do that there would be many more stories engaging many more issues, such as, community development and land reform, community development and ecological issues, community development and hiv orphans, community development and disaster response, and so forth. The book consists of five stories, including:

• hantam community education Trust, focused on the crucial interplay of community development and educational issues;

• The nelson mandela foundation’s community conversation methodology, focused on concerns to do with socio-cultural work and xenophobia;

• The abalimi and home and community garden movement, with its exemplary work in community-based economic development;

• The Southern Cape Land Committee, focused on politically-oriented work among farm workers in the Eastern and Western Cape areas;

• The ymca Better life options Programme, and the importance of community-based education and training practices.

Whilst the chapters articulate numerous distilled practices from the stories/case studies it is not until the conclusion chapter that i consider what they mean within the broader theorising project.


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chapter 5

community Development, education and the hantam community education Trust

my partner and i are driving along a dirt road to visit the hantam community Education Trust. It’s a dusty drive, some 40 km out from Colesberg, 600 km south-west of Johannesburg. We have driven past many small communities, reminding me of the villages I used to work in within Kwa-Zulu Natal from 1994–1998. Often the schools are broken looking, but there are crowds of young people. I feel a familiar sense of despair for the young people who are institutionally marginalised by the on-going failure of educational reform in South Africa. But I keep my head up, after all I am working at the university which has Professor Jonathon Jensen as the vice chancellor, and he has plenty to say about education and schools; and also i am about to arrive at the hantam community Trust about which i have heard many good stories.

Introduction

many of my interviewees within the broader research project consider the crisis in education of young people as the definitive crisis of South Africa. Structurally, the failure of education to be reformed significantly entrenches marginalisation of particularly young black people, but also many other poor people. Modernity’s key mechanism of social mobility is thwarted. Within capitalist logics, if people do not have access to financial capital then cultural capital, gained through education, is the next best thing. Within South Africa many young people lack access to either financial or cultural capital and therefore their dreams are shattered. It is into this space that the following chapter speaks, tracing the role of community development catalysing an education initiative within south africa.

A casual peruse of this book would enable the reader to discern my interest in education, with both the chapter dedicated to exploring the community-based education case study of the YMCA, and also the reflections of Es’kia on education. This chapter considers the story of a community-based effort to start formal education initiatives within a rural setting. The chapter, like others, also discusses some other crucial elements of community development practice.


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Context

hantam community education Trust is located in the district called umsobomvu, an area that consists of 28 farms all within a radius of approximately 50 km from the Trust. The work of the Trust focuses primarily on the constituencies of these farms – the labourers, the young people and even the farmers themselves. As the Trust’s credibility has grown, young people are also bussed in from colesberg, some 40 km away, as many parents there consider Hantam the best school in the area.

The idea and conversation that sparked the genesis of this project occurred in 1989 as three women of the area came together and decided they wanted to do something. Their initial idea was to form a playgroup and so, with some help from Early Childhood Development (ECD) experts, some women from the farms were identified by the local population, sent to training, and then given some work. The process of identifying women and consolidating the project occurred during a ‘community meeting’, one that took place monthly for some time. This regular community meeting also was used as an opportunity to consider a range of other local issues and potential initiatives, such as how to set up community gardens.

since that initial meeting and those early days the Trust has evolved into an ‘integrated’ rural development initiative that has, among other things, ‘provided a school’ for well over 6,000 young people in the area, including bursaries for post-school education, initiated a hospitality training centre that provides professional training and supported/mentored job placements, set up a rural community health strategy, inclusive of a pharmacy, and many other things.

The context is not easy. There are endemic issues to do with alcohol abuse (leading to substantial challenges related to alcohol foetal syndrome), HIV/aiDs, farmer/labour tensions and economic poverty. The integrated nature of the challenges are well illustrated by the following anecdote, whereby at a community meeting early in 1989 a community spokesperson stood up and said, ‘We are not happy with this. We don’t like the [play]school!’ Asked why, he answered, ‘It is all well and good, but where will our children go from here?’ Certainly a reasonable and rational question, in fact a very astute one, demonstrating the complex integrated and interconnected nature of many community problems. one could ask the same question having set up a successful school – what next? Dilemmas of employment arise; and then of course alcohol foetal syndrome, namely a health issue, thwarts many efforts to solve educational-economic problems.

It is into such a context that Hantam’s integrated work, pioneered via educational initiatives, has grown. however, before telling the story in more depth, and also distilling crucial community development practices, i now turn to the literature exploring the linkages between community development and education.


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Community Development, Education and the Hantam Community 73

Locating Linkages between Community Development and education

Within many parts of the world it is easy to discern two strands of theory-practice within the history of evolving community development practices. on the one hand are the more technical approaches that focus on community development as a social planning or service delivery practice. for example, this technical approach emerged from the neighbourhood-oriented work within the UK of the 1950s (adapted from Canada’s neighbourhood work underpinned by Murray Ross’s work). However, the 1950s saw a split occur within the UK with more progressive elements re-orienting community development towards what can be understood as a community and adult education tradition. in many ways this split still exists around the world, with more institutionally-oriented community development continuing to focus on social planning and service delivery, albeit eliciting more community participation, and more ‘grass-roots’ workers focusing on community and adult education.

Re-visiting this history, the 1960s saw the emergence of the first UK-based community development programmes, focused on localities. however the approach was heavily critiqued by those aligned to the progressive impulses of the 1960s. such impulses were then reinforced by what is often termed the ‘radical turn’ triggered by numerous publications, but one in particular, notable for community development, Paulo freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970). It should be noted that within the USA Saul Alinsky’s work had already been published and community organising took off as an approach that also countered the more social planning approaches. His work drew on a long lineage of community practice which could be traced back to Jane Adam’s 1880s settlement house tradition, one that had a strong emphasis also on community education. as per the split within the UK, Jack Rothman’s seminal 1968 article, focused on types of community practice, clearly delineated community development (as a form of social work practice, more focused on community organisation), community organising, and social planning.

This brief overview is recounted to locate the links between community development and education within a historical perspective. What is clear is there is a long tradition of community development approaches focusing on education, both of adults and young people. This is true to the point that many youth workers using community development approaches talk about their work as ‘informal education’.

However, whilst community development has strong links with education, it is not situated primarily within the sphere of formal education. as per above, the linkages are more obvious in relation to community education, adult education or non-formal education. as already mentioned, some of my previous work, written in collaboration with a colleague Lynda Shevellar (Shevellar and Westoby, 2012), examines three educational traditions that have deeply influenced community development; namely, adult education, transformational learning and


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popular education, albeit again largely in relation to community-based education approaches and settings.

Having said that, there are also explicit linkages between community development and formal education, particularly the schooling aimed at young people. For example, the previously mentioned work of Es’kia Mphahlele, a south african exiled under apartheid, wrote an important essay ‘education as Community Development – 1990’ (Mphahlele, 2002), discussing the importance of linking community development and schooling.

returning to the story

Having established the legacy of linkages between community development and education i now return to the story of the hantam community education Trust, an exquisite example of how community development approaches can be used to create an educational oasis in the context described above.

Building on the initial efforts of the three women who dreamed up the idea of a playgroup and hosted the regular community meetings, energy was gathered to respond to community identified issues. Schooling was on the agenda of the community, as per the assertion of the spokesperson recounted earlier.

At first, the school was established within the farm buildings that were available, and initially consisted of 60 children and several teachers. The dining room, the garage and the stable were used as classrooms. eventually one of the local farmers donated several hectares of land and this was registered as a school site, providing not only a geographical and identity base but also a legal basis for raising funds. an architect designed a school, which was built over a period of the next 15 years and funds were gradually donated enabling several buildings to be constructed.

The school targets 3–16 year olds, with the idea that some of the students can then articulate to boarding schools in colesberg or Bloemfontein, supported by Trust bursaries. The medium of learning is english, at the request of the parents, and the pedagogy of the school is constructed on best practice researched and taught by the most engaged educational scholars from different parts of the world1. The school also has an excellent library, a fully-functional computer lab, and a science laboratory. Transport, while provided for the children (seven vehicles), is paid for by parents, but subsidised by the Trust. at the time of my visit the school had 210 students attending; the only limits to growth being space and other resources.

The work has expanded beyond formal schooling. For example, a farm workers’ apprenticeship programme has been established, aimed mainly at young people

1 for example: aarnout Brombacher, an international maths consultant; Dr louis Benjamin, founder of the Basic conceptual Programme and an educational specialist; and, mrs anne hill, a language specialist consultant.


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who have alcohol foetal syndrome and therefore would find it difficult to work in other contexts. They are able, with support, to learn the skills to be farmhands. sitting behind this initiative is a philosophy of giving young people a ‘realistic chance’, thereby not setting up people to fail. such a philosophy argues that young people with alcohol foetal syndrome would not succeed in many other learning contexts and are in fact easy prey for organised crime. The realistic alternative of becoming farm hands was therefore established.

additionally, a hospitality programme has been created within colesberg where graduating young people can enrol for an 18-month internationally accredited certificate in hospitality. They spend one year learning in the Colesberg based programme and are then mentored on-the-job for the next three years, but graduate after six months of this mentoring on-the-job. They are given their certificate six months into the mentorship phase ensuring that they have to stick with the whole programme for 18 months prior to graduating. for several years this programme has had a 100 per cent success rate in placing and keeping young people in a job. The graduates are well sought-after employees.

furthermore, a health clinic and community pharmacy has been established, one that services the community and young children, focusing on primary health care. This health initiative also incorporates seven community health workers who engage with groups, conducting community education around issues such as hiv, alcohol foetal syndrome, affective parenting, pre-natal care and so forth.

More recently some ‘edgy’ community work (Kenny, 2011b), has involved the seven community workers engaging directly with some of the labourers of the neighbouring farms, currently focusing on four farms. They ask the labourers questions such as, ‘What do we expect of our employees’, and conversely, ‘What do the farmers expect of us?’ This work of questioning, gentling, is creating a conversational space for labourers to consider transformational options. for example, one story recounted how the process of questioning led to one labourer asking, ‘Should we keep beating our wives and kids and drink more alcohol, just because the farmer treats us badly?’ It was a crucial question, one reflecting freire’s hope that oppressed people not only be questioned, but also learn to question themselves (Freire and Faundez, 1989), and also one that could kick-start a process of transformation from victim to agent of change.

finally, and as a way of concluding the story, when interviewing the director she affirmed that, ‘We’ve created an enabling environment, but now people have to take responsibility’. The statement reflects the Trust’s philosophy of partnership work, recognising the co-creative efforts required of local people and outsiders, internal and external resources.

having explicated the story i will now distil some crucial generic lessons for community development practice.


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Discussion: Distilling the Lessons for Practice

While the story could be used to discuss dozens of ideas, four main lessons have been distilled for the purposes of this chapter. They include: the element of time in community work; the notion of cooperative leadership as ‘0–1–3’; the meme ‘start anywhere – go everywhere’; and, ‘pedagogy of hope’.

The Element of Time in Community Work

The story told above fills a page or two of text. The reader might be able to sense the rich texture of the work despite this limited account. However, the ‘told’ story only makes visible traces, or small components of the real story. It is a chosen story, one that obviously obscures so much. one aspect of the story rendered invisible by such a brief telling is the length of time embedded within the work. It is not obvious at first glance that this story, at the time of writing, provides glimpses into 25 years of combined work of uncountable numbers of people. The time element quite literally ‘slips away’ in the telling; it is rendered invisible by the quick read.

The crucial point is that most community development processes take a lot of time. Within this story the processes, being relationally-oriented, required the building of trust, and trust is something earned over time. The endless informal meetings between the women leading the initiative and local leaders and people, additionally supplemented with formal monthly meetings, are a time-investment that builds a platform for solid trust. Clearly this investment of relational work – taking the time – leads to an emphasis on process over product (albeit ‘product’ as outcome is also important and it is best to avoid a binary split between process and product). Within the told story the product is visible – a school, teaching, a library and so forth. What is easily submerged is the process work, sometimes colloquially referred to as ‘the footwork, the legwork’, of meeting people, spending time eliciting their stories, building trust and collegiality, and then working cooperatively together. People spoken to or interviewed as I developed this case study were attentive to process, that of the past, present and future. This is crucial within effective community work.

0–1–3 and Cooperative Leadership

If time is one crucial element to community work, then leadership is another. Within the telling of the story, both by people at hantam, and also in my telling, it is easy to miss the significance of leadership. In my experience it is often an unspoken dimension to community development stories because the leaders in community work, unlike leadership in many contexts, do not like to ‘blow their own trumpet’, as we say in australia. They often lead quietly from within, behind, even beneath. Their leadership is often not heroic leadership. instead it is cooperative leadership,


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or the leadership of the ‘nudge’. This kind of leadership can be crystallised through the story of initiating the work of the Hantam Community Education Trust.

Technically, the kind of leadership demonstrated in the story is sometimes referred to as cooperative leadership using the ‘0–1–3’ method (Lathouras, 2010; Westoby and Owen, 2010). Within this method, leadership is initiated when one person has an idea. however, that one person, with an idea within their imagination, might not yet have tested it with others, and is thereby not in relationship with anyone else around the idea – hence the starting point of ‘0’ (zero relationships). community development leadership is astutely exercised when a single person with an idea, but not in relationship with anyone around that idea, avoids going straight into action. such action, if initiated alone, would not be community-oriented. instead they share the idea with one other person. consequently two people then hold the idea, and there is one relationship – signified technically as ‘0–1’. Furthermore, they potentially share a third person. Three people make for three relationships, again, technically signified as ‘0–1–3’, and here is the initial building block of a community process – a minimum of three people and three relationships (Kelly, 2008; Kelly and Burkett, 2008; Westoby and Owen, 2010). This triad creates the cooperative platform for community-oriented action (see Simmel (via Wolff, 1964: 139ff) on the significance of triads).

Within the hantam story we see this process in action, with the account of three women initially coming together, sharing an idea, and then starting an initiative. Of course they quickly move on technically from 0–1–3 – through talking and consulting with potential beneficiaries, as per the community meetings – and quickly there is a 0–1–3–6–9 (as more individuals get involved then the number of relationships multiplies exponentially). This is a web-weaving process that leads to a leadership ethos where people cooperate together and take responsibly in different ways. A minimal triad structure (0–1–3) that evolves into a strong web like structure, provides for a strong leadership structure, as it should become non- or at least less-dependent on any one person (Westoby and Owen, 2010).

Start Anywhere, Go Everywhere

From the interviews, one of the tensions identified was the issue of where you start in community work. One perspective, most clearly articulated by a key informant as, ‘community education is the key, being the catalyst within a holistic model’, is that community workers have to identify the core or root issue to work on. This perspective represents a particular kind of analytical approach whereby the analysis of the community worker or intervener is crucial. Such an analytical approach is very persuasive amongst experts, albeit it makes sense because within this frame it is often assumed that outside experts are needed to help a community, thereby justifying the role of experts. The expertise is focused on using technical tools to analyse the community or social context to identify the root cause of poverty. Groups or a community might then be mobilised to act around that identified issue.


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in contrast, another perspective, best articulated within margaret Wheatley and Deborah Freize’s book Walk Out Walk On: A Journey into Communities Daring to Live the Future Now (2011) is that the real core issue is to work where people have energy, enthusiasm, vision and knowledge (as opposed to correct analysis of the root issue at hand). They use the meme ‘start anywhere, go everywhere’ to hold in a concise manner the wisdom of this way of thinking and working. From this perspective, in the case of the hantam story, the issue was not so much whether ‘education’ is a core issue, or root cause of poverty, but that there were three women who had energy, enthusiasm and knowledge of how to initiate educational experiments and so that is where they started. from this perspective, the issue is that the process started where there was energy, a vision and some skills, neither a convoluted community planning process, nor an abstract analysis of what is the core problem. The point is that three women, working cooperatively (as per the 0–1–3 discussion above) started something and from that more work can grow (hence the ‘start anywhere, go everywhere’ meme).

From this latter view point, it is easier to get work going in a community because experts are not central to the process (albeit importantly, they can be called in to provide support with a very clear understanding to not ‘take over’ or lead). Work can start wherever there are the combined inputs named above, i.e. energy, enthusiasm, a vision and some knowledge.

A Pedagogy of Hope

One participant interviewed explained how hope is the crux of the work’s success. from their perspective if the school does not create a context in which children and young people, along with their parents, can hope – for a better life, or more concretely, paid work – then the community development initiative would collapse quickly. There would be no resonance between hopes and action. Hope as a concept is wonderfully articulated in Paulo freire’s Pedagogy of Hope (2004), as a concrete process of change. hope is theorised in a way that differentiates it from ‘magical thinking’, understood as wishful thinking inspired by dreams alone. for freire, hope instead requires concrete praxis, therefore grounding hope in real possibilities that have emerged from an analysis of options and opportunities.

Such a perspective appeared to me to resonate with the people I talked to at hantam community education Trust. Their analytical connecting of issues, as discussed above, ensured that young people attending the school had real possibilities for their future. The school did not simply create realisable expectations or dreams. instead it elicited both dreams and expectations, and then set out to create concrete pathways enabling the dreams and expectations to be realised in practice.

The analysis of people interviewed indicated that such concrete pathways were made manifest through the holistic nature of the work, providing linkages between primary school, secondary school and a possible next step, the hospitality


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programme, the farm-workers’ apprenticeship programme or bursaries onto tertiary level education. This holistic work ensures credibility within the community.

Conclusion

As explained, there is a long tradition linking community development and educational practices. This chapter provides a glimpse into the literature on this topic and also a closer look at one story linking the two, that of the Hantam Community education Trust. it is an exemplary story of holistic rural community development work which started with an educational ‘intervention’ but has expanded into an integrated practice addressing education, employment and health issues.

Within the chapter, several crucial ideas for community development theory and practice have also been distilled. an inductive approach has been used to identify crucial themes relevant to this research project. These themes include:

• Being conscious of issues of time and the related theme of trust in community work;

• The significance of fostering cooperative forms of leadership and applying technical concepts such as ‘0–1–3’ to understand the building blocks of community processes;

• The meme ‘start anywhere, go everywhere’ as representing a perspective about where practitioners should start the community work process;

• Finally, a ‘pedagogy of hope’ that invites practitioners to work with people in ways that examine real concrete paths for action, as opposed to inspiring wishful thinking.


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chapter 6

community Development, community cohesion and

the nelson mandela foundation

Introduction

i am sitting in a café in KwaZulu natal, catching up with a dear friend verne harris, director of the research and archive Programmes within the then nelson Mandela Foundation. I ask him about the broader socio-cultural dynamics at work within south africa. a fragment of his answer is captured here:

Our society remains severely damaged. Old fissures remain resilient. New ones are emerging. The social fabric is being unravelled further by growing disparities between “haves” and “have-nots”, by rampant corruption, by creaking service delivery infrastructures, a failure of leadership at many levels, alienation from political processes, xenophobia, what i call the re-racialisation of discourse, unacceptable levels of crime, domestic violence, infant mortality, hiv infection, illiteracy, unemployment, and so on. By any measure we are troubled, and in trouble.

The notion of a south africa “belonging to all who live in it” seems now to be an impossible ideal. south africa belongs increasingly to the few who can afford to access the instruments of democratisation; the few who benefit from resilient colonial and apartheid patterns of privilege; the few who can feed from the troughs of patronage, protection and graft; the few who construct islands of conspicuous consumption in huge lakes of impoverishment. In these contexts the metanarratives of “the new south africa” are unravelling. social cohesion is elusive. for the many, the many encumbered by the chains of a too-old south africa, for the many, i would argue, learning simply to get on together has become a lot harder now than it was in 1994.

i don’t have ready answers to these questions. But i would suggest that we underestimated the damage wrought by our histories – to individuals, collectivities and institutions. and i would suggest that we were seduced by the possibility of a “quick-fix” whereby “Madiba Magic” would sprinkle salve on our wounds and we would emerge, quickly, as reconstructed “new South Africans”. Madiba’s gracing of the 1995 rugby World Cup would fast-track the


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transformation of the country’s sports sectors and accomplish in a moment what logic told us would require generations of hard work. On the other hand, I see promising signs … (Harris, 2011)

harris paints a picture of socio-cultural damage, resultant from brutalising years of apartheid history, yet also argues there are promising signs. This chapter considers both, damage and promise, for community development. Drawing on my comments in the introductory chapter of this book, about locating community development within a post-conflict environment, I consider how community development is contributing to the rebuilding of what can be thought about as community-level social cohesion within south africa.

A couple of months after visiting Verne Harris I am again in Johannesburg, the so called city of gold. it is a place i have ambivalent feelings about, conscious that I am in one of the economic hubs of Africa – the economic powerhouse of one of the BRICS nations – yet also aware that there is ever-present danger for people who let their guard down, particularly conspicuously obvious foreigners. The place overflows with the double stories of success, resilience, transformation. It is a vibrant African city after all but also one filled with a sense of hopelessness, (one is constantly reminded of this by the hundreds of unemployed people gathering at the entrances of shopping malls), crime and corruption. I first head to Melville, the neighbourhood I love to stay in when visiting the city, and after checking into a bed and breakfast I again reconnect with Verne Harris. Today he is taking me to visit the coordinator of their community conversation projects, on which this chapter focuses. one of those projects has focused on facilitating public and community-level dialogue around issues of social cohesion, the centre’s response to the 2008 xenophobic ‘riots’.

Locating ‘Community Cohesion’ within the Literature

south africa is faced with the ever-present challenge of what can be construed at a broader national level as social cohesion. Harris (2011), above, provides a pertinent yet harrowing analysis of the many factors in play. however, while concerned with social cohesion generally, this chapter focuses more on community-level socio-cultural cohesion, one of the usual domains of community development work. In a sense, community-level cohesion – the capacity for people to live alongside one another without either necessarily ‘sharing values’ nor living ‘parallel lives’ – is linked to socio-cultural cohesion in complex ways. South Africa is a country where people do still live parallel lives, often due to the enduring spatial issues of apartheid town and city planning. Generally, poor blacks still live in particular neighbours and wealthy whites in others. There is a mix in the middle so to speak, but for many the ‘other’ is profoundly different, foreign in almost every way.

Barlosky (2013) and others (Landau, Segatti and Freemantle, 2013) particularly critique the anc government’s use of the social cohesion concept because their


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Community Development, Community Cohesion 83

version of it is focused on ‘nation-building’ with the nation being primarily for South African citizens, not foreigners. As Marais puts it, ‘there is a serious risk of exclusionary interpretations of belonging, citizenship and rights’ proving to be ‘politically rewarding’ (Marais, 2011: 5). Within this policy frame the main means of achieving social cohesion is through building a set of national shared values. Such a version of social cohesion comes with great risks: firstly, recreating notions of insider and outsider (those who share the values and those who do not); and secondly, produces a notion of difference that assumes lack of antagonisms. an alternative framing of social cohesion would recognise that difference is profoundly important within society, and social cohesion would be built around capacities to engage in what Mouffe calls agonistic politics (2005, 2013), that is, engaging in a politics that recognises consensus is not often possible and difference importantly remains. The idea of agonistic politics implies that people can differ profoundly but respectfully and antagonisms can be worked through in ways that avoid violence to the ‘other’.

However, the current fractures of social cohesion, primarily linked to issues of poverty and inequality, put at risk community cohesion that is understood in this alternative way. Attacks on ‘others’, particularly foreigners since 2008 (Landau, 2011) make manifest such risks – community cohesion in certain townships becomes fragile due to the underlying social cohesion issues and the public discourse of belonging, citizenship and rights.

David Matsinhe takes the analysis deeper, arguing in Apartheid Vertigo: The Rise in Discrimination Against Africans in South Africa (2011), that this violence against mainly black immigrants in South Africa since the end of apartheid is a result of ‘ghosts and hangovers of the [apartheid] past that prove irrepressible in transitional societies with tendencies to categorise into insiders and outsiders’ (2011: xiii). Like Ugandan scholar Mahmood Mamdani, Matsinhe also argues that apartheid and colonialism ‘involved citizen-subject or outsider-insider dualities that continue after decolonisation’ (2011: xv), and that this is manifest in ways that:

… black South Africans were offered opportunities to become insiders in [the new] South Africa for the first time and it can be expected that they would guard this right jealously against any potential rivals. however, given the fact that it is the elite blacks who were given access to become insiders while the urban poor remained outsiders, the influx of large numbers of poor immigrants in their midst resulted in the formation of in-group and out-group identities among the poor based on national pride. (2011: xv)

With a nuanced analysis Matshinhe also points out that ‘to make matters worse, public officials like police officers, the military, immigrations officials and some leading politicians seek to maintain the outsider status through discriminatory practices …’, albeit recognising that such discriminatory policing ‘affects poor south africans to the extent that more than 85 per cent of the prison population in the country is made up of black South Africans’ (2011: xv). The way forward for


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Matshinhe is to tackle the problem through some form of education that ‘would expose the futility of blaming outsiders’, alongside ‘economic empowerment for the masses of the poor’ (ibid.: xvi).

With an even sharper analysis, Neville Alexander argues that the kind of xenophobia that erupted in 2008 (which he notes had already been occurring for many years, just not quite as explosively), illuminates the ‘bankruptcy of bourgeois politics in general and of African nationalist politics in particular’ (2013: 175). furthermore, aligned to harris’ comment above, alexander posits that such events have disrupted or deconstructed the ‘fairy-tale that the south african elites and the world’s liberal do-gooders have spun’. The disgruntled working class, and particularly the millions of unemployed youth are angry, albeit their anger has been directed in degenerative ways. alexander, with a cutting analysis of the issue of xenophobia and social cohesion pin-points the ‘poisoned cocktail, the witches’ brew, that produced the explosions in the ghettoes’ (ibid.: 179). His summary of the poisoned cocktail includes:

… a range of interconnected social policy initiatives, which include a dysfunctional civil service; a shambolic department of home affairs responsible for the documentation of citizens and non-citizens; and a vicious neoliberal macro-economic policy of austerity, high interest rates, budget deficits below 3 per cent and even a budget surplus, resulting in “economic growth” of between 2 and 4 per cent since 2004, which was accompanied by an increasing, now a steady, unemployment rate of approximately 40 per cent; a huge legacy of substandard housing and bidonvilles for the poor; a flood of the rural poor into the cities in search of non-existent “opportunities” and work; a hopeless education and training system for the vast majority; and, above all, a Gini coefficient of almost 7, a mark of horrific gulf between the rich and the poor … (2013: 179)

It is this cocktail, fuelled ultimately by a dog-eat-dog competitive attitude for work, that leads to the ‘highlighting or foregrounding of markers of social difference, the most salient being colour or “race”, religion, language of “ethnicity” … Workers of foreign nationality are in these circumstances the most visible’ (ibid.: 180).

Both matsinhe’s and alexander’s analyses fuel a perspective that within contemporary south africa there is also the ever-present sense of potential social chaos and political disintegration. The history of social distance ensures that there is a non-reflexive tendency to project the enemy onto ‘the other’ – whether it be Muslims, gays, asylum seekers/foreigners, blacks/whites, conservatives, liberals, greens or socialists – and such a tendency can put stress on a society.

Stepping out of the specificities of South Africa, and building on Alexander’s analysis of inequality, Richard Sennett’s sociological work (2003, 2012) has focused an analysis of growing inequalities and how they in turn both undermine people’s ‘capacities to cooperate’ and produce a ‘cynical society’ whose ‘denizens are ill-disposed to cooperate’ (Sennett, 2012: 134). At the core of Sennett’s thesis is the notion that contemporary forms of capitalism are leaning towards a ‘zero-


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sum competition’ with ‘winner takes-all extremes’ (ibid.: 134). He argues that social cohesion is inherently weak within such capitalist systems (ibid.: 134), and is even more stressed under the conditions of contemporary turbo-capitalism.

This reduced social cohesion, produced through increased inequalities, undermines the possibilities of dialogical or hospitable exchanges.

furthermore, sennett argues that the complex social dynamics centred on how respect and dependency interrelate also challenge pro-social relations (2003). His analysis of how many marginalised people within unequal societies end up in relationships of dependency – upon welfare/social grants, or low-paid alienating work, or aid initiatives – is very useful. A community worker engaging with marginalised people, often in conditions of dependency, can encounter a deep resistance to opening up to dialogue. There could be a lingering resentment, a building anger, and/or a simmering indignity.

Harvard University conflict-resolution specialist Donna Hicks offers further insight into the humiliation of indignity (Hicks, 2011) – understood as something different to disrespect. Thirty-three years of conflict-resolution work led her to conclude that, ‘emotional riptides wreaked havoc on the people and [any] dialogue process’ (Hicks, 2011: xiii). She concluded that ‘the force behind their reactions was the result of primal insults to dignity’ (ibid.: xiii). Social cohesion is undermined or weakened when people who are treated badly, suffering indignity, find it hard to let go of their positions, perspectives and pain. slovenian philosopher and cultural critic Slavoj Zizek pushes this kind of analysis further, arguing that within wealthy societies we now live with the ‘institutionalisation of envy’ (2011: xiii) ensuring and amplifying such resentment, anger and indignity. These feelings, all produced by welfare or aid dependency, clearly do not create a good emotional platform for dialogue. reaching ‘for the other’ or for ‘mutual understanding’ is counter-intuitive when humiliation poises people for a fight.

Seeking connections across gulfs of difference is challenging. Inequalities produce many challenges – albeit individually mediated and made sense of – that can undermine people’s self-respect, their self-love, and their capacity to reach out. With greater inequality and the corresponding increased chance of experiences of humiliation, there is often less self-respect. There is also an accompanying inclination towards dispositions (Bourdieu, 1984) that imply ‘go away – you are different!’ People bunker down with ‘people like themselves’ thereby reproducing social distance and inequalities. These dynamics produce what seminal authors Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett call ‘social pain’ (Wilkinson and Pickett, 2009: 212), an idea echoing Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of ‘social distress’ (1999) and Wendy Brown’s concept of ‘social injury’ (1995).

of course a community development approach sees potential within the social pain produced by such inequalities. if not silenced or managed, people’s experience of social pain can lead them, sometimes ‘nudged along’ by community workers, into dialogic conversations with others. These conversations create possibilities whereby a mutual understanding of common experiences can then lead to social solidarity and collective action. Potentially then, while inequality reduces social


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cohesion across society it can lead to social solidarity among those suffering. The felt private pain, through dialogue with others, can be understood as social pain and reimagined as a public issue animating collective action (Daveson, 2000), as per the story accounted now.

The story of Practice animating Collective action via Dialogue

in 2007 the nelson mandela foundation launched its community dialogue programme. In 2008 the work initially focused on community conversations around the issue of hiv/aiDs. however, with xenophobic riots also erupting during that year, a programme of dialogue focused on community-level social cohesion was initiated. The director of the centre, sello hatang, recently argued that, ‘community dialogue is all about the importance of people who fundamentally disagree with each other having a safe space to dialogue’ (public presentation, 26 August 2013), hence a focus on creating spaces to explore xenophobia amongst antagonists.

The work aims to not only facilitate community-level dialogue but to also train community facilitators who can then accompany people in their change-oriented work. Since the inception of the programme over 400 dialogues have been facilitated and more than 200 people have been trained as facilitators. recently the work, initiated by the Mandela Centre in partnership with the German donor GIZ, has been handed over to the south african Department of social Development with the hope that community dialogue work has now been institutionalised and will continue within their broader community development programme.

at the heart of the community Dialogue approach is the united nations Development Programme (UNDP) Community Capacity Enhancement (CCE) methodology – commonly known as a Community Conversation Methodology. The overall goal is social change and is based on a dialogic approach.

The dialogic approach is based on a six-step implementation cycle, with each step having a specific objective and small group exercises to promote participation, reach consensus, and implement action plans. The steps initiate and support a process of data generation, group analysis and agreements for social change strategies. evaluative reports about cce conclude that there needs to be a time-frame of 9–12 months (approximately 18–24 sessions) therefore requiring a significant time investment (Bunkers, 2010: 10). The steps include: relationship building, concern identification, concern exploration, decision-making, action, and reflection/review.

for the past few years, the centre has applied the cce methodology to identify communities’ concerns with regard to both hiv/aiDs and also address violence and xenophobia. The aim is deep transformation – of attitudes and values as well as behaviour. The analysis underpinning the whole programme is that the fears and concerns surrounding the presence of migrants and xenophobia in south africa require deep reflection and transformation of values, attitudes and practices at individual and community levels. facilitators help communities to identify the


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underlying causes and impact of their frustration and anger towards migrants, and to find locally relevant means to address these causes, albeit there is also recognition that horizontal learning processes can link local communities in ways that enable ‘trans-local’ issues to be tackled (as the issues at hand are not always locally generated).

The main means for achieving this is through community conversations – open community discussions guided by facilitators trained in the cce methodology. Community conversations provide safe spaces where people can get to know each other, build relationships, express themselves without fear and get to the heart of their concerns. here, they identify and explore their issues, values and resources. They begin to make decisions and take action to find solutions to the challenges they face. They constantly review and reflect on the process they are going through (Nelson Mandela Foundation, 2010a; Nelson Mandela Foundation, 2010b). The process is also shared beyond the community through documentation, arts and the media.

There have also been more recent experiments in enhancing or infusing the methodology through forms of applied drama with the initiation of a partnership with the Drama for life Programme of WiTs university. The goal has been to enhance dialogue through embodied learning, and to do this some of the facilitators have been up-skilled in applied theatre practices. Within the experiments that included applied theatre, the community conversations appeared to be enhanced through, for example, sustained dialogues within villages but with the addition of cross-village dialogues and cross-community events, triggering both horizontal learning processes and more collaborative action plans.

This is not to say there are not difficulties. Within the research it became clear that whilst all people talked to were enthusiastic about the methodology and deeply committed to it they were also aware of the challenges. for example, some participants talked about the ever-present issues of who gets to speak in the conversations – complex group dynamics between chiefs, women, elders, and young people were foregrounded. Others talked about their surprise when ‘power issues emerged’, particularly between the formal representatives of local government and the emergent leaders from the conversations. vested issues came to the foreground and the conversations appeared to create tensions between forms of representative and participatory democracy. One analysis of people I talked to was that when ‘communities start to experience capacity then you see clashes with some formally elected councillors’.

Furthermore, when facilitators reflected on their work they expressed some crucial needs, such as: needing additional capacities to deal with conflict; debriefing opportunities because the work is so emotionally draining; and more training in how to support what they called ‘champions’ and manage ‘spoilers’. Many also talked about the need for more patience realising how slow the work actually is, echoing the reflection on the role of time in community work discussed in the previous chapter.


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Discussion

Whilst many issues about the methodology could be discussed i now focus on several crucial practices relevant for community development. They include: the practices of group analysis; building an analysis ‘beyond where people are at’; and, facilitators in the role of accompanying.

Group Analysis through Dialogue

While the previous chapter considered the significant role of cooperative leadership in getting community initiatives going, this case study exemplifies what can be done when groups of people get together. in common community development parlance this can be understood as a process that enables group analysis (see Westoby and Dowling, 2013: 70). There are of course many others, such as Conversation Cafes, the art of hosting and open space Technology processes, to name just a few. each has a series of steps or procedures that are designed to achieve what i have also previously called data and agreement generation (ibid.: 71).

The idea of group analysis is that people themselves are at the centre of generating an analysis of what their concerns are and what can be done. cce, using dialogic approaches, aims to do this. While facilitators, animators and experts might play a supportive role in the analytical process they are not central to the process. as an advocate of participatory development robert chambers would say, ‘hand over the pen’, ensuring people affected by the issues at hand are the ones developing the analysis.

For example, another cutting edge method of analysis exemplifying the kind of group analysis practice is the ‘collective narrative practices’ methodology being developed by australia’s Dulwich centre in partnership with organisations around the world. This approach to building group analysis, like any good micro-method, is grounded in people’s stories. yet it uses a set of principles to unearth these stories in particular ways that enable communities of resistance or sustenance to be created (Denborough, 2008). These principles are grounded in practices that enable a practitioner to elicit the ‘double stories’ of people’s hardships and responses – one story of their suffering itself, and another of how they have sustained themselves despite such sufferings. embedded within the sustaining processes are people’s skills and knowledge that are the starting points for ‘development’. Collective narrative practices unearth these stories, skills and knowledge – people’s data so to speak – and through various methodologies (Denborough, 2008) enable people to build an analysis of ways forward.

another important element of group analysis processes, departing from the story chosen within the chapter, and also again learned from the Dulwich centre’s collective narrative practice experience, is the importance of taking care in co-creating analysis tools that are embedded within local culture. for example, the risk with the CCE methodology is that it is a one-size-fits-all methodology imported from the un and used all over the world regardless of the context. The


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real risk in using ‘trans-context’ methodologies is that within group or community meetings a lot of energy can be taken up with people simply understanding or assimilating into the tool itself. in a sense, participation then becomes ‘dis-embedded’ from the cultural roots of the people using the method or tool.

Building an Analysis ‘beyond where people are at’

one of the terminable problems of community analysis is what to do when a group analysis is lacking, or when people’s analysis appears to not be sharp. Put another way, what does a community worker or facilitator do when their analysis is profoundly different to a group or community analysis. returning to the story, what would a community facilitator/worker do when a group’s analysis of xenophobia alludes to the ‘problems of foreigners’ – locating the problem within the ‘alien’ that needs to be removed? Paulo Freire argued that educators must always ‘start with the people, but must not stay with the people’. his wisdom provides a way forward for community workers involved in supporting group or community analysis. one starts with the people, listening, harnessing their concerns and their analysis but sometimes it is not enough to leave it at that. There is a role for inserting new ideas, new theory, and disrupting stuck or ill-informed ideas. Clearly there are both theoretical problems and practical problems with such a position about practice. Theoretically the problem is aligned to the problem of critical theory generally, that is, what to do when a professional, or an intellectual deems ‘lay’ analysis to be faulty. freire called such faulty analysis ‘false consciousness’, or ‘magical consciousness’ if people’s analysis included causes related to god, fate, magic, witchcraft and so forth. Practically speaking, the problem is embedded in what to actually do. again returning to the above example, if a large group of people in a room are calling for foreigners to be removed from a community what does a community facilitator do? The community facilitator’s theory might inform them that people have a faulty analysis. for example, people might have ‘bought into the myth that foreigners are taking their jobs’, yet how does one respond? Freire’s wisdom implies that the facilitator is obligated as an educator to insert new ideas or theory into the situation. one such example could be, inviting someone to bring information about, for instance, ‘what jobs are being created by the activities of foreigners’. The challenge here becomes how to balance the community organising with the community educating role, an endemic tension within the work of community development (see Bell, Gaventa and Peters, 1990, We Make the Road by Walking for an excellent discussion of this tension).

Facilitators in the Role of Accompanying

one of the delights in researching this case study was listening to the facilitators explain their role using the language of accompaniment. resonating with CDRA’s developmental approach to community development (Kaplan, 1996), accompanying is indicative of an approach to development generally that eschews


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a strong-willed patriarchal ethos of intervention. as per some of the ideas explicated within the methodology chapter of this book, instead a more careful, nuanced understanding of co-motion is foregrounded. accompanying indicates an ethos of working alongside a group of people, not leading from the front, nor even pushing from behind, but instead nudging from the side. metaphorically, accompanying also represents being willing to ‘hang in there’ for the long haul, sticking with a group over a period of time that enables them to stand up for themselves, having gained confidence, networks and resources. Whereas some capacity building practices focus simply on transfer – of skills, ideas, technology, often with the input of money or workshops – accompanying implies more than just transfer. It is the language of social solidarity (Sennett, 2012) and ‘being with’ a group. This is not to negate the utility of skills, ideas, technology, money and workshops – and clearly the CCE methodology requires all of them – but it is to highlight the nature of the facilitator-people relationship as primary and to locate the transference issues as secondary.

Conclusion

community-level social cohesion issues abound within contemporary south africa. as per the literature review above, it would be easy for social cohesion policy and language to fall into the trap of constructing the ideal or idea of communities unified by commonality, whether they are the commonalities of values, ideas, or ethnicity. however, alternative ways of framing social cohesion focus on communities’ capacities to engage with agonistic conflict – recognising differences and working through them with respect – whilst also creating the kinds of social solidarities that enable social movements to tackle issues of inequalities that ultimately undermine social cohesion.

one delightful response to the issue, an approach grounded in and illustrative of community development theory and practice, is the nelson mandela foundation community conversation methodology. Proponents of the cce methodology, as articulated by many facilitators talked to and heard within this research, were able to discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the approach with honesty. Their enthusiasm and commitment did not thwart a critical reflective space and the hope is that with the recent institutionalisation of the initiative within the south african state the work will flourish.

from a practice perspective the case study also offers not only a methodology but an opportunity to distil crucial community development practices. This chapter has highlighted the practices of building group analysis, building an analysis ‘beyond where people are at’ and the role of accompanying in community facilitation.


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chapter 7

community economic Development and the abalimi home and community

garden movement

Introduction

one of my early observations through this broader research project was that within south africa, community development is in danger of being captured or colonised by an economic perspective or vision of community development. in a sense, poverty is un-reflexively defined as an economic condition or state, and in turn ‘development’ is understood as economic transformation, or growth. hence, when talking of community development within South Africa, most people very quickly start talking about social enterprises or livelihood-oriented development. I most certainly wish to avoid such a capturing and colonisation, hence my exploration of economic practices as only one of several. however, at the same time i want to avoid the mistake of underestimating the centrality of some form of economic development to most poor south africans. Therefore, the case study explored within this chapter engages with the issues of economic development, connecting the dots between food, jobs, work and land.

I first visited Cape Town in 1995, a quick visit to go to the quarter final world cup rugby match between england and australia. australia lost, but unusually i did not feel upset. instead the beauty and magic of cape Town cast a spell over me – as it does many. Of course, such an experience belies the history of this city on the southern tip of africa. it is one of the central ‘beachheads’ for colonisation and settlement within southern africa and so the emotion elicited from the beauty is mixed with other feelings such as sadness.

Over the years I have visited the city many times – often to visit friends and occasionally to go for a walk up the mountain. However, in 2011 I first visited the Abalimi Bezekhaya (from now on referred to as Abalimi), a Voluntary Association (VA) supporting and catalysing an urban home and community garden movement, consisting of mainly female urban agriculturalists from the surrounding townships.

In 2013, as I again drove into Cape Town, I was struck by the accurate analyses of both Mike Davies’s Planet of Slums (2006) and Edgar Pieterse’s Rogue Urbanism: Emergent African Cities (2013) – of the unfolding failure of capitalist systems of economics to transform the lives of millions of marginalised. The n1 highway cutting through cape Town provides a poignant overview of the ongoing consequences of capitalist logics – some win, many lose – and the failure


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of African urban policy makers to engage with the urban reality. In 2011, the township area i was visiting with a small group of other interested observers, was also burning with community anger, another manifestation of so called ‘service delivery protest’. in fact tensions were so high, our host the director of abalimi, informed us that ‘the locals insist we have a police escort’.

it is into this context that i chose to visit abalimi, a hopeful story of community economic development work. I had originally read about the movement in a local magazine, and then established contact with one of the founders and director, rob Small. My impressions were that here was a story of innovative work, focused on women, on the building of solidarity and of food production. abalimi is focused pragmatically on poverty alleviation, but philosophically on constructing a ‘relational economy’ (Westoby and Dowling, 2009: 157ff), that connects the urban poor, mainly women, with those who have cash incomes – the middle class – using a short food chain community supported agriculture (CSA) mechanism.

Context

abalimi is located within some communities of the cape flats area of south africa, a huge region populated largely by economic refugees from the previous apartheid homelands of the Ciskei and Transkei in the Eastern Cape. New arrivals into Cape Town are officially estimated to be about 1,200 people per month and unemployment figures continue to be in the region of 30–40 per cent.

The Abalimi Bezekhaya, translated as ‘the farmers of home’, was founded in 1982/83, as a voluntary association, although discussions illustrated that the term ‘non-profit’ is contested and might in the future be changed to ‘social profit’ – a perspective that again triggers new ideas emerging within what is known as fourth sector organisations. The organisation attempts to alleviate poverty and create self-employment through micro-farming initiatives combined with other practices. for abalimi, micro-farming means that people are growing vegetables and other food items in home gardens, and community gardens, which abalimi calls ‘micro-farming’. micro-farms can be anything from one square metre at home up to one hectare in size.

Abalimi runs an administrative office in the township area of Phillipi and works out of two non-profit People’s Garden Centres or demonstration gardens, nurseries and training centres in the townships areas of Khayelitsha and nyanga. The majority of the core professional staff are female farmers and are recruited directly from the beneficiaries. At the time of writing they have a core full-time staff of (up to) 17, and part-time, contracted or casual staff and volunteers of (up to) 14 persons at any one time.

The key beneficiaries are the marginalised, the poor and the unemployed. In particular women, not because others are explicitly excluded, but because it is mainly these groups who come forward and actually carry the energy for micro-farming in the townships. Women, mothers and grandmothers more often than


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Community Economic Development 93

not represent whole families, thus the direct impact of the work goes well beyond individuals. While the organisation would love to see more young people engaged in urban farming they know it is a difficult task. Most young people, like most ‘modern’ people, want a job and a reliable low risk income – doing the work of urban gardening, essentially running your own business, is hard work.

at the time of writing, abalimi supports individual households and groups to implement home gardening, community gardening and micro-farming projects. This includes a total of approximately 5,000 micro-urban farmers; or approximately 25,000 (with an average of five family members per farmer) direct beneficiaries per annum. It is an impressive piece of work making a real impact on many lives.

Before telling the story in more depth, and also distilling crucial community development practices, i turn to the literature exploring community economic development.

Locating Community Economic Development within the Literature

Having a job, a livelihood, employment, is crucial to people’s futures. Like having a shelter over our head, many people want to have a meaningful job, or for that matter, any job at all. engaging most people in conversation would soon see the topic of job, employment, livelihood or incomes arise. Within the field of community development such topics are usually encapsulated within the discourse of community economic development.

clearly community development has a long history of connection to community economic development practices, albeit there are very different traces of theory embedded within the practices depending on ideological leanings. Within the usa ‘community development’ is almost synonymous within ‘community economic development’, with other forms of practice being named differently, for example, social mobilising work as community organising. Within this book community economic development is understood as one possible pathway of community development, one of profound importance within south africa considering the endemic economic poverty.

in considering community economic development within the literature and within south africa it should also be noted that since the neoliberal turn, with a growing ‘privatisation of risk’, people are often forced to rely more on their own individual or community agency to generate work or employment. In a sense, community economic development is then captured by a self-help ideology, whereby the state has become more shadowy in terms of the distribution of capitalist surplus. People are often left to themselves and community economic discourses are part and parcel of new forms of governmentality that enables the state to support self-help initiatives. There are many community economic development practices that can be situated within this paradigm – with the role of community development being to harness people’s abilities collectively to survive or manage within the frame of capitalist economics. examples would be


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community development practice that is focused on levering investment into a community, or tourism development ensuring a geographical community attracts tourists, albeit at the expense of another geographical community.

However, there are significant other discourses of community economic development, discussed as the social economy, solidarity economy, and social enterprises (Amin, 2009). Each of these, and there are many more, represent different approaches to thinking about the linkages between community practices and economic hopes. examples of community economic practices that are situated within these discourses would be cooperatives, leTs systems and reviving the gift economy (Boulet, 2010).

While the above mentioned discourses of social economic, social enterprise and so forth, name different ways of thinking about community economic development practices, there are also different frameworks of thinking about community economic development. Some of the frameworks within the literature include:

• Michael Shuman’s (2007) local economic development framework;• Katherine Gibson-Grahams (2006) diverse economies framework;• John McKight’s and colleagues Alison Mathie and Gordon Cunningham

(2008) Assets-Based Community Development (ABCD) approach;• British Department for International Development’s (DFID’s) Sustainable

Livelihoods Approach (SLA), originally developed by Robert Chambers at the sussex institute of Development studies.

They each provide different analyses of what the problem is, what the possibilities are and what the methodology of bringing change towards community-centred economies is.

it should also be said that the economic sphere is increasingly understood to be intricately connected to the ecological – as two sides of the same coin – and in many ways community development, deeply influenced by the broader ‘development literature’, has been reconstructed by the ecological polycrises upon us (Swilling and Annecke, 2012). These ecological connections to community economic development are therefore briefly explored here.

Initially, path-breaking work such as E.F. Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful (1974) coincided with the analysis published within the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth (Meadows et al., 1972). Such work inspired a generation of work giving early focus to ecologically-oriented reform, however it was only in the 80s and late 90s as a consensus grew about industrialised impacts on the planet that such work flourished. Satish Kumar’s collaborative efforts with others, to form the schumacher college in the uK, and the publication of Resurgence magazine, were indicative of this pioneering work.

Making sense of the literature exploring this kind of work in recent years would be a huge task. Therefore I have conceptually drawn on the work of North American eco-philosopher Joanna Macy (1983) who, along with Molly Young Brown (1998), has provided a useful framework for making sense of the strategic


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options community workers, focused on ecological and economic practices, have utilised. They have been categorised into: (i) analysis of structural causes and creating of alternative institutions; (ii) changing hearts and minds; and (iii) holding actions. each is now considered in turn.

Alternative Institutions

examining the literature on community development and ecological issues illuminates a proliferation of work focused on ‘analysis of structural causes and creating of alternative institutions’ (Macy and Brown, 1998: 19). Macy and Brown themselves pose the relevant kind of questions such as, ‘What are the tacit agreements that create obscene wealth for a few, while progressively impoverishing the rest of humanity?’ and ‘What interlocking causes indenture us to an insatiable economy that uses our larger body, Earth, as supply house and sewer?’ (ibid.: 19). Many other questions could be asked and myriad social movements are at the forefront of asking them – and in doing that are challenging powerful interests. abalimi is one of them.

however, community practitioners at the forefront of ecologically oriented issues are not only tackling the causes of the problems, but are also creating new institutions that reflect the ‘dreams’ of new ways of consuming, growing, producing, commuting, working and travelling. At a local level the dream is created and modelled through community initiatives such as re-localisation work, transition town initiatives, community gardens, city farms, community supported agriculture (CSA), permaculture demonstration sites, bicycle and car cooperatives, local energy production, new public transport systems and bikeways.

Changing Hearts and Minds

macy and Brown’s second strategy calls for a ‘change to hearts and minds’ (1998: 21). The body of literature relevant to such a strategy is focused on how to cultivate more careful and honest dialogue with ourselves and with other people around the concern of earth care. See for example the work of Jose Roberto Guevara (2012) accounting for the work of environmental education using popular approaches within the Philippines.

internationally, initiatives such as the roots of change study circles, developed by the international society for ecology and society, show how people-in-places can structure up strategies for changing hearts and minds. conversation groups, coffee circles and reading groups are all processes that can be engaged in the gentle but critical work of changing people’s hearts and minds. In South Africa my friends allan Kaplan and sue Davidoff, with other colleagues, have established The Proteus Initiative and Towerland space. Their work focuses on creating a learning environment that fosters ecological ways of living through reconnecting with nature.


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Holding Actions

macy and Brown’s third strategy is that of ‘holding actions’ in which some people mobilise around the issue of protecting environmental sites that others are still trying to utilise in unsustainable ways (1998: 17). This strategy requires still more radical action, which probably means confrontation.

Within this research project, as already discussed in earlier chapters, i have been observing the community mobilisation processes against the plans of Royal Dutch Shell and SASOL to conduct gas extraction, or hydro-fracking in the Karoo Desert. many people are deeply concerned about the impacts of this technologically and chemically laden process on the quality of ground and surface water. over the past few years there has been a mass mobilisation process led by farmers and other groups arguing that not enough is yet known about the impacts of these technologies and chemicals on the water tables. These mobilisations represent ‘holding actions’ indicating, in this case, that people who live close to and off the land, want to protect the water and land for more sustainable purposes.

Certainly such mobilisation work in South Africa mirrors the increasing expansion of mining and logging interests around the world, from Panama and india, through to ecuador and mongolia, where there also seems to be a groundswell of resistance. many people, particularly indigenous groups, want to hold on to their land, their older more sustainable practices of livelihood, and resist the extractive practices of modernity.

in conclusion it might also be useful to remember that for many people around the world, ecological work does not just represent issues of conservation. It is instead about survival – hence the linkage to economic practices as well (a short-hand for ‘caring for the household’). Many people in the world live off the bountiful supply of the ‘global commons’, but this commons is increasingly being fenced in by the colonising actions of corporations in collusion with governments. For example, national parks have been formed that marginalise tribal people from their livelihoods; corporations as well as illegal groups over-fish areas that destroy the fishing commons for local villages; and forests are logged as export crops, destroying local commons food sources and water tables.

it follows then that at the core of a commitment to earth care in community practice is a commitment to the local and global commons (Poteete et al., 2010). Modernity and capitalism encloses all spaces within a profiteering economic grasp. The practice of guarding some local and global spaces from this encroachment is becoming ever more critical (Patel, 2009; Harvey, 2012).

The story: Learning from a Case study – the story of the Abalimi Bezekhaya

Returning to the introduction of this chapter, I first sat in Rob Small’s beat up VW Golf as we drove across Cape Town and soaked up the story of Abalimi, and then


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talked to different workers and volunteers involved in the project. It is a story that integrates concerns to do with community economic and ecological development, particularly the building of ‘alternative institutions’. In unpacking the story, three key site visits are first considered, as a way of painting a picture of Abalimi’s work; and then some of the particular practices are considered. a theory of development that has been distilled from their long years of practice and reflection is considered and finally generalised lessons for other such initiatives are presented.

During the research three important sites were visited, and accounting for those visits makes the work understandable. The first site was one of the many community gardens run by groups of women. The garden is farmed using organic methods (although it is not organically certified as it is using seeds from nurseries which cannot claim to have been organically produced, but they are not gm seeds), natural wind barriers and natural pest control (dual-cropping/companion planting). Water, which is tested regularly, comes from underground where there is an abundant supply. What was immediately clear is that such a garden is like a small business and needs a great deal of work to make it productive. The women working on the garden have to choose whether they just want fresh food for their families, or to invest in labour and other costs to also make cash – that is, turn it into an enterprise which reaches beyond self-help. If they work hard they can make approximately R3,000/month (US$300) per 500 square metres. The particular group at my first site visit have a rule that, in order to join their group, an applicant must first work for a year for no cash income – they are only allowed to take home some fresh produce. it is a tough rule, but the rationale is to stop new members benefiting too easily from the project after all the really hard work has been done by elder women.

The women here, like most, have registered their collective as a non-profit organisation (NPO), albeit all are being encouraged by Government to register as cooperative legal structures. as an nPo they can access government support such as finance, to buy water tanks. The advice Abalimi gives on these community structures is not to start an executive group, arguing that it is important to keep the groups small (6–20 people) so all decisions can be made in plenary. They have learned ‘the hard way’, as someone put it to me, that ‘executives’ usually mean that either men or educated groups take control, marginalising the less powerful or less-educated workers/farmers. In fact, Abalimi has again learned that the real challenge of the work is not technical, but the social – such as how the groups are run, and how people cooperate, or not, once money enters the picture.

as i listened to rob and several of the women i also learned how important Abalimi’s services are and how people in the community get to know about such services via community networks, the radio, or community events. Abalimi essentially has two components, the first being the development service which provides ongoing free technical support to the farmers. for abalimi, while the women pay rent for the land and also costs of water and electricity, technical input is a free subsidy to the women. Their services are essentially those usually understood as ‘extension services’, in this case provided by abalimi because the


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state mainly focuses on providing such services to larger scale commercially-oriented farmers. The second service is the abalimi business unit, understood as Harvest of Hope (HoH), discussed below.

The second site was one of the two People’s garden centres with demonstration gardens, and in many ways these are understood as the real engine room of the work. Abalimi argues that if an urban farmer learns to cultivate 100 square metres of land they can feed a family – provided good inputs are invested (such as labour and compost). The heart of where urban farmers learn how to make that 100 square metres of land fruitful are the two demonstration gardens at the People’s garden centres.

People come to either of the two educational sites for training and advice from one of the Abalimi employed field-workers. At these demonstration gardens people can access seeds, compost, and advice. To access this people have to become a member, at the cost of 30 rand for an individual or 50 for a group, which entitles the members to discounted agri-inputs for one year and to attend a four-day basic agriculture course (i was later informed that the real costs of the four-day training course are 600 rand/farmer, hence the need for a subsidised service).

abalimi again advocates that crucial to success is that urban farmers (indeed, any farmers anywhere within the modern economy) must have ongoing permanent support which is part and parcel of the ‘extension service’ (without this farmers, particularly emerging ones, will fail). Within their model this support provides an initial four days of training, on-going field support, and then access to scientific services if the field worker does not know how to solve a particular problem (that is, the field workers know what expertise is available to help solve a particular problem that they themselves cannot, for example, dealing with unknown pests). At the demonstration project I visited, Mama Mabel Bokolo is the field worker-animator and People’s Garden Centre operator – she runs the whole thing, with the support of a dedicated trainer. Ma Bokolo signs up the trainees and runs the People’s garden centre and the trainer also supplies on-site extension services to community gardens that use the People’s garden centre. she particularly loves providing the training which is structured in two ways. firstly, as a starting course of four days, Monday to Thursday, 9 am to 3 pm – which enables an urban farmer to achieve subsistence if they have the 100 square metres and also persist for the year while accessing support. Then secondly, in a more advanced course of eight days, aimed at helping those who also are looking to trade their produce; that is, make financial profit on top of feeding their family.

The third site included the office of Abalimi and also the packing hub for the business-marketing arm of Abalimi, essentially a CSA mechanism known as Harvest of Hope (HoH). This business-marketing arm was launched in 2008 and operates as a csa purchasing fresh produce from the micro-farmers (approximately 70 per cent of these suppliers are women) at a good price which is then sold via the CSA mechanism to middle-class people who pre-order a weekly box of food. The mechanism thereby connects urban farmers to those who have income sources – a market issue, crucial to success. Every month Abalimi field


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workers visit these farmers and make a contract for what produce is needed to be grown (for the boxes of CSA) to supply HoH, which is bought at a good price. if the produce quality is not good enough then it is used by farmers to feed their families, or is sold across the fence.

Having discussed the site visits, the key practices that Abalimi engages in to develop or support such projects are now discussed.

The first practice is oriented towards what they call resource supply. for example, as already discussed Abalimi runs two non-profit demonstration gardens which also act as nursery projects in the locations of nyanga and Khayelitsha. These are called People’s garden centres and they supply free advice, information and subsidised gardening inputs such as trees, groundcovers, soil improvers (for example, manure), seed, seedlings, basic tools, windbreaks and safe pest control remedies.

secondly, they engage in training, whereby up to 1,000 people are trained each year through the four-day basic course already mentioned, along with year-round on-site technical follow-up support visits and demonstrations to projects.

Thirdly, a core focus of their practice is community building. The rationale for such practice is that the social benefits of organic gardening and micro-farming among the poor are enhanced through activities such as mutual help work events where members from different community projects gather and work together on one community project site to accomplish large or difficult tasks. Such collective work is usually accompanied by good food and celebration at the end of the day, and horizontal (farmer to farmer) learning events – this is where the gardeners and farmers gather to share stories, difficulties, problems, solutions and achievements among themselves.

fourthly, abalimi explicitly focuses on building partnerships and networking. Within these practices the organisation, through its own partnerships and networks, assists community projects to connect to other opportunities and services which they may require, thereby linking need to resource as effectively and efficiently as possible. for example, a community garden group may wish to start up a sewing group, or obtain support from another service provider.

finally, the organisation is focused on useful research, monitoring and evaluation. Such practices ensure that Abalimi can continue to ‘fine tune’ its own development practice, so that community projects become more and more sustainable within a better defined step-by-step process. For example, through careful observation of what actually happens ‘on the ground’ over 30 years, abalimi has developed what it calls its ‘Development Theory’ which is used to help understand sustainable development of community projects along a clear pathway. Their development theory conceptualises four phases, understood as: survival level, subsistence level and livelihood level and commercial level. see this depicted pictorially:


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Discussion: Distilling the Lessons for Practice

again while the story could be used to discuss dozens of lessons, three main ideas have been distilled for the purposes of this chapter. They include: an action learning approach to community development; ‘seeing what the people see’ – applying observational skills; and providing ongoing support, training and organisational development, each discussed below. Before engaging in that discussion it should also be noted that with regards to the literature introduced earlier in the chapter, the Abalimi work could be construed within the Macy/Brown framework as an example of ‘analysis of structural causes and creating of alternative institutions’. The organisation has spent many years analysing the causes of urban poverty, of trying to make sense of the ‘food system’ most of us are immersed within, and have created an alternative institution, one that fosters people-centred development processes. These processes also draw on numerous community economic development frameworks harnessing assets (as per the ABCD approach) and aiming for sustainable livelihoods (as per sla, with a thorough analysis again of assets and also potential shocks to the sustainability system). Particular practices relevant for community development are now considered.

An Action-learning and Research Approach to Community Development

While a vision and cooperative leadership creates a motivational and intentional edge for people to get things going, an action-learning and research approach to

figure 7.1 The farmer Development Chain for organic farming projectsSource: Originated and developed by Rob Small for Abalimi Bezekhaya and the Farm & garden national Trust.


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the practice ensures that the work is constantly reflected upon leading to potential new innovations and directions. It is easy for community development work to get ‘stuck’ in the sense that what works for a while can become dogma – ‘the way things are done’ to so speak. However, as I listened to workers involved at Abalimi and also read documents that tell their story what struck me was their capacity to keep reflecting on their practice in ways that have led to new analyses and new innovations. here is an organisation with more than 30 years of experience, providing a context for deeply reflective work. For example, in the previous section I shared the development theory that underpins their work, known as the Farmer Development chain. This chain, while important as a substantive development theory, is more important to a community worker in that it reflects a theory that has emerged inductively from people working in the field over many years.

To See What the People See – Observational Skills

Linked to this inductive and action learning and action research approach is the centrality of observational skills. Crucial to the success of this story is the commitment by community practitioners involved to ‘see what the people see’ (Lathouras, 2010), that is, to take seriously people’s experience of the world and what they aspire to be or do. Taking seriously people’s experience of the world requires astute observation skills. However, such skills are not easy to attain for several reasons. For example, Kaplan (1996; 2002) writes about the ease with which community or social practitioners fail to conceptualise the difference between observing and interpreting and in that conceptual failure end up interpreting what they ‘think they see’ in inaccurate ways. Instead, more care needs to be taken to observe what is occurring in a social situation prior to any attempt to interpret. Secondly, many community workers are trained to dismiss what people have to say because training often leads to an attitude of expertise and ‘I know best’. This leads to an attitude whereby observation becomes almost superfluous. Thirdly, observing and seeing are incredibly difficult when cleavages such as class, race and gender are taken into account. Within any given social situation, what a privileged white male community practitioner might see, and then interpret in one way, might well be seen and interpreted in a completely different way by someone who has a totally different lived experience – for example a poor, black woman.

I am reminded of an insightful story told by Jacob Dlamini in Native Nostalgia (2009), reflecting on life in a Johannesburg urban slum. Within the story the local municipality decided to introduce owls as predators against an epidemic of rats. A good idea, emerging from an analysis built on an introduced scientific understanding of the food chain. But it was an analysis that had no legitimacy with the people and was not based on ‘what they see’. in this case the professional analysis did not take into account the worldview clashes of different sciences. For the local people, owls are linked to witchcraft and they decided to hunt them with more fervour than the rats. The local municipality staff had failed to listen to the people and engage them in an analysis first ‘seeing what they see’.


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Within the Abalimi story the astute observational skills have clearly enabled the community practice to evolve to a level of sophistication where practitioners are able to be responsive to the diverse experiences and desires of the potential and practicing urban farmers. For example, the practice is one that takes into account that while the work opens space for poor people to learn how to garden or farm, there is no pressure to continue gardening or farming. People can opt in or opt out at any time depending on where their lives are at and their aspirations are going. Observation also enabled practitioners to quickly see how the formalising of groups into NPOs which then chose to form executives, quickly led to control by an elite few, with the emergent practitioner recommendation that groups remain small enough for everyone to participate in plenary decision making.

Provision of Ongoing Support, Training and Organisational Development

from the story it is clear that ongoing support is crucial to the success of abalimi. The notion of ongoing support provides a counter-story or counter-analysis to the many short-term orientations of development interventions. furthermore, the type of support is not limited to training inputs – often known as workshops – but is expanded to include ongoing support around the development of community-based organisations among groups of farmers (should they wish to operate as a group, and not stay as backyard gardeners). The attention to the social and organisational formation of groups, in the forms of NPOs or cooperatives, is essential to the work of abalimi. There is recognition that the technical elements, that is, people learning to grow food, is the easy component of animating a successful movement of urban organic micro-farmers. The more complex elements include the organisational configuration of each group – as discussed earlier above – related to the use of executives or not, how decisions are made in plenary, thereby requiring the limiting of group size to about 20 maximum, the allocation of cash (either as income or as re-investment into the garden), and the organisational configuration of the movement itself. This latter component in the case of abalimi includes a careful and purposeful mix that includes the urban farmer groups organising themselves into a voluntary association – called Vukuzenzle urban farmers Association (VUFA), the service system of Abalimi itself (providing technical services and the business-marketing arm of Harvest of Hope), and finally the Farm garden national Trust, set up to lever corporate and private sponsorship, and also create franchise models so the work can be replicated in other communities.

Conclusion

i visited abalimi in 2011 and then again 2013. The energy and enthusiasm encountered in the first visit still resonated in the second. There were familiar faces, always a good sign – people are loyal to the work. Food was flourishing, markets were being created, and connections woven. Community economic


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development practices were also clearly articulated and theories such as ‘farmer development chain’ were being inductively constructed from reflection in the field – the best kind of theory. The story told within this chapter provides a glimpse into their work and an articulation of some crucial practices relevant to community development. These practices, distilled from the particulars of the story, can be generalised for broader theorising of practice. To work within an action-learning and research frame, to nurture observational skills enabling community facilitators to try to ‘see what the people see’, and to ensure the community development work provides ongoing mentoring, support and organisational development (particularly within the meso and macro stages of developmental work) are crucial to effective community work. They enhance the possibilities of successful transformational work.


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chapter 8

community Development, Political Practice and

the southern cape land committee

Introduction

I have driven some 450 km from Bloemfontein to the Karoo town of Graaff-Reinet to visit one of the site offices of the Southern Cape Land Committee. It is a stunning drive – the scenery striking in both its serenity and also its vastness. The mountains rise up from the plains, and the vistas regularly take my breath away. At the site office I meet several workers who have a three-day programme of field visits ready for me. We travel out to a number of farm-workers, some of whom are still working on large white-owned commercial farms and several others facing evictions from these farms. We then drive another 170 km onto the town of Willowmore and i am introduced to several members of the Baviaans Land and Agrarian Reform Forum (BLARF) who are organising 17 cooperatives of emerging black farmers within the municipality boundary.

it is into this context that i locate the exploration of community development that has a political edge, and within this story, a political edge focused on issues of land reform and food sovereignty. The story is of the work of the Southern Cape land committee. i have chosen to tell this story of practice both for its political relevance, but also because of its focus on land, food, small-scale farmers and farm-workers – concerns central to the transformational needs of South Africa.

Within the chapter I also consider how within the literature there are both links between community development theory and broader political processes but also there is a strong emphasis on the sphere of local government.

A caveat: one of my observations is that within South Africa people think about, or talk about, community development primarily in terms of infrastructure development or economic development – with either a focus on roads, footpaths and street-lights or a focus on livelihoods, small business, cooperatives and so forth (as per the previous chapter). In contrast, when people think of the kinds of case stories mentioned in this chapter they tend to think about activism, not community development. Within this chapter i argue that this dismisses not only a whole tradition of community development, built around political activism, community organising and social mobilisation, but also fails to take seriously one of the crucial demands of community development within democratic settings. again, part of the challenge is removing the technical or project bias


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from community practice. at times community development does have a strong political edge, which becomes obvious when observing community development practice ‘on-the-ground’ within south africa.

The Context

Within south africa the issue of land is central to transformational hopes. since early settlement there has been an ongoing process of colonisation that has seen land ownership predominantly in the hands of white commercial farmers. Different crucial moments, such as the land act of 1913, which both extended processes of forced removal, but essentially codified existing patterns of land loss to blacks, simply represented part of an ongoing process of colonisation. With apartheid ending in 1994 the previously dispossessed became hopeful – there was a perception that change was coming. however, since 1994, despite a post-colonial epoch, decolonisation of land has failed miserably. The same pre-apartheid patterns of ownership, labour and agrarian exploitation continue. While numerous laws claim to have made a positive difference, related to issues such as minimal wage increases, eviction and tenure, enduring structures and relations continue. for example, despite the 2013 increase in daily wages for farm-workers (from the previous 69 rand/day to 105 rand/day), the situation for workers is mostly the same. Anecdotal evidence emerging from the field indicates that when wages were set at 69 rand/day many farmers provided free milk, or some supplies of meat, or were more generous with transport costs. now, forced to increase daily wages, many (not all) farmers have reduced those ‘services’ resulting in most farm-workers living at the same approximate level as before.

Resistant regimes (Geels, 2012) are also easily identified and analysed. People working within what can be described as organised agriculture are very fearful and resistant to change, often tending towards a defensive posture of ‘this is mine’. government has itself entrenched pre-apartheid patterns through, for example, its structuring of departments. The Department of agriculture has a substantial budget and works with organised commercial (mainly white) farmers. Extension officers are well resourced and support such work. In contrast, the Department of Rural Development and Land Reform works with black farmers, mainly using commonage land (owned by cash and capacity strapped municipalities) for small-scale agro-ecological work. This department is cash strapped with few resources to support these initiatives. any attempts for such farmers to access the extension workers of the Department of Agriculture comes to little, with their response being, ‘we only support large scale export-oriented commercial farming’. This reinforces, and is itself reinforced by the assumptions around the world whereby ‘the simplistic formulation of “subsistence” farmers versus “commercial farmers” [which] continues to hold currency among ministries of agriculture, national governments, donors and others’ (Peters, 2013: 551).


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Community Development, Political Practice 107

Hence, market-led strategies of land reform have failed miserably within South Africa. As Peters again argues (2013: 543), ‘… the outcomes of the “market-led”, “willing buyer-willing seller” model in programmes of land distribution have been poor and its premises and assumptions are flawed, especially by ignoring the political context where highly unequal social relations, such as those between rural poor and landowners, structure the supposedly neutral “market” relations of prospective “buyers and sellers”’. There is a huge literature on this, and readers could do well to refer to the repository of the institute for Poverty, land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS) at the University of the Western Cape.

Peters (2013: 552) summarises the political issues arising of ‘… the inevitability of an agribusiness future centred on large farms, albeit with outgrower schemes absorbing (some of) the current rural populations’. Furthermore he argues that:

over the past few years … the posited disappearance of the smallholder population in africa has come under reassessment, due to several factors. one is the new literature on the environmental and ecological costs of agro-industrial agriculture which provides a new type of critique of the posited inevitability of such a future. a second is the formidable rise of agrarian social movements, particularly in Latin America and Asia, which, along with the surprising links between these and similar movements in europe, have helped fuel a challenge to seeing “peasantries” as necessarily doomed, and provide a positive assessment of the economic, ecological and social benefits of rural-based livelihoods. A third is the fast-growing documentation of intensifying land appropriation (“grabs”) by both foreign and domestic agents from peasant and smallholder populations, discussed above, a trend that has occasioned not only deep concern but a re-evaluation of conventional trajectories of “development”.

This commentary is summative of both the global and south african restructuring of the agricultural sector, away from small-holder farmers and towards large commercially oriented farming; but also the second movement responses, as social movements organise resistance and reclaim spaces for revitalisation of small-holder farming and other forms of agro-ecological practice.

it is into such a context that the southern cape land committee, originally known as the Southern Cape Against Removals (SCAR), works across communities of the Western and Eastern Cape. They have offices in Graaff-Reinet, George and Beaufort West. Their work is focused on farm-workers, emerging farmers, agro-ecological practices, political schools and networking with government departments. Their dual strategy could be construed as: (i) first order social change work, enabling farm-workers and potential emerging black farmers to ‘survive the existing system’ through para-legal work, seeding and supporting new agro-ecological initiatives; (ii) while also conducting second order social change, ‘to change the system’ through community organising, campaigning and advocating for new models of land reform. There are both aspirational and pragmatic elements to their strategy, which are discussed in more depth below.


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The chapter now turns to a consideration of how the literature considers the interactions between community development and politics.

The Links between Community Development and Politics

As discussed in an earlier part of this book, ever since the launching of neighbourhood-oriented official community development programmes within the UK during the 1950s, there has been a split in community development thinking. more conservative or reformist approaches of community development focused on social planning and service delivery, while more progressive, or radical approaches have focused on processes of mobilising, organising, conscientising and politicking. While this latter emphasis was strong in the 1960s and 1970s, deeply influenced by what is sometimes known as the ‘Freirean radical turn’, the 1980s saw the neoliberal turn, a ‘fight-back’ or second movement, among conservative forces. however, despite many manifestations of community development being captured by conservative forces community development as political practice has continued to thrive around the world, as demonstrated by the story recounted within this chapter. communities have mobilised themselves collectively and cooperatively, in attempting to at least influence, if not, transform politics.

The Project of Democratising

In thinking about community development and political practice it is prudent to step back and consider the idea of democracy. Democracy is a crucial foundation for thinking about the interactions between community development and politically-oriented practice. In other work I have discussed democracy as a classic example of a concept requiring grammatical transformation (Westoby and Dowling, 2013: 111). By this I mean that the restating of the noun democracy as the verb democratising exposes the social dynamics at work within any political process – usually either for or against the process of democratising. Democracy as a noun is often talked about in binary terms of democratic–undemocratic, in which south africa can now proudly describe itself as being democratic as opposed to ‘other’ countries that are described as undemocratic.

Thinking in terms of verbs enables people and practitioners to rethink democracy as a ‘project of democratising’ requiring constant renewal with various potential trajectories. Thinking can then be transformed and illuminate the contest over democracy simply by ‘getting some verbs into it’, so to speak. If people are lacking the freedoms to engage around their concerns, many commentators would argue there is a problem for democrats. if some people are protecting entrenched powerful interests or some key people are purposefully blocking engagement, then there is a risk that the project of democratisation has reached a state in which it has stalled. on the other hand, if people are actively engaging around their concerns or


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are challenging elites then the project of democratising is a process that has some life in it, and diverse agents are determining its future.

One of the key tasks as community development practitioners is to care for politics and politically-oriented practice, because one of the key imperatives is the project of democratising all our social, cultural, economic and political contexts. Democratisation is central to making the political sphere of participation meaningful. Democratisation is one of the cornerstones of an approach to community development in which people have a right to voice, can act publicly and are able to influence decision-making processes. Many significant development outcomes – those that genuinely reflect the way people want to live – are dependent on people’s democratic ability to participate in the process of deciding how they should live, not only in terms of civil and political rights, but also in relation to socio-economic rights (Jones and Stokke, 2005).

community development as political practice requires community practitioners to accompany other people, usually marginalised people, in a process of transformational change. such transformational change often requires challenging entrenched powerful interests. it is the project of democratisation that gives legitimacy to this work.

While arguing for a ‘universal project of democratisation’, i recognise that the forms of democracy emerging from that project will be shaped differently within different social, cultural, historical and economic geographies. What democracy looks like within South Africa will be different to that emerging elsewhere.

So what does it mean to make the project of democratisation central to community practice? One of the classic essays on democracy was written by Alexis de Tocqueville, in which he used the key concept of the agora. originally the market-place and meeting place of the city-states of classical Greece, the agora is used by de Tocqueville as, ‘the assembly’ where people’s concerns are discussed collectively and publicly. Bauman (1998: 86–7) likens the contemporary idea of civil society to the concept of agora, seeing it as an interface between the public and private spheres of social life. historically there has been an evolutionary process whereby the agora has, officially at least, been opened up to everyone. Originally in ancient Greece it was for ‘citizens’, defined as a particular group of men. in modern parliamentary democracy it has opened up to include almost everyone through universal suffrage.

one challenge of democratisation for community practitioners is to support people on the margins to learn about the political system and how they can use it to take what they have perceived as their private concerns into these public assemblies for discussion and deliberation. after all, feminists and others have taught us all that ‘the personal is political, the private is often public’. in many ways the process of present-day community development ‘may be conceptualised as the late modern agora – as the site of political, or at least politicised, assembly of citizens’ (Geoghegan and Powell, 2008: 15).

Within south africa there are many examples of organisations attempting to democratise through forceful participation in government deliberation and


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decision-making. As already mentioned within Chapter 3 of this book, when referring to the social mobilisation tradition of community development, the Durban based Abahlali movement (Patel, 2009; Gibson, 2011) is an excellent story. Of significance to their work is a combination of democratisation through rights-based practice with a co-creative ethos, arguing for a different kind of relationship between state and civil society, not one founded only on a social contract for service delivery, but a different kind of politics. Their story represents a manifestation of political action, particularly in the form of social movements that are not just acting towards the state but are also creating their own platform for dialogue within an autonomous space. such an approach could be said to reflect an evolution of the politics, reaching beyond Alinsky and other traditional trade-union oriented political practices.

There are also many other examples of community development processes that are politically oriented. contemporary examples include what is being called social accounting, or social auditing, whereby local communities are organised in ways that hold governments to account in terms of their stated objectives.

however, locating the literature on community practice with a political orientation requires a quick discussion of different expressions within South africa itself. Within south africa what could be construed as community-oriented political practices include several strands. i have tried to distil an analysis of these in the following ways.

Firstly, there are numerous examples of locally-oriented work whereby community workers accompany people in local action – putting pressure on government to do as it explicitly states it should. service-delivery protests could be easily characterised in this way, representing organised (and at times disorganised) action – symptomatic of anger, frustration and ongoing humiliation. More about this specific phenomenon is discussed when focusing specifically on local government.

secondly, there is politically oriented practice that organises communities to form community-level governance structures enabling them to work in partnership with state agents. A documented example would be the Jansenville Development Forum (Wilkinson-Maposa, 2008).

Thirdly, there are practices that have moved beyond the local, whereby coalitions, networks or federations are formed that put pressure on state agents or corporations. sometimes these form into social movements. examples would include the now collapsed Anti-Privatisation Forum in Johannesburg (Veriava and Naidoo, 2013) and the struggles against hydraulic fracturing in South Africa (Fig, 2013).

Fourthly, there are examples of practice whereby similar formations like those discussed in the third point occur, yet they are oriented not so much ‘against’ the state, but are creating autonomous political spaces to co-create ‘with’ the state. The best example of this within south africa is the already mentioned Durban based Abahlali movement, researched and documented by Gibson (2011) and Patel (2009).


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It should be said that behind each of these kinds of political practice are forms of community practice, whether it be conscientisation work through organisation workshops (Andersson, 2000), REFLECT groups or other forms.

having considered this broader context and practice, i will now bring the focus on to local government, the sphere of government that attracts most attention for community development workers.

Democratising Local Government within South Africa

as already stated, within south africa a crucial context for democratisation is local government. community development theory and practice while being primarily focused on the collective action of people in communities, is also concerned with the sphere of local government. such a concern ensures community development is not reduced to local self-help efforts or mutual aid alone. as would already be clear by now, community development is also concerned with issues of formal and substantive citizenship, decision making processes around the fair allocation of resources and land-use, appropriate and effective local service delivery and other issues usually within the sphere of local government, the sphere of government closest to the people.

Within South Africa, The National CD Policy Framework (Community Development Directorate, 2011: 49) affirms the link between local government and community, stating that:

as a sphere of government located closest to the people, local government shall provide the foundation for people’s engagement in community development. Local government also plays a significant role in the provision of infrastructure needed for social, economic and environmental development. it is also responsible for the provision of basic amenities such as electricity, water and sanitation, health, safety and security etc. These services help build sustainable communities.

Within south african policy there is also a commitment to participatory governance – which can be thought about as a ‘set of structural and procedural requirements to realise public participation in the operation of [provincial] and local government’ (Matebesi and Botes, 2011: 6). Quoting Lovan, Murray and Schaffer (2004), Matebesi and Botes (2011: 6–7) also argue that such participatory governance ‘goes beyond public management to a more fundamental question of how the process of democracy can be adapted to help countries resolve the complex public issues with which they are challenged’.

such an approach transforms the way government has been operationalised within south africa. During the apartheid era most south africans were passive actors as recipients of government, rather than being active citizens. according to Matebesi and Botes (2011: 10) such a history ensured that, ‘formal participatory governance structures became an important feature of post-apartheid governance


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as all levels’. Some key contextual policies for such participatory governance within south africa include The White Paper on local government which highlights the role of municipal councillors as that of promoting involvement of community groups in the design and delivery of municipal programmes. Through such mechanisms municipal councils are ideally accountable to their local communities. furthermore, Ward committees are mechanisms created to assess and approve budgets and participate in planning and development of integrated Development Plans (IDPs). More recently multi-stakeholder forums have also been experimented with as a way of enabling more participatory forms of local government. effective public participation also requires including as many structures and organisations which represent the community as possible, hence the importance of stakeholder forums for participatory governance.

however, research seems to indicate that despite all the hopes of participatory local governance the reality ‘on the ground’ is highly problematic. for example, Matebesi and Botes’ (2011) research within the municipality of Khutsong indicates that, despite all efforts for the community to participate within democratic structures, its voice was neglected or more accurately marginalised (other voices were considered more important). Eventually, after many efforts of dialogue and discussion, the community turned to the ‘last-resort’ of initially peaceful protest and civil disobedience, and eventually violent protest. in this case the disjuncture between local needs/voices and national priorities disrupted any effective efforts for local democratising.

The conclusions of Matebesi and Botes (2011: 17ff) are that, ‘what was regarded as a participatory process was in fact tantamount to … manipulation’, and furthermore in this case went on to ‘reinforce the personal interests of strong leaders’. Their conclusions remind me of an old saying i learned as a young community worker – ‘for a local person a local tyrant is just as bad as a national tyrant’. it was a way of reminding me that while community development practice often focuses on local-level action and concerns, often idealising the local as where decision making should be focused (as per decentralisation discourses), sometimes the result could be just as harmful. The local sphere of politics, along with the national, can be only as good as the mechanisms of checks and balances that exist to ensure that power is democratised. as i often say to my students, ‘the struggle is not for democracy per say, but for processes of democratising’, putting the focus on democratising as an ongoing endeavour. service-delivery protests are a healthy sign of the impulse amongst the marginalised for democratisation. To have reached the post-apartheid era of democracy is not enough. Democratisation, whereby decision-making processes are truly transparent, and decision-makers and agenda setters are held accountable, is an ongoing process and goal.

Having considered the literature linking community development, democratisation and politically-oriented practice we now return to the story of our case study.


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The story: southern Cape Land Committee

The southern cape land committee was established in 1987 and was initially focused on the fighting of forced removals in the George area of the Western Cape. However, from the 1990s the work focused more on land reform issues, attempting to create spaces for people to participate in policy issues. in the 2000s a process of reflection led to the conclusion that land reform was ‘going nowhere’ within South Africa and so the organisation shifted its work towards community organising. This refocus has led to several initiatives.

Firstly, their work aims to support emerging farmers to ‘act as one voice’. The community development workers of the Land Committee support emerging (black) farmers through capacitation of leadership so that they can act with one voice within local-level multi-stakeholder forums. The focus, as per the literature on local government, is on engaging local municipalities with one voice. Governments find it easier to relate to each individual group separately – it then becomes easier to utilise patronage forms of politic with some groups, or simply to ignore others. however, when groups organise horizontally, and form a cooperative, network, forum or coalition in the way that has been fostered by the Southern Cape Land Committee, then it is difficult for local municipalities to discard the arising issues. Such networks of groups have a stronger force which is harder to be ignored or manipulated by the powerful.

Secondly, they use a ‘rights-based’ practice to educate farm-workers about their (limited) rights. Their practices involve the formation of farm committees at very local levels, ensuring that farm-workers can work together. Again, such farm-worker committees are then linked together, giving them a stronger voice.

Thirdly, the committee works among emerging black farmers to promote agro-ecology, as per the work demonstrated by Via Campesina. This work supports emerging farmers in producing their own food with the aim of food sovereignty. This requires engagement with local government, particularly to lever access to commonage land and also particular services, such as water.

Finally, their work focuses on people mobilisation, raising awareness of poverty-producing processes and supporting initiatives and movements for change. Here they work in close partnership with other civil society organisations like Khanya college, an organisation that is experienced in running ‘critical schools’, attempting to catalyse social movements.

from a broader perspective the southern cape land committee attempts to integrate these initiatives into the overall goal of building local leadership that can catalyse a rural social movement that demands change in the various spheres of influence. They attempt to integrate practical and strategic work – the former being work such as agro-ecology, supporting people to grow their own food, and the latter being more explicitly political whereby the organisation accompanies people in learning about, and exercising their rights along with campaigning work.

In talking to the workers of the organisation and meeting several constituencies they work with, I was also able to hear about, and see some of their actual practices.


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for example, within the initiatives above they often use participatory rural appraisal practices to support farmers in conducting their own analysis about the issues at hand and to also consider how to move forward. From workers’ participation in this analytical process, leadership groups are then formed which can participate in municipal forums. These practices embody a grassroots critical process that enables the marginalised to engage with formal structures of local government.

another practice of the organisation is to be closely embedded within the geographies they work within. This ensures that the community development field workers are quick to hear about emerging ‘hot-spots’, usually because farm-workers or emerging farmers call the worker. The organisation can then quickly respond, organising mass meetings within the hot-spot, following these up with horizontal learning processes between different farmer groups, building cross-locality networks enabling local people to learn about their rights and then farmers are supported to organise local structures that enable them to sustain their work of advocacy.

at a higher level the southern cape land committee is also committed to working closely in partnership with other NGOs, ensuring that they themselves do not have to do all the work, and also avoiding duplication of expertise. For example, SCLC is part of a national platform of nine civil society organisations working in the agrarian transformation sector, Tshintsha Amakhaya. National collaborations strengthen advocacy, support national campaigns and enable sharing and learning. As already mentioned, they work closely with Khanya College in facilitating ‘critical schools’ as per their capacitation and community-based education efforts.

Discussion of Practices

having considered elements of the story of the southern cape land committee i now turn to a discussion on some of their practices that are particularly relevant to the broader work of community development and political efforts. Four practices have been distilled down, and they include: the delicate relationship; the practices of horizontal learning; the practices of structuring the work; and finally, a co-creative approach of community–state relations. Each is discussed in turn.

The Delicate Relationship

There is a delicate relationship embodied in all community work. However, when community development is engaged with political efforts this delicate relationship becomes even more complex. Questions arise, such as how does a community worker engage or support poor marginalised workers – in this story, farm-workers – in a way that does not abuse the authority of being a professional, being deployed by a reasonably well-resourced organisation, and of bringing a particular political commitment themselves. In a nut-shell, and linked to our previous discussion on accompanying, how does the community worker accompany the people they


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want to mobilise without manipulating them? Freire has talked about the ‘delicate relationship’ (Bell et al., 1990) embodied within the complex relations between an educator and a student. a similar relationship is embodied within the relations between a community organiser and those being worked with.

one way of resolving these complex issues is, as already discussed, to imagine the practice as one of accompanying people, or put another way, engage in a process described by esteva as ‘co-motion’. for the sclc, accompanying refers to starting where people are, engaging with their own realities and stories, then exploring together the root causes of skewed power relations and opportunities to challenge these. it requires careful listening, empathy and an understanding of the context. This idea of accompanying alongside esteva’s co-motion helps imagine the movement for both parties (community worker and farm-workers/dwellers), ensuring that while there is an agenda to bring change, that agenda is subject to a mutual process of co-learning, co-reflection and co-strategising. The worker has some ideas of what to do – they have at least collected or lived within the stories of other communities organising themselves – but they also recognise the integrity of each story and do not impose another story.

The Practice of Horizontal Learning

Whilst the practices embedded within the story above draw on numerous forms of community-based education efforts, such as Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA), critical schools and information sessions on people’s rights, a crucial component of their work involves what is known as horizontal learning.

horizontal learning is a way of ensuring people both learn – whereby they learn from others who are experiencing or at least have experienced a similar set of issues (the real experts, so to speak) – and also build a network of support and solidarity at the same time. embodied within the idea of delicate relationship discussed above is the idea that a community development worker’s primary resources are: (i) their process expertise – accompanying people in a step-by-step process of coming together, building analyses together and structuring together; and (ii) their access to stories and networks of other communities who have had similar experiences. Therefore, rather than being able to provide solutions to community questions, they can link people to others, or stories of others, who have worked on similar issues. The people are then left to find their own solution, but with access to appropriate resources (the stories and networks of others). This is really the process of empowerment within politically-oriented community development work – for people to feel they have access to knowledge, confidence, networks and resources.

The Practices of Structuring the Work

The building of a network of support and solidarity, referred to above, can be understood as ‘structuring the work’. It is a community development term for


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moving informal groups towards a stage of formalisation, which enables the people to sustain the work over a longer period of time. Structuring refers to the particular task of creating community-based structures – sometimes legally recognised, other times not – which are able to ‘hold’ an identity, name, funds and clear decision-making processes. An example within the story of this chapter is the formation of the Baviaans Land and Agrarian Reform Forum (BLARF) who are organising 17 cooperatives of emerging black farmers within the municipality boundary. Such formation implies numerous levels of structuring. firstly, the initial structuring of local famers into place-based cooperatives. such cooperatives formalise the non-formal pre-existing relations and enable the local farmers to work as one, to make decisions together, to access resources and so forth. secondly, there has been a process of structuring ‘beyond the local’ into a municipal forum of 17 cooperatives. This level of structuring gives the farmers leverage at a municipality level and enables them to consolidate leadership and other resources into a focused process of lobbying and campaigning. local forums provide the basis for provincial and even national campaigns and solidarity actions. This structuring beyond the local ensures community development work does not remain overly focalised on only local issues, but tackles the broader totality of concerns (Freire, 1970: 111).

A Co-creative Approach of Community–State Relations

one of the challenges of participatory governance processes within south africa is that many people still locate governance within a service-delivery framework, whereby the participatory structures are simply another mechanism for government officials to consult with community stakeholders. However, usually the consultation leads to more demands for services, based on evident needs and people’s sense of their rights and entitlements. some people engaged within this research argued that the fundamental paradigm has not changed despite the new structures. for example, one person within this research discusses how,

The state can’t just deliver services into community as if it is a mechanistic, open hole into which you can pour water. in order for those services to be received they have to be adapted, they have to be recreated and taken into the fabric of community in a way that the community knows and understands it. And, most importantly, link it to the community’s own resourcefulness so that they’re not just these sort of cunning creations of government bureaucrats and policy makers from, dare i say it, universities. so the challenge has to be co-creative and if you look at where things have worked (for example, shack dwellers) people can build their own houses with state support. And real community development takes place, not just building houses.

Within the case study, community development practitioners of the southern cape land committee have been pushing in this direction, away from the often failed participatory and consultative mechanisms embedded within what is known as Integrated Development Plans (IDPs), towards multi-stakeholder forums whereby the community–state relations are re-configured in a co-creative relationship. Such


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forums attempt to ensure that resources flow into the municipality in ways that link resources and needs more appropriately and effectively. ideally there is recognition from state actors that they cannot service the people based on their expertise alone. The forums harness the expertise of many actors into focused action.

Conclusion

Edgy politically oriented community work is necessary to keep democracy alive (Kenny, 2011b). Community development with this orientation, sometimes understood as activism or community mobilisation, is thriving in south africa. As people and communities feel more alienated from the benefits of a growing economy and voiceless within the polity then some turn to community action. such action can be explosive and violent, other action more incremental and strategic. The work of the Southern Cape Land Committee sits within the latter category with its community development workers accompanying people into the agora – the assemblies where decisions are made. Their work particularly supports farm-workers and dwellers to survive – through agro-ecological practices – but also to fight strategically for their rights. It involves campaigning, conscientisation through critical schools, horizontal learning processes, structuring local farmer groups and structuring forums ‘beyond the local’. it is edgy because sometimes the work is fraught – challenging vested interests (commercial farmers, wage levels, labour practices), which inevitably relates to issues of power. And power is never just given away, it needs to be taken! Food sovereignty and land reform sit at the heart of transformational issues related to power within south africa. They have for ever done so in the past, and will in the future.


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chapter 9

community Development, the ‘craft’ of community-Based education and

Training and the ymca

Introduction

Some time ago, I was running a workshop for the Better Life Option Programme (BLP) with some sexual and reproductive health peer educators at a national conference in cape Town. The topic of that national conference was on boys’ responsibilities within reproductive health issues.

During day one of the conference, several workshop activities focused on the key topic and by the end of the day all the peer educators appeared to have digested the ‘content’. They could all verbally affirm with confidence that boys and young men should take more responsibility within sexual relationships around condom use and so forth. During the evening as I reflected on the day and planned the next, I decided to try to ‘test’ the ‘affirmations’ and figured the best way would be to use an applied theatre/forum theatre technique (Boal, 1979; schutzman and Cohen-Cruz, 1994: 2). I pulled aside a couple of the young people and quickly devised a script in which the two young people, now as actor and actress, would create a scene in which a young boy proceeded to seduce a young woman at home after a night out on the town. Within the acted scene the boy would offer the girl alcohol, which she accepted after a small amount of protest, and then they would fall into the flow of seduction, with her agreeing to have sex, and eventually, even agreeing to have sex without a condom, because firstly no one had a condom with them, and secondly he insisted that he ‘loved her’.

The next day the scene was acted in front of all the other peer educators with much laughter and delight. As per applied theatre methodology I then asked the two actors to restart the scene from the beginning and also invited spectators – more accurately named ‘spect-actors’ within applied theatre methodology (schutzman and Cohen-Cruz, 1994: 1) to call ‘Stop!’ at any time and come out and replace one of the actors. They could then continue to act out the scene as they saw fit and both ‘spect-actors’ would see if a different outcome could be achieved.

During the next 30 minutes or so, the scene was replayed about half a dozen times, usually still leading to the similar outcome of the young man sleeping with the young woman, although usually with a condom. however, what astounded me was that all replacements within the applied theatre process replaced the girl. in addition, this replaying usually attempted to negotiate a better outcome through


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modifying her behaviour (such as not accepting a drink in the first place), or being more assertive about her sexuality (‘I will not sleep with you’), or being more resourceful (‘I have a condom with me’). It should be said that with respect to the latter, usually having a condom with her was seen to be either ‘sluttish’ by the boy, turning him off from wanting sex with her (in the theatre scene that is), or irrelevant (that is, ‘I do not use condoms’).

After winding up the first stage of the applied theatre – six replacements of the girl – I referred back to the previous day’s sessions about male responsibility within sexual relations and protection. Questions such as, ‘What have you seen today?’ and ‘In what way does what you have seen relate to yesterday’s workshop?’ were asked. It was suggested that maybe the group should consider what relation those sessions might have to the applied theatre experience. no one seemed to be able to ‘connect the dots’ and it was at this moment that the previous sense of being ‘astounded’ was reinforced with an intellectual curiosity about the now (failed) educational process initiated during day one.

I then asked the two initial actors to replay the scene and this time called ‘stop!’ myself and replaced the boy. moreover, this time i had a condom with me, and both actors agreed that if they were to have sex the male would want to use the condom. Again, spect-actors were asked, ‘What do you see?’

The peer educators were now themselves astounded at both how ‘easy’ it was to change the outcome of the story (with both actors being happy and even being able to enjoy an alcoholic drink or two), and also at their own inability to have ‘connected the dots’ between the previous day’s discussions about male responsibility and the actual attitudinal and behavioural change required. all that was needed was for someone to replace the male and take responsibility!

My educational curiosity remained. Reflecting on this ‘ah-ha’ moment in attempted transformational learning became a key motivator to consider the importance of firstly theatre, and other forms of embodied performative learning (Pettit, 2010) within community-based training and secondly, the key role of a community-based trainer as facilitator.

Clearly reflecting on this experience focuses on the failure of both orthodox educational practices within much community development work, and even an embodied educational experience as technique. Neither the first day’s learning nor the theatre experience would have led to transformational change within the context of gendered power relations, without the intervention of the community facilitator. Recognition of this creates substantial challenges to thinking about initiating and maintaining community-based training processes that do keep power and transformation central to their gaze and analysis. however, before discussing this further I will now step back to tell more about the story’s context and programme.


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Community-Based Education and Training and the YMCA 121

The Context

young girls within south africa are particularly vulnerable to teenage pregnancy and contracting HIV (Human Immunodeficiency Virus). For many initiatives aimed at changing this situation the key analysis is that young girls need information about reproductive health. The assumption is that information equals power – to have reproductive health information means to be empowered in negotiating sexuality. To a degree, this is true. however, this chapter describes and analyses an initiative that holds a deeper analysis: namely, that information alone does not equal power. Issues to do with HIV specifically and the girl-child’s sexuality generally are embedded within relations of power that are about more than acquiring information.

at the heart of this chapter is a weaving of analysis around some of the challenges of initiating and maintaining a community development initiative which centres community-based education and training work whilst keeping issues of power central to its gaze and methods. it is posited that such a gaze requires an understanding of community-based work as craft.

This community-based education and training initiative is a part of a peer education reproductive health programme in south africa called the Better life Options Program (BLP), run by the South African National Council of YMCAs (Young Men’s Christian Associations). Furthermore, the chapter locates the work of community-based training within a broader framework of community development and social service delivery highlighting the different logics at work within each of them.

The south african national council of ymcas is an indigenous, membership- based youth organisation working throughout South Africa. It has approximately 2,500 members attached to both the national council and 27 local ‘branches’ of ymca located throughout the country. since apartheid ended, the organisation like many within post-apartheid South Africa has been on an extraordinary journey of organisational transformation, reallocating resources and strategic priorities towards the historically disenfranchised black communities.

in 1994, i was placed, through an australian international non-government Organisation (INGO) called Australian Volunteers International, with the South african ymca. The placement was with one of the ymca’s most progressive local branches on the South Coast of KwaZulu-Natal – managed and lead by a colleague and friend Sipho Sokhela. The main focus of the local YMCA was a Supplementary Education Initiative (SEI) funded by the then AusAID through World vision south africa and World vision australia. This initiative was centred on providing a SEI educational service to young black South Africans at a period of incredible instability, with many black schools simply failing to function. The initiative also included an empowerment process ensuring young people, through locally formed committees, took control of the decision-making process of how the sei projects would be developed, implemented and evaluated.


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However, during the process of getting to know local young people through this service-delivery initiative a ‘community analysis’ (Westoby and Dowling, 2009: 71ff) emerged. Both YMCA project staff and young people indicated that they felt something more substantial needed to be done about the growing teenage pregnancy rate and hiv/aiDs. in a sense a more autonomous community development process was emergent from the social service aspect of the project.

This was an historical period during which great stigma was associated with hiv, so most people would say that their friends were ‘dying of TB’ or some other associated illness. Participatory community-based research was initiated through the local YMCA youth networks in 1996 to find out about the knowledge, attitude and practices (KAP) of young people in relation to sexuality, protective behaviours, access to reproductive health services and so forth. This research provided a rationale to initiate some small educational initiatives within the structure of the SEI project which aimed to increase young people’s knowledge of reproductive health.

Towards the end of 1996, several other INGOs had heard about the work of the ymca on the south coast of KwaZulu-natal. one was a Washington, Dc based organisation called the Centre for Development and Population Activities (CEDPA). A key reproductive health advocate, Seema Chauhan, visited the YMCAs and a process of partnership building was initiated with a view to ‘scaling-up’ some reproductive health interventions across the ymca branches within south africa, and eventually across the African Alliance Network of YMCAs.

The Community education Initiative

Through listening to young people, bringing young people together and also working with the existing international experience of CEDPA generally, and seema chauhan particularly, the BlP was established within the south african YMCA. This programme targeted young girls as the key participants, and worked with young boys, parents, schools and other community leaders as key partners within the change process. The rationale for targeting the girl-child was their particular vulnerability when it came to firstly, (not) having information and knowledge about their sexuality and available services, and secondly, within the South African context it was incredibly difficult for young women to negotiate their sexuality within gendered relations of power and violence. That is, often boys, or worse still, groups of boys would not listen to a girl’s assertion of ‘no’ in relation to her sexuality. furthermore, our social analysis and research made it very clear that an underlying issue for many young women was economic, that is, their sexual selves were often the only bargaining power they had in negotiating many outcomes they wanted in relation to their life-goals.

At the heart of the BLP, and the key element relevant to the focus of this chapter, was the community-based peer education intervention that developed. such peer education approaches are considered highly effective because peers


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have insider status and knowledge, and because the approach is participatory. although there are many outstanding theoretical and practical issues in relation to understanding peer initiatives (Campbell and MacPhail, 2002), peer education was in many ways the cornerstone of the BlP. This programme mobilised thousands of young people from late 1996 through to current times to educate their peers about their reproductive selves and reproductive rights. it also brought groups of young people together to tackle local issues of service provision; ‘Where can I get condoms without everyone in the neighbourhood knowing?’ or ‘How can we band together to persuade the local police station to take rape seriously?’

The peer education intervention trained a pool of young girls as educators in reproductive health education issues and in facilitation skills, enabling them to then run small community-based training processes with other groups of young girls. The focus of these training processes was information as a mode of knowledge acquisition; skills development, such as assertiveness; and the development and implementation of local action plans around particular local concerns. The peer educators were provided with initial training, ongoing supervision by a ymca staff member, as well as regular extra training. many of the peer educators also attended regular feedback workshops with YMCA staff and attended regional and national conferences, ensuring that they remained central to ongoing design and redesign of training materials.

Locating the Community-based education work within a Broader Community Development and service Delivery framework

The threads of this story also helpfully illustrate how community-based education work can flow from, and sit within community development and social service delivery work. As a community worker/writer I often find other practitioners wondering if they can sit one beside another. What i have learned from this piece of work is that they can, as long as practitioners remain clear about which methodology is being used where, with clarity about the accompanying logics of each methodology. For example, within this work the SEI represents a social service delivery initiative, emergent from good consultation work with young people and communities, but ultimately developed out of a sense of national and donor priorities (‘education for young people’). Initially the design of this project, by the ymca, World vision south africa, World vision australia and ausaiD had limited involvement of young people and communities within decision-making processes. The inclusion of youth committees as decision-making structures within the sei was a change to the original design.

however, emergent from this social service delivery process was a community development process in which young people who, through the youth structures incorporated into the sei, found their collective voice. as well as running the SEIs they identified their key priorities as dealing with teenage pregnancy and other reproductive health issues. They demanded changes to the sei that initially


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incorporated reproductive health education workshops into the SEI curriculum. furthermore, young people developed ideas and activities to address teenage pregnancy within their local communities – theatre at sports events, inclusion of information within community newspapers and so forth. as per orthodox community development work within a social learning tradition, these young people formed numerous projects which sometimes evolved into a whole community programme work, with the accompanying need for partnerships. at that stage, the ymca, which was driven less by staff-donor agendas and more by the young people’s needs identification, found that both CEDPA and the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) to be more than willing partners.

Despite this complex array of work, the key issue was that a social service oriented sei project was now accompanied by a community development process led by young people, in partnership with YMCA workers and other organisational partners. Driven by young people, accompanied by such partners, a community-based education initiative was then developed in the form of a peer education strategy. The analysis emerging from the community development process was that a youth-led, peer education strategy, supported by community-based training of peer educators would be the most effective social change intervention in relation to reproductive health needs.

it is important to hold the three processes apart conceptually. These three processes include the:

• SEI social service programme – providing education services for young people;

• community development work – understood as evolving initially from the youth-oriented community structure (SEI committee) that could, through its new capacity develop young people’s confidence, skills, relationships and networks, organisational partnerships, and initiate other community development initiatives as per emergent community analysis;

• community-based education work – whereby the young people initiated the BLP community education reproductive health initiative – working with young people, animated by young people through peer education.

The SEI continued for some five years and remained primarily: (i) a social service delivery intervention, albeit located effectively at community level. The sei committee, while initially set up as a participatory structure for the sei shifted towards holding a dual function. on one hand, the committee continued to play the role of a participatory youth structure of the sei, while on the other hand, the committee now had changed into also being: (ii) a youth-oriented community structure in which young people could identify and initiate their own community-based initiatives. in this sense, it was the hub of youth-oriented community development processes that initiated new activities. Furthermore, one of the key community programmes emergent from this youth-oriented community structure


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was: (iii) the BLP with its focus on community education. Now lessons about community development and community-based education are distilled.

Reflecting on the Story: Discussing and Distilling Community Development Practices

having described the context, the bare bones of the training intervention, and the conceptual understanding locating the intervention within a broader community development and social service framework, I now return to the opening story and consider two practices for community development work. I have chosen to focus on how to maintain training around issues of power, not only information, and the ‘trade-offs’ in scaling-up community-based training work. Both areas are inter-twined.

Training Around Issues of Power, Not Only Information

By situating the programme within an action learning framework community workers soon learned, through reflecting on experiences such as the applied theatre method described earlier, that community-based education focused on reproductive health/hiv information was not enough. in this case and context, information was not transformative. Young people acknowledged that they did not have enough correct information/knowledge about sexuality, their bodies, negotiating sex and so forth, yet it became quickly apparent that providing correct information/knowledge did not enable substantial change either. As mentioned above it became clear through ongoing listening, feedback and learning from international good practice (Campbell and MacPhail, 2002) that reproductive health issues are more related to issues of power – concerns of masculinity, gendered relations and economics – rather than information.

changes were made to the educational activities embedded within the peer education curricula ensuring that the programme was more focused on power issues – both analytically and in relation to skills learned. For example, learning activities that helped young girls and young boys understand and deconstruct notions of sex and gender were incorporated. Discussions flowed from such activities enabling participants to understand which aspects of their lives were biologically determined and which were socially constructed. Particular exercises that enabled young people to draw and discuss what it is like to be a man or a woman in south africa were elicited. for example, participants developed posters named ‘Look like a man, act like a man’ that depicted how young men’s masculinities were culturally and socially constructed. Participants talked through how within popular constructions of femininity and masculinity conflict might be engaged-negotiated-resolved. alternatives were then considered, particularly in relation to negotiating conflict around reproductive health that allowed people to practice their skills around conflict.


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However, in acknowledging and understanding the importance of moving from information transmission focused on knowledge acquisition to transformational learning focused on issues of negotiating power, it is easy for practitioners and young peer education to revert to the former. Young people as peer educators, like many trainers, can resort, or more accurately reverse to the easy option of providing information. Despite all the modelling and mentoring around experientially and transformation-oriented facilitation, the cultural and pedagogical pressure was towards reverting to education as information transfer.

This is hardly surprising when one considers the pedagogical emphasis of most marginalised educational contexts within south africa. young people, despite experiencing something ‘dialogically different’ within the ymca training context, still also experience a predominant educational culture of what Paulo Freire (1970) called the ‘banking model’. Daily, many of the young people go to dysfunctional schools in which good practice is about teachers at least turning up for the day and delivering monological lessons. Thus transformational training goes very much ‘against the grain’.

Coming to terms with this problem leads me to reflect on the challenges of facilitation for powerful transformation. even if the issues discussed above can be dealt with, that is, reversing the cultural and pedagogical pressures towards information transmission, there is still the complex question of how to create and support facilitator training around complex issues such as power. What the introductory story illustrates is that moving from information-oriented to participatory and even embodied learning experiences does not guarantee transformative learning experiences, particularly if the goals are empowerment. empowerment goals require facilitators who are equipped with both technique (including participatory, applied or forum theatre techniques) and the ability to craft an ‘ah-ha’ moment. such craft requires high-level consciousness, creativity, adaptability, discernment and insight.

The Trade-offs in Scaling-up Such Community-based Training Processes

Such a conclusion leads to questions being asked about the quality of the work particularly in relation to trade-offs required by attempting to scale-up the work. For example, in scaling-up the work, to reach a much broader constituency of young people – given the scale of the challenge of HIV/AIDS and reproductive health rights – there is the need for, amongst others, more:

• professional staff to ‘train’ the young peer educators;• young people to be trained as peer educators;• involvement of local ymca branches to manage the local initiatives;• coordination of the local initiatives, as per the nationally funded programme.

The emphasis on trying to reach more young people signposts the issue of quantity. In this way scaling-up becomes a quantity issue that can at times conflict deeply


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with quality. There appear to be trade-offs required that at times are difficult to agree upon. considering the introductory story and accompanying discussion above, an inherent tension exists between scaling-up the numbers of facilitators needed and ensuring all facilitators have understood the craft to work around issues of power and transformation.

Much can be learned from Robert Chambers’ reflections on similar challenges involving scaling-up participatory approaches to development. he argues that when thinking about scaling-up, ‘Choices have to be made between working with initiatives and programmes which are small, slow and beautiful, and those which are big, fast and flawed’ (Chambers, 2005b: 119). Chambers also argues that, ‘cases can be made for both. The best way forward may be slower than the speed demanded by sponsors [donors] but faster than the speed advocated by experienced field practitioners, with trade-offs between scale and speed, and quality’ (2005b: 119).

certainly, tensions around such potential trade-offs were felt amongst practitioners within the ymca BlP initiative. Whereas the initial small-scaled BlP initiative, developed within the sei programme in KwaZulu-natal, was made up of staff who had evolved with the programme learning skills and the craft on the job, the requirements of scaling-up necessitated finding staff through more orthodox ways of recruitment. recruiting staff through advertising meant equipping them with (rather than evolving them through) transformational training craft, philosophy and techniques. What we learned here was that it might be easy to equip people with the techniques, but not with the craft and philosophy of transformative training. This is because developing the craft and the philosophy is closely aligned with attitudes, consciousness and behaviours, and an overall commitment to empowerment. staff training per se, finds it hard to ‘develop’ such a philosophy.

The trade-off is then between the qualities of trainers who can mobilise young people around an empowerment and transformational initiative versus the requirements of a quantity of trainers that can ‘get the job done’, meeting donor deadlines and outputs. furthermore, the pressure of quantity leads to the development of a more manual-oriented training curricula, with heavily prescribed input/activities rather than menu-orientation where there is lots of flexibility within what facilitators chose to utilise. As core staff become less confident in the capacities of staff to train the young people in situ by drawing on a strong philosophy of empowerment, it then becomes easy to fall back on manuals – prescribing what should be done to peer educators to ensure they can deliver the group learning processes with other young people.

In some more serious ways, one of the key trade-offs seems to be the inherent challenge to peer education programmes. While the initial small-scale community-oriented peer programme was led by young people who had long affiliations with the YMCA – their commitment to education was clear and credible – as the programme grew nationally young people became peer educators for more diverse reasons, of which some were not primarily about benefitting the key beneficiaries.


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Some young people became peer educators to gain skills for themselves, or access opportunities to travel to workshops in other parts of the country or region.

Having reflected on these experiences, and through the reading of literature around scaling-up, I propose that the key lessons learned around scaling-up effective community-based training initiatives include:

• sticking to a flexible, trainer-friendly menu-oriented curricula rather than ‘falling-back’ upon a manual that prescribes what learning should take place;

• scaling-up slowly, but persistently, driven primarily not by the agendas of donors, but by the agendas of demand from young people and communities (within the context of this story);

• the scaling-up process should be facilitated, not forced with the focus on trusting the local trainers and peer educators, rather than predetermining targets that take precedence over process;

• champions of change who have stuck with the community-based training work for some time and who with their historical memory ensure reflective capabilities and some level of continuity of learning;

• drawing on robert chambers who advocates developing ‘words and sayings’ and ‘stories’ (2005b: 149) to reflect the transformational heart of the work. For example, for many of the young girls participating in the programme the simple saying ‘the gender agenda!’ ensured they remained focused on what they had learnt about the social construction and deconstruction of relations between themselves and boys. Just as words and sayings used by facilitators such as ‘hand over the pen’ or ‘hold your agenda lightly’ remind trainers about process, the gender agenda constantly reminded people of key content issues relating to power and change;

• to keep the community-based training programme ‘on-track’ requires the ‘hosting’ organisation to remain engaged in its own ongoing transformational process ensuring there is a supportive action learning environment that fosters experimentation, risk-taking, honest reflection and change.

Conclusion

initiating and sustaining community-based training initiatives that focus on power and individual and collective transformation-empowerment is incredibly difficult. At a micro-level, I have unpacked what could have easily ended as a failed training experience, despite using strong participatory and embodied techniques. The conclusion reached is that the craft of facilitating transformational training is difficult to learn and not easily transmitted via most train the trainer programmes. The cultural and pedagogical pressure is towards informational transfer within initiatives such as the peer education Better life options Program. This pressure becomes even more pronounced when compounded by the need to achieve scale


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in order to inform large population groups about teenage pregnancy, hiv and reproductive health. here, trade-offs between quantity and quality abound.

I propose that recognising the trade-offs, and therefore at times having to make tough pragmatic choices, needs to be accompanied by a deep commitment to ensuring facilitators of such community-based training are supported to learn the craft of transformative training. Philosophy and technique is not enough. it is the craft which is critical.


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interlude

The Process of community Development: In Dialogue with Es’kia

Introduction

Like many good things in life you tend to stumble on them rather than find them through a careful systematic search. This was the case for me in discovering Mphahlele Es’kia’s work. One beautiful clear March day in the Western Cape coastal town of hermanus, indulging in one of my most pleasurable activities, browsing through a book shop, I was attracted to a beautiful-looking hardback book titled Es’kia (Mphahlele, 2002). I think it was the photo of the thoughtful and somewhat pained man on the front cover that caught my initial attention. Flicking through the pages, I quickly recognised that here was a man of extraordinary breadth and depth – an exile, who had returned to South Africa – and having seen the old south africa was now writing on the verge of birthing the new. and then, lo and behold, i found some essays titled ‘community Development’. animated by turning the pages i realised i had discovered a gem, a treasure.

During the next few months I carefully read several sections – to do mostly with his thinking on education and literature – but regularly I returned to his musings on social consciousness and specifically to his pages on community development. i also delved into some of his other writing, for example, the excellent memoir Down 2nd Avenue (1959). After some time I realised a whole chapter of this book based on his wisdom would be useful – simple and practical wisdom about the processes of community development. so i chose to engage with each section of a particular text carefully and supplement it with other material from my research and biography. The reflection has been organised into several sections as per the titles below, with the Es’kia text indented. The text used is Es’kia (Mphahlele, 1992: 188–90).

Reflection

Prior to the first section of the text utilised in this reflection Es’kia had spent some time writing on the african family and its gradual dissolution through apartheid policies and capitalist development modes. For Es’kia the individual and families are the foundation of community, but he then explicitly moves on to reflect on the nature of community and how to start community projects. The following part of the text is very careful to argue that someone with an idea for


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community development should enlist others who share the same interests and vision. he is also very forthright in resisting an abstract form of democracy that can sometimes be used to strangle the kind of community vision and energy that could be unleashed in organic processes. read carefully:

you organise a project, for instance, enlisting support of some members of the community who share your interests and vision. I find it necessary to emphasise the origins of an idea that eventually becomes the property of the community at large. Out of sheer obsession with democracy as an idea – an abstraction – some self-appointed political faction will often insist that a group of persons who want to translate an individual’s idea into a concrete programme first seeks its permission to do so. The faction’s purpose is undoubtedly to assert its own political supremacy, real or imagined.

Es’kia is arguing against gatekeepers or powerbrokers determining what initiatives can be started within communities, even in the name of ‘democratically elected’ gatekeepers. The spirit of the text is that anyone, with an idea and energy, if they can enlist some others who share the same idea and energy, can start an initiative. i would concur and add that effective community development practice dreams of such initiatives flourishing from many parts of the community. One of the crucial roles of a community worker is to sow seeds within communities, spreading ideas carefully usually through sharing stories, which are then taken up by some community members, watered within their imagination and shared with others. Some of those stories, like seeds, take root and in flourishing give birth to actual activities or initiatives.

This movement from an individually inspired idea to a group of people who share an idea is critical. Again Es’kia discusses the importance of this:

And yet the natural path is actually for a project first to take root, driven by a small group of persons who then solicit further ideas from those members of the community whose real strengths are known at a practical level, rather than conferred by “democratic” elections. It is not difficult to imagine that a committee may be democratically elected but still turn out to be a mix of crooked, indolent, self-seeking but highly articulate, popular figures who happen to be politically “correct”. a time may come when a project deems it proper, because it has developed strong legs, so to speak, to exercise controlled democracy in selecting a board of management. The most important prerequisite is that its goals be inspired by the highest ideals that we have come to associate with community development. There may be similar, diverse projects in the community, even variations of a particular one. collectively all these cultivate an awareness among members of the community of, shall we say, gugulethu or Langa or Nyanga; an awareness of their own needs and capacity (or lack of it) to deal with their immediate socio-economic problems. Still collectively, the


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The Process of Community Development 133

projects stimulate self-help, self-realisation and can even lead to the creation of a community chest.

Building on the previous reflection there are a couple of extra important points to make here. Es’kia first recognises the ecological or organic nature of powerful community processes. as per above, when the right person, with a vision and energy, finds others who share that vision, or through osmosis come to share it, then things happen. it resonates with margaret Wheatley’s meme, ‘start anywhere, go everywhere’ (Wheatley and Frieze, 2011: 91). Democratic processes are perceived to be somewhat instrumental, easily manipulated by the powerful, captured by potentially ‘crooked’ people. From the perspective articulated within this book I would like to draw on Es’kia’s wisdom but also add to it, arguing that a framework that holds Es’kia’s wisdom but extends it, requires an understanding of both mezzo (meso)-level group and macro-level organisational work, ordered in the best way. The organic nature of community work occurs most powerfully at mezzo-oriented group level with several people choosing to come together around a shared vision that morphs into a shared task or process (Westoby and Dowling, 2013: 61). however, as that small group engages with the wider ‘community’ then the process might need to be transformed from organic, relational and informal group work to a more structured, democratic initiative with transparent governance structures in place.

Secondly, Es’kia’s comments focus the reader on the notion of ‘highest ideals’ linking community development work to humanistic values. Clearly this aspiration is worthy of deep respect and any community worker dreams of it. However, in the cut and thrust of the real world many people get involved in community processes due to ‘interests’ rather than ‘ideal ethical commitments’. The rhetoric might be ethical but under pressure most espoused ethics are shown to be interests. This is not to imply withdrawal due to a cynical perspective, but simply to highlight some of the real challenges in supporting processes of dialogue, discussion and debate about the kinds of ideals and ideas informing a community development process. Es’kia goes on:

now, brutal realities exist in our townships that cripple many self-help ventures and excellent ideas for community development at birth. These realities are related to sectional political divisions. it becomes immediately imperative for us to consider the first item on the agenda for community development as “community organisation towards a unified vision of the road ahead”. Here we could discuss concrete practical strategies for the resolution of sectarian political conflicts. We may even devote several meetings to such a topic. Even if we find the constitution of the group to be one-sided, the agenda must go on. We must simply appreciate that we have to go through a process of evolution, discussion and interaction being a part of it.


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salient comments from someone who clearly had observed and experienced the realities of community life, and particularly the organisational dimension – previously discussed as macro-level work (Westoby and Owen, 2010). The structuring of community initiatives or projects into organisational forms is a fraught process. Commentators such as Henderson and Thomas (2005) have examined the complex issues at stake when a group of people consider moving into a formal organisational form. Es’kia identifies one of the inevitable elements – politics, and the potential to undermine any clear unified vision. One of the challenges in community development is negotiating or navigating between the potential centrifugal tendencies of differing perspectives, divergent analyses and degenerative conflict – versus the potential centripetal tendencies to seek ‘unity within diversity’ (Freire, 1994: 57) and work towards a common goal. In other writing I have called this ‘seeking a narrative thread’ – that is, a common analysis and vision that can generate collective energy (Westoby and Kaplan, 2013). It is not easy, particularly when some people are often intent on holding to their own agendas rather than exploring the possibility of a common agenda. Es’kia goes further in his analysis of the challenge exploring how,

Some of the major difficulties in African urban community organisation in South Africa are: the fact of political strife among black, self-generated or incited by a third force; poverty and/or survival consumer economics; and the overarching fact that we are strangers in urban life, even though several of us may be third-generation inhabitants. There is also that part of urban life that does not express us in the fullest sense of the phrase. i mean we did not choose to live in these ghettos, but were dumped here. had we created our own urban environment in the first place we would be proud and ready to mobilise our human resources, in spite of underdeveloped economics, because our commitment to such an environment would have been above reproach.

The cosmopolitan nature of our urban townships is forever changing, as new inhabitants enter and shantytowns, which may sooner or later become permanent, spring up. We are generally slow to volunteer services in welfare and educational work. It may be argued that volunteering community service is a typically middle class way of extending oneself, for people who have surplus time and a relatively comfortable income. That may be. But must this mean that such development has to wait until a middle class evolves?

his analysis includes a historical approach, trying to understand some of the consequences of forced removal, the non-voluntaristic nature of rural to urban drift and the lack of a community ethos within urban geographies. His analysis underpins an ethos of trying to ‘see what the people see’ (Lathouras, 2010), integrating a realistic picture of the challenges that beget urban communities that are marginal to the mainstream. As per Biko’s analysis, there are cultural and consciousness issues to do with loss of pride which undermines motivation.


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And for Es’kia there are also other material and structural dynamics at play as people move in and out of geographic spaces undermining the possibilities of people, over time, building trusting relationships that can then be the foundation of effective community development work. Lacking connection and commitment to the spaces and places that people inhabit, people are reticent to make it their base, giving of themselves to service and involvement. Es’kia contrasts this urban challenge with a perspective of rurality arguing that:

in the rural areas communities are more homogeneous, and people are good listeners and will hear you out if you have a proposition for community organisation and development. But you have to be a “native” son or daughter, or something close to that, in a matter of speaking. They don’t easily take to perceived “outsiders” initiating a project, although we must admit that rejection is not absolute: one simply has to work harder to be accepted. I am optimistic, too, that this is as passing phase, inasmuch as the whole rural landscape is rapidly changing.

his perspective is not necessarily overtly dualistic in arguing that community development is hard in urban settings and easy in the rural context. The above comments provide a sharp analysis of the insider/outsider dynamics of rural communities, arguing that it is very hard to initiate community processes as outsiders.

as already quoted within the introduction, neville alexander’s recent reflections on ways forward for the New South Africa (2013: 199) concludes that:

Besides the ongoing political and economic class struggles in which we are willy-nilly involved, and by means of which we attempt to create and consolidate more democratic space in the short to medium term, we have to go back to the community development tasks … we have to rebuild our communities and our neighbourhoods by means of establishing, as far as possible on a voluntary basis, all manner of community projects that bring visible short-term benefit to the people and that initiate at the same time the trajectories of fundamental social transformation.

Alexander offers an analysis of a way forward. Es’kia offers ‘practice wisdom’ on how such community development work might emerge, particularly exploring the significance of a particular kind of leadership. For Es’kia leadership is crucial in catalysing the community development process. effective leadership, holding to an ethos of community work, starts through building awareness. Es’kia offers the following signposts on this kind of work:

May I make the following remarks concerning the origins of community awareness:


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1. Both in urban and rural areas there will be individuals who have an extra-ordinarily heightened and passionate concern for people: they identify problems, and a problem-solving cause is relatively easier to get across to ones audience than a mere brainwave that brings people together purely for the sake of fellowship. It is to the credit of our women that they have initiated self-help projects in their communities, and are still serving in positions of leadership and as the general membership of other establishments.

2. initiators or pioneers of community projects display an instinct for priorities in any catalogue of social causes; they also display a restlessness born of the idea that fired their imagination in the first place.

3. They are knowledgeable about contacts with civics, educational agencies, funding establishments and mass media. I’m talking here mostly about natural leaders, among them teachers, nurses, doctors, lawyers, social workers, trade unionists, artisans and so on. Generally, people who are sensitised about human concerns because their occupations bring them close to people.

4. There is a need for us to form study groups in our communities that can be a resource for initiators of projects intended to serve them.

5. We should harness the energies of survival support groups, such as burial and benefit societies, so as to cultivate among them a social conscience and consciousness that go beyond basic survival. They could use the interest on their group savings for worthy causes.

Some of the characteristics identified in these signposts include, ‘heightened and passionate concern for people’, ‘an instinct for priorities’, ‘are sensitised about human concerns … [they are] close to the people’, able to initiate ‘study groups’ as a resource for energising collective action, and ‘harness[ing]’ existing resources. In many ways, Es’kia has put together the wisdom of many contemporary approaches to community development arguing essentially for: endogenous-led development (local people as leaders of change processes), assets and people-oriented approaches, and community-based education similar to contemporary REFLECT processes or Organisation Workshops to catalyse thinking-reflection and collective analysis.

having provided these insights into how to raise community awareness as a crucial element of the community development process, Es’kia then uncannily tackles what can be considered a most contemporary challenge for community workers. In essence he considers the question, what is the role of community development in relation to the state, or put another way, what is the relationship between self-help approaches and rights/advocacy approaches? In his own language he discusses how:

i am always deeply moved by rural and semi-rural village communities that collect money from their lean savings to build a school. By contrast i have heard urbanites, among them highly placed political activists who should know better,


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say they are not going to involve themselves with non-government organisations engaged in providing alternative and non-formal education. The reason they give is that this is a state responsibility.

I do not deny this. But what if the State has abdicated its responsibility? What guarantees do we have that future governments will want to build most of the schools we want? Furthermore, I would not want to entrust a people’s welfare and education wholly to state-run institutions. let governments give community projects money, yes; but leave us to manage them. governments have made a mess of things by monitoring welfare, health and educational services to stagnation. It is in these institutions where the educator, social worker and health worker can give community enterprise a human dimension. It is here that self-help initiatives can train us to speak for ourselves, and experiment with and develop our own ideas, instead of responding to government policy. it is here that we, as CBER [referring to the Council for Black Education and Research], work towards the development of the whole personality, and not only skills and assimilation of social, political and economic theories. it is here that we create a learning environment of our own, where we have a fighting chance to promote the humanistic qualities of education …

A community is often what we make of it. It realises its status as such through the alignment of individual and group interests, concerns, anxieties, aspirations and goals, into a unified purpose.

His perspective is clear, not requiring much comment. Like Alexander (2013), Es’kia does not see service-delivery by the state as the best way forward (not to suggest that good service delivery is not crucial). Es’kia identifies the task of the community worker to, while waiting and even pressuring the state to work with the community in delivering services (in this case, schools), to get on with the task at hand. communities are capable of creating, often with the help and support of outsiders (non-government or government) projects and programmes that need to be established. To only wait for the state can ensure that feelings of stagnation, anger, and frustration become debilitating. While waiting, Es’kia suggests that people and communities self-activate, or using some more contemporary thinking, co-create new initiatives. Furthermore, he argues that there are clear benefits in getting on with the tasks at hand – to do with building of self-confidence, learning new skills, and creating something ourselves. In a sense such practice embodies what Alexander calls ‘building a new historical community’ (2013: 186).

Conclusion

Es’kia has offered simple practical wisdom for community workers. Written for another time the ideas still resonate with contemporary contexts. Things have


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changed – yet also they have not. Drawing on other literature to illuminate or extend Es’kia’s thinking provides a reflection on practice that I hope can help community development workers navigate the complex field.


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ParT iv exploring state-led

community Development

Part IV of the book considers the research findings in relation to state-led community development, particularly the national community Development Worker Programme (CDWP) and also the Community Development Practitioner Programme (CDPP).

chapter 10 focuses on the ‘dilemmatic space’ of state-employed community development workers. The chapter traces the long tradition of government-led community development and provides some appreciative and critical analysis. Crucial concepts, such as ‘dilemmatic space’ (Hoggert et al., 2009) are carefully considered and then interpretive data, particularly from interviews, are discussed. The chapter particularly reports on the political challenges of working as a state employee.

chapter 11 considers my investigation into the interaction between supply-oriented state-led community development and cooperative formation. cooperative formation is a crucial element of the south african national Development Plan and has been well integrated into the national community Development programmes. The chapter considers the challenges of state-led strategies such as cooperative formation particularly when linked into a supply-oriented chain.

The third and final chapter of Part IV, Chapter 12, focuses on training of community practitioners within government departments. again the focus is on the national cDW programme training. again the literature on training and community development is explored, the findings are reported and discussion then considers the crucial issues relevant to community development training within south africa.


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chapter 10

The Dilemmas of south africa’s state employed community

Development Workers

Introduction

As already stated within this book, during the past few years within South Africa there has been a proliferation of government led community work and community development initiatives. it is into such a context that i conducted research during 2010 and early 2011, into how community development workers employed within the national Community Development Worker Programme (CDWP) understand and conduct their practice within south africa. contrary to previously published literature (such as Gray and Mubangizi, 2010) I did not set out to directly critique the national Community Development Worker Programme, but to understand how such workers negotiate the dilemmas of their ambiguous position as both in and against the state (Hoggert et al., 2008). Furthermore, the discussion considers how such practitioners, as ‘street-level bureaucrats’ (Lipsky, 1980) are negotiating various policy contradictions at a practice level.

Background

The CDWP was launched in 2003 by the previous President Thabo Mbeki, but as indicated by the quote at the beginning of this book, has continued to stay on the radar of Jacob Zuma, the current president. The national programme employing approximately 4,227 community development workers (CDWs), is funded nationally, administrated provincially and operationalised through the local wards of local municipalities. cDWs are public service employees. The personnel goal of the programme is to place one cDW in each ward thereby ‘servicing’ approximately 12,000 people per ward.

The programme structure varies from province to province. This study focused on the free state, one of the nine provinces of south africa. in the free state, CDWs are held accountable to local municipality public participation officers, and tasked to work in collaboration with people and groups such as ward councillors, local ward committees (with members representing sectors such as health, education, women, youth), other sectoral community workers (health, agriculture, housing, land affairs and so forth), and other state officials. The details of their


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job descriptions vary from province to province but the core activities include: providing information to citizens ensuring they know and can access their rights; linking people into legislatively endorsed local government participatory structures (for example, the ward committees) and ensuring people ‘have a say’; and, also working on projects initiated by groups within communities with a particular focus on livelihood initiatives.

Within the free state Province the cDW programme is administered by the cDW unit, located in the Department of Public service and administration. There are approximately 300 wards within the free state and therefore 300 cDWs. The free state master Plan (Department of cooperative governance and Traditional Affairs, 2010) states that the key goals of their CDW programme are to: strengthen civic services; strengthen social well-being; stimulate local economic development (LED); and enhance public participation for service delivery improvement. Also, they are explicitly told within this Master Plan (ibid.) that they cannot do: be the secretariat for ward committees; implement department-specific mandates and programmes; mobilise community members for party political events; and be politicians, and play out this role in their communities. such warnings are indicative of the potential problematic political issues being played out within the programme.

furthermore, it is important to alert readers to the parallel development of the community development practitioner programme, situated within the national Department of social Development. This programme is situated within the newly formed community Development Directorate and has been formed to complement more traditional roles of social workers who focus on statutory work. Although the Department of social Development envisages integration of services between the statutory work of social work services and more developmental work of community development practitioners, there is a clear separation of tasks – the former focused on individuals and the latter on communities, with a particular emphasis on livelihood development.

Locating both the CDw Programme and the study within a Broader Literature

The south african national community Development Programme can be said to be located within a long lineage of such government-led programmes situated within the global context. examples of similar programmes currently exist within Zambia, indonesia and Papua new guinea.

As far back as 1962, T.R. Batten, in his classic book Training for Community Development: A Critical Study of Method, provided a critical overview of many such programmes, situated mainly in asian and african countries. Batten’s focus was on the inadequacies of the training provided to cDWs, and those who are meant to be collaborating with cDWs, in such programmes. more recent studies within South Africa (see Van Rooyen, 2007) and elsewhere have also distilled


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South Africa’s State Employed Community Development Workers 143

key lessons, for example, the recently published report Effective Community Development Programmes (Bamber et al., 2009).

such lessons mainly point to the challenges of training within the community development programmes, a focus of Chapter 12 within this book. Here I have however focused on the dilemmas of practice, particularly political dilemmas, within the current context. as i considered this study i found it useful to engage with some conceptual ideas discussed by key development thinkers Hoggert et al. (2009) and a key social policy researcher Michael Lipsky (1980). Their ideas seemed to help make sense of some of the complexities of CDWs’ work. For Hoggert et al. (2009), one orthodoxy about the complex field of community development practice is that it occupies a highly problematic and somewhat uniquely complex dilemmatic space. such a space leads to complex ethical, moral and practice dilemmas. For Hoggert et al., examples of the kinds of dilemmatic space occupied by practitioners include: in and against the state; and an in-between an instrumental ethic of programming and a solidarity ethic of struggle. Within such dilemmatic space the practice of community development is full of ambiguity, risk and uncertainty. Recognising such a space therefore requires understanding how community workers ‘read’ a situation (for example, through community profiling) and then authorise action within complex spaces where the official answer is increasingly given to be ‘coordination and collaboration’ within what is essentially a conflictual and contested political space (Boyte, 2008).

While recognising the critiques articulated by other commentators, for example, Gray and Mubangizi (2010), who argue that the gap between community development theory and practice are left wanting, I draw on Michael Lipsky’s work to help re-orient such theory and practice to ‘fit’ into the contemporary realities of what is taking place. In a sense then I recognise that, at least for now, government-led cD programmes are here to stay. community development theory and practice, rather than advocating a radical departure from what is going on, should engage with this reality. It is also proposed that Michael Lipsky’s (1980) notion of ‘street level’ policy practitioners, or street-level bureaucrats applied to publicly employed community workers, helps analyse what is occurring ‘in the field’ in a way that is useful for practitioners. For Lipsky, street-level is a space where ‘policy’ is operationalised. This is particularly relevant when cDW positions are public service positions, which is the case within South Africa. They are workers for the state, attempting to operationalise the policies of the state, however contradictory they might be. Lipsky argues that often much national policy is deeply contradictory and while policy makers can live with contradictions, it is often at a street level that the contradictions are ‘worked out’ for better or for worse. Street-level workers – in this case, state paid CDWs – are left in positions of trying to operationalise the contradictions of policy. Furthermore, community workers as front-line street workers where ‘policy contradictions’ are operationalised, are often left with a sense of role confusion, and experience mistrust from both the horizontal community-level actors and also vertical state-level bureaucrats. With this conceptual framework in mind findings and themes are now discussed.


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Findings: Identified Dilemmas and Contradictions

All of the practitioners interviewed spoke readily about their dilemmas in community development practice. Several key themes relevant to the research project have been distilled from the data and each is examined in turn.

Political and Professional Agendas

One of the tensions and dilemmas for CDWs emerged from conflict between professional and political agendas. While most of the cDWs were committed, (mainly due to their pre-service training), to professional practices such as those articulated within their job description – working with all people in communities, ensuring people as citizens know their rights and are able to participate in participatory structures of local government and so forth) – many political dilemmas still existed. cDWs were clear about their professional roles and agendas, but often they found themselves having to navigate complex political pressures. in a nutshell, these tensions were felt as the professional pressure to work with all of community (or at least being available to all constituents) versus the political pressures to only work with the part of community that supports a particular political party. This pressure in turn leads to legitimacy problems among some constituencies and also as potential threats to some local councillors who see cDWs as building constituency for political purposes.

For instance the following discussion, taking place with a focus group, is indicative of the experience of all interviewees and identifies deep political tensions between the cDWs and local politicians or/and local political structures:

A: The other thing is political involvement – the councillor might be ANC [referring to the ruling party within South Africa – the African National congress] and if you’re not involved in politics at all he/she starts to mistrust you, doubt you. and if you start to get involved in politics, you might end up in the executive of that political party … the community starts to doubt you. are you a CDW or campaigning for the party?

B: This is not with all councillors – we sometimes have very good relationships.

C: Sometimes CDWs want to put pressure on councillors – sometimes councillors want to show they are superior to cDWs …

a: Sometimes the CDWs want to be a councillor – they resign from the CDW … there are examples of this …

one participant had this to add:


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If, for example, the ward councillor calls a meeting you know your role is to work around governance, not politics – in wards there are many politics – if i come to the role with a political hat on people will not trust me. i focus on governance. (Participant Interview 1)

The same participant identified her main tension in the work as a political tension:

The first is political, like for example in different wards they [the branch executives of the parties] don’t know what the CDWs do – they say you have to report to them. But you are an x-official of the ward, not the party. You work with the community, not the parties. We encounter so many challenges and you don’t know what to do. For example, the party officials tell us to distribute pamphlets and we should not do that. (Participant Interview 1)

The perspectives offered by these CDWs indicate that for many local party officials the cDWs are not so much an instrument of the Weberian state, to serve the entire local constituency, but are an instrument of the party in power – usually the anc. The pull towards serving political agendas versus professional imperatives was therefore acutely felt.

At the same time, many participants talked about the tensions with the ward councillor who perceived the cDW as acting politically, or building up their own political credit. for example, the same participant as above explains:

I’d like to start with a person I work closely with – a ward councillor – I have been politically deployed – he might think I am trying to take his job – there is a tension – he’ll think [name] knows the people – he has helped 50 households, this person has political power and can take my role. So there will always be this tension. (Participant Interview 6)

What is of interest here is not only the tensions between the councillor and the cDW, but also the language of deployment, a reoccurring word within the interviews and focus groups. The cDW was ‘deployed’ to the role by the anc office, and this is felt as competition to the ANC Councillor, reflecting not so much political versus professional agendas, but internal party political tensions.

findings also indicate many tensions and dilemmas in practice due to community-level perceptions of politics. again, the same participant quoted above argues that:

i can join the party of my choice, but when someone is not a member of the party you might not get the best service – but I am not in my role as an ANC person, but as an official. If you’re in the wrong party you won’t get access to resources, e.g. a loud hailer – for example, if we give X, a member of COPE [COPE is another political party: congress of the People], but also a cDW, a loud hailer


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people will think we are giving it to COPE … so there is confusion and tension. This hampers access to services for people. (Participant Interview 6)

Bottom-up and Top-down: Community Needs and National Priorities

Within the literature on community development theory and practice the challenge of how to resolve the tensions of top-down versus bottom-up driven development has been enduring. findings from this research project indicate that such tension continues to be endemic within the south african national cDW Programme. However, the tension was expressed in terms of the disjuncture between identified community-level needs and national priorities. a senior practitioner within the free state cDW programme stated the tension clearly:

our challenge in cD is the long list of needs and problems. But not all of it can be expressed in the IDP [referring to the local government integrated development plan] – so this leaves a long list left for communities. The challenge is a disjuncture between local needs and national priorities – CDWs are left with the disjuncture (Participant Interview 4).

The institutional perspective for dealing with service delivery is seen as co-ordination of all levels of government at the local municipality level. from this perspective the role of the CDWs is to ensure all stakeholders, particularly via local ward committees and local development forums (both are key local government participatory structures), are able to participate, or are at least consulted within the development of the iDPs of the local municipalities. The iDPs, developed by local municipalities, are the tool that should be used to ensure the sustainable development of both urban and rural areas through combating service-delivery backlogs and also high levels of unemployment and poverty (Human, Marais and Botes, 2007). However, IDPs are also ‘driven’ by stated national priorities (with pre-determined goals) and therefore tend to override the consultation–participation process of ward committees or development forums (Human, 2007). As per the above quote, this national versus local priority disjuncture creates many tensions and dilemmas for cDWs. for example, how does a state employed community practitioner motivate and mobilise community members to participate within local participatory structures and processes when they know there is a good chance that their concerns will be overridden by national priorities?

furthermore, what is clear from analysis of grey literature on the national cDW Programme and the free state master Plan (Department of cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs, 2010) is that the programme is developed by policy makers who have been assimilated into a ‘big plan’ and/or ‘big push’ approach to development (Easterly, 2006; Sachs, 2005). Spectral to the hopes of local participatory development are national or provincial big plans that, rather than looking to existing experiences of good practice, social innovation and local development (which can then be scaled-up or across), instead design ‘one size fits all’ big plans. Within this ‘frame’ national priorities are set at the centre and are diffused out through provincial plans, sectoral plans and so forth. community


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development then becomes captive to a planner’s vision for development, rather than an experimental incremental process.

Political Context: From Developmental Perspectives to Entitlement – With and For

findings also indicate that another dilemma for many of the cDWs was voiced as that of working developmentally with people, recognising that community development practice is one of partnership between workers and people, versus what they talked about as ‘the sense of entitlement’ people now have, often demanding that a CDW do something for people. I find this a particularly difficult dilemma to discuss, aware of the complex social forces that construct citizens’ appeals for entitlements. For example, one participant, linking citizens’ calls for entitlement to anc political slogans, discussed it in the following way:

The anc, my political party, once said “a better life for all”. That thing tells an ordinary someone they can sit home and life will be better. The slogan is not helpful. We need a new one – where people stand up and do something for their country. When you vote you must vote with responsibility – and be the change you want to see.

The same participant then continues, this time making the point that people certainly need jobs, but that it is best not to wait for the government to provide them; that is, mobilise oneself:

We must get to the point where we see spinach coming to Bloemfontein [the capital city of the free state Province] from somewhere else and is selling for 1 rand/bunch and say: “Why don’t we plan, do it ourselves, get the land, get water, plant spinach and sell it here?” Why wait for the government? They think they need the government. (Participant Interview 6)

other participants constantly reiterated this perspective. it was understood as a perspective whereby CDWs see people as citizens wanting to be beneficiaries of development, understood primarily as ‘the provision of jobs’, rather than as participants within development processes. as cDWs, whose main community development methodology is supporting people to learn, strategise and act together, with themselves as cDWs acting in a support role, the idea of citizens being ‘provided’ anything is frustrating for their work. There is no problem with entitlements per say, and cDWs understand that part of their professional role is to mobilise citizens to put pressure on the state to ensure their entitlements are met. The dilemma for cDWs is when responsibility is located within the cDW, focused with questions from community members such as, ‘what can you do for us?’ Again, the dilemma takes us to the heart of the dilemmatic space described by Hoggert et al. (2008). From the perspective of citizens, CDWs – as state employees – are


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a reasonable target to ask such questions and demand legitimate entitlements. Yet as state workers tasked to use community development methodologies, they themselves want to work with such citizens mobilising them to make fair entitlement claims to the appropriate duty bearers. While beyond the scope of this study, it would be fair to say that south african citizens have been mobilising for a long time and they have learned that, within the framework of neoliberalism, they are ‘on their own’, responsible for themselves. To find a state employed worker (CDW) coming close to them, appearing to be responsive, would inevitably lead to questions such as, ‘what can you do for us?’

Discussion

exploring the south african national community Development Programme in this way, through the conceptual framework of dilemmatic space and interviews with street-level practitioners, has thrown into the foreground a number of key issues for discussion. also, the ideas i discuss here highlight not only my own reflections but continue to draw on ideas suggested by CDWs within the course of the research.

Becoming Politically Literate: Negotiating Two Conceptions of the State and Politics

firstly, the nature of the contested space, within which political dilemmas are experienced for south african cDWs, is somewhat different to what hoggert et al. explored within their book The Dilemmas of Development Practice (2009). Whereas for Hoggert et al. key dilemmas for development practitioners emerge from working within the contested space between state and civil society, findings from this research indicate that the contested space is between two different conceptions of state and politics (Adetula, 2011).

Findings indicate that many CDWs are working within a contested space between what is considered on the one hand to be a programme embedded within and delivered by the idealised Weberian state, and on the other hand by a programme that is embedded within, and delivered by a state that appears to be experiencing the kind of political rationalities analysed by Patrick Chabal and Jean-Pascal Daloz in their seminal book Africa Works (1999), explained below.

many cDWs experience political dilemmas that would seem to be an inevitable consequence of a policy and programme that is deployed within the frame of the Weberian Western state basically ignoring the grassroots street-level perceptions of how political power is deployed. The CDW is officially associated with the rational state, disembodied from african politics, but in reality cDWs are often appointed as per processes of political patronage, and then perceived through a political world-view that is different to that of the rational Weberian state. Drawing on the analytical framework of Chabal and Daloz such processes are indicative


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of the anc as a liberation movement whereby power is not emancipated from society. As per Chabal and Daloz’s framework, there is instead a gradual process of deinstitutionalising the state or informalising politics within the state of south africa. The cDWs are in turn perceived at street-level in this way. it is my contention that while cDWs clearly have a good idea of the political tensions they are dealing with daily, political literacy seems to be an issue. understanding both how the idealised Weberian state is meant to operate and how processes of informalised politics also are at work within South Africa could be helpful. While codes of conduct are clearly important to develop, my input into the programme suggested a more focused education and training processes, enabling cDWs to make sense of this dilemmatic space and negotiate the diverse agendas within a supervised space.

Enhancing Reflective Capacity: Developing Navigational Capability

secondly, the practical dilemmas of delivering programme outputs and outcomes within a politically laden context are foremost in the minds of cDWs. according to Mazrui (2006) the political landscape of South Africa is one of contested political ideologies, a socio-political space that clearly amplifies this dilemmatic space. While for many local communities there are hopes that cDWs will contribute to better service delivery, information circulation and overall individual and community well-being, there is often also local community and/or municipality mistrust of CDWs – due to perceptions of political patronage and failed delivery.

Negotiating the complexity of such dilemmatic space requires significant navigational capabilities. As a way of helping make sense of such navigational skills I draw on Sandra Sewell and Anthony Kelly’s (1986) idea of the ‘compass’. The idea of compass enables practitioners to identify a number of key components required to navigate the complex dilemmatic and often contradictory political space of practice. These include being able to conduct a systems analysis, and also being able to read several possible practice tensions: such as public concern/private concern; my agenda/your agenda; inside-out/outside-in; ideal/real; top-down/bottom-up; and advance/retreat. The names for the tensions reflect the kinds of tensions experienced by street-level bureaucrats – knowing that one is working from the ‘inside’ of the state moving ‘out’ to communities, while recognising that many community groups are working in the other direction, with little concern for inside priorities. for example, obviously cDWs also occupy a space where they need to be clear and transparent about when they are working with top-down agendas and when they can be open to bottom-up agendas.

The usefulness of using a compass to navigate is being able to name the tension points, while also identifying where one is located. Within this research many such tensions have been identified: for example, supply/demand; national priorities versus community priorities; developmental/servicing. naming these tensions is the first critical step in enhancing reflective practice.


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Programme Implications

Finally, findings indicate that while the above ideas could be useful for CDWs (political literacy, navigational capacity), a discussion about the National CDWP as a whole, focused on the challenges for CDWP managers and policy makers, is also worthwhile.

Building on the above points it would seem reasonable to assert that one priority for CDW policy and programme managers is to acknowledge that their programme and workers are embedded within a contested space between different conceptions of the state and politics.

one test for the legitimacy and therefore longevity of such a programme, perceived by local councillors and often local community members as a politically-driven programme, will therefore be firstly, capacity to deliver services at all, and secondly, intention and/or capacity to deliver into communities of a different political constituency. assuming there is intention to deliver, in a sense capacity then becomes a central issue for the CDW Programme. My approach to thinking about capacity development moves beyond training (albeit i will discuss this a little below), to thinking about some more holistic ways forward for the National cDW Programme.

Drawing on recent ‘capacity development’ literature, particularly the work of Ubels et al. (2010: 174–7) I rethink capacity in the CDW Programme. Drawing on their conceptual framework directions would include the following. Firstly, it would be helpful to initiate local-level action research and action learning processes that distil successful good practice at local level and then disseminate such practice through the national programme. secondly, such locally-learned good practice could be spread through horizontal learning processes: not facilitated through expert consultants, but via local practitioners who have learned good practice. Thirdly, the CDWP could provide responsive and flexible capacity-development support to local actors tasked to work with local workers and other involved local stakeholders to adopt new insights and develop better working practices. Such an approach requires not so much rolling out training modules, but freeing such capacity-development practitioners to accompany local cDWs in understanding their local situation and working contextually. Fourthly, there is the growing need to pay significant attention to the changing dynamics and working practices between the different sectors between programmes (of different government departments) and hierarchical levels (within the programme and the auspice department). Such attention requires the building of trust between programmes and levels, one facilitated through and by communication flow (mainly from the bottom-up, rather than top-down), and developing more participatory procedures for planning, budgeting and disbursement. finally, all of the above ideas are embedded within politics and therefore conversations among practitioners would help make more transparent the accountability logics and enable the practitioners to more constructively engage with them.


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Conclusion

This chapter contextualises the concept of dilemmatic space within a study of South Africa’s ‘street-level’ community development workers. I proposed that consideration of the experiences of such cDWs through the conceptual lens provided is helpful. The study illuminates three ways forward for enhancing the cDWP. firstly, political literacy among cDWs would enhance their already skilful ways of negotiating the highly contested political space and accompanying dilemmatic space that they find themselves within. Such political literacy would focus, not so much on tensions between the state and civil society, but between different conceptions of the state and politics. Secondly, enhancing the reflective and navigational capacities of CDWs would be helpful as a way of working in such a complex dilemmatic space. and thirdly, i discuss some possible ways forward for the national cDWP as a whole, focused not so much on the cDWs, but on their managers and policy makers. The ideas range from restructuring how learning is facilitated, through to how accountability logics are shifted from a top-down to bottom-up perspective.


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chapter 11

community Development and cooperative Development within south africa

Introduction

my particular focus for the purposes of this chapter is the interplay of community development practice in relation to cooperative development, a south african national priority. at the time of writing, when south africa nationally (Department of Trade and Industry, 2012) and also provincially (for example, Economic Development Chief Directorate, 2012) is focusing on cooperative development, it seems timely to learn from what has been occurring during the past few years and to consider ways forward for practice and policy.

as already stated in chapter 10, contrary to previously published literature (Gray and Mubangizi, 2009) I have not set out to directly critique the national Community Development Worker or Practitioner Programmes, but to instead understand how such workers are both ‘see[ing] like a state’ (Scott, 1998), while also negotiating the dilemmas of their ambiguous position as both ‘in and against the state’ (Hoggert et al., 2008).

Background/Context

The context of this research is two national community Development Programmes – the CDWP and the CDPP – and the national focus on cooperative development as a crucial component of its livelihood development strategy. With the first two discussed in chapters 10 and 12, the cooperative element is briefly discussed here.

Of significance to this chapter is the central place of cooperative development within the goals of south africa’s post-apartheid developmental state. This is reflected in the development of: the 2005 Cooperatives Act; the 2004 Cooperative Development Policy; the announcement in may 2012, by south africa’s Department of Trade and Industry (DTI), that it will increase support for co-operatives in the country by establishing a cooperatives Development agency and Tribunal; and the development of an integrated strategy on the Promotion and Development of Cooperatives (2012). This is not to say that cooperatives have not previously had an emphasis within South Africa – during the apartheid era cooperative development was one strategy for Afrikaner economic empowerment (Satgar and Williams, 2011: 218) – but it is to say that there is a renewed interest.


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in the pre-apartheid era the state created enabling conditions for such white cooperative development through financial, regulatory and technical support (Satgar and Williams, 2011: 218). In a sense, pre and post-apartheid cooperative development mirror one another in that they have been designed with a racialised dimension, albeit clearly pre-apartheid development focused on the minority Afrikaner population and the post-apartheid era, under the guise of Black economic empowerment, is focused on the majority african population.

Locating the study within the Literature

While this chapter locates itself within the literature on state-led community development, already discussed in chapter 10, the focus is on cooperative formation. however, the conceptual orientation of this study also locates the practice of state-employed community workers within a broader understanding of what I called in the introduction ‘seeing like a state’ referring to Scott’s seminal work of the same title (1998). At the core of this literature, which itself builds on a long lineage of thought (see for example, Schumacher, 1974), is the idea that large-scale state planning, without real attention to organic local knowledge and needs-identification, can be quite catastrophic. While arguing within this chapter that the south african state’s plans for cooperative development are in no way catastrophic, the experience so far appears to be quite damaging to the potential future of a cooperative movement, and also to the lives of people who become members of cooperatives but with little understanding of cooperative capacities, or knowledge of the cooperative and mutuality tradition.

The research locates itself within the practice of cooperatives formation as a sub-component of the social economy (Amin, 2009). This body of literature therefore contextualises cooperatives as a particular prioritised south african community economic development strategy. There is a long lineage of research and literature around cooperative formation and development, including the early seminal work of Robert Owen’s A New View of Society (1813) or Bernstein’s Evolutionary Socialism: The Economic Capacity of Co-operative Associations (1907). Examples of more recent work would include Gonzales (2010), Levi and Litwin (1986), Majee and Hoyt (2010) and Restakis (2010). Niekerk (1988) is a particular South African example, with his early work providing a foundation for a more recent flourish of studies – ranging from those conducted by more progressive organisations such as the Johannesburg based Cooperative and Policy Alternative Centre (COPAC) (Satgar, 2007; Satgar and Williams, 2008, 2011) through to more economically orthodox organisations such as the south african Foundation, an association of South Africa’s largest corporations (Philip, 2007).

The research brings these literatures together focusing on how community development workers, employed by the state, (thus deployed within a social guidance tradition and ‘seeing like a state’) are forming cooperatives as part of a national sustainable livelihood strategy.


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Community Development and Cooperative Development within South Africa 155

There are boundless contradictions for any state-employed community workers, some of which were considered in the previous chapter. Drawing on a global body of research, similar dilemmas within the interaction between community development and cooperative development have been highlighted by Levi (1986). While arguing that there is high potential complementarity between community development and cooperative formation, he identifies the particular dilemmas of what he calls the ‘process orientation versus task accomplishment dilemma’ and also the ‘structural change versus service delivery dilemma’ (Levi, 1986: 4). for levi, how community development and cooperative formation engage with each of those two dilemmas then leads to four possible outcomes. his analysis provides a model that is a useful departure point for analysing the more recent south african experience, and can best be summarised in the following table, with the four possible outcomes named within the four lower right-hand quadrants:

Table 11.1 Community development and cooperative formation

relationship between community development and cooperative formation

Community development emphasis on:

Process focus: Task accomplishment focus:

Cooperative formation emphasis on:

Structural change:

Potential for mature self-sustaining cooperatives aimed at structural change that reduces social and economic inequality and democratises workplaces

ambitious premature self-management aimed at increasing democratisation of workplace but failing to institutionalise cooperative principles and practices

Service delivery:

Potential for mature self-management of cooperative with limited structural change, albeit providing limited income and/or benefits to members

Premature self-management with limited change, unable to either democratise workplace successfully or deliver any sustainable income/benefits to members

The combination of the process-focus and structural-change emphasis would for many be the ideal type, drawing on both community development’s relational and gradualist practices (process focused) and the cooperative mutuality tradition (Restakis, 2010) which is rooted in emancipatory hopes rather than simply job-creation aspirations.

findings

While many themes emerged from the data analysis, four have been reported on for the purposes of this chapter. They are: state-led community workers as catalysts for cooperative development; a dilemma of statecraft – working within instrumental contexts; the emotional work required of the practitioner; and finally,


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confusing the developmental process. The first theme is reported with appreciative awareness that the interviews, site visits and workshops led to the telling of many hopeful stories of cooperative development. The latter three themes are more critical.

State-led Community Workers as Catalysts for Cooperative Development

Many of the interviewees reported that, with CDWs and CDPs working alongside other crucial state actors, each of whom can provide specific technical support, it is possible to develop cooperatives in a way that is hopeful for members and beneficiaries. For example, the following worker talks about how his/her work has led to cooperative formation:

We’ve also met with SEDA [the Small Enterprise Development Agency] to register as a cooperative – with about 16 young people. Initially we called all the community members and we identified different social groups. We asked at the community meeting which social group do we want to focus on for the CBP [community-based planning]. All the community agreed to focus on the youth. so youth came for three days to cBP. Then we called another community meeting to provide feedback that the outcome was an agreement to form the cooperative. … I will continue to support this cooperative in linking to training institutions (to learn to make bricks …). Also, these young people are frustrated; and I as a CDP need to be accommodating – show there is hope and life. You need to really listen and give advice. You need to resolve conflict so they don’t split, but remain in the organisation. (IS – CDP)

This story explains how a community-based planning process, a technique currently being utilised within the Department of social Development among its community development practitioners, led to the participants identifying young people as particularly vulnerable to unemployment. subsequent engagement with a cohort of young people led to 16 of them joining up to what was then registered as a cooperative enterprise. according to the cDP there are still plenty of issues of support needed – from the ‘hard’ business technical skills, to the ‘soft’ relational ones, such as dealing with conflict among members. What is clear is that the state has taken a lead in the process: first, with state-employed community workers as crucial catalysts of a community planning exercise; second, in ongoing engagement with the identified group of young people; and finally, in supporting the young people to liaise with the relevant government departments to access support. This reported success is reinforced by an excerpt of a second story:

Before a project starts – for example, someone comes with an idea – we firstly analyse and shape up the idea – do the feasibility study (SEDA might help us) – and we, as DSD, identify the stakeholders who can be of use. Then we start


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the process above. The person who had the idea will usually be appointed as a mentor of the beneficiaries. (LH – CDP)

The story again illustrates the complex array of state stakeholders in making a cooperative work. After the community worker identifies a person who has what is potentially a workable idea for an enterprise, they then bring together government stakeholders to consider each of their contributions. Every cooperative visited within this research could have told the same story. a state employee supported them in getting started and then also connected them to other state agencies for particular help. one of the cDWs shared their analysis:

a great achievement is that we have conscientised our community about how government works. People, in the past, have been marching, protesting, but now they know they live in a democracy and need to negotiate. Also a big achievement is we have involved our communities in local economic development, in terms of cooperatives – you can go to any number of communities in the Free State and you’ll find in each municipality co-ops that are working – some funded, others not and behind each and every cooperative you’ll find a CDW. They would have been involved at the beginning. (TM – CDW)

It is a confident statement that behind each and every cooperative there will be the work of a community development worker, indicative of the central catalytic role of both community development and the state in cooperative formation within south africa. such stories are illustrative of the importance of cooperatives within both community-based planning exercises led by the state, and more relational work, whereby a state-employed community worker meets someone with an idea and energy to potentially form a cooperative. Within both stories there are accounts of several crucial government stakeholders that then play an ongoing support. The architecture of a particular kind of statecraft is set in place.

however, such an account of cooperative development only represents one story in the multiple narratives available. While many cooperatives have been established with the support of the state – and on one level my visits to several were inspiring – on another level this research project indicates that there were substantial challenges, such that the architecture of statecraft in relation to cooperative formation might be cracking.

Working within Instrumental Contexts: A Dilemma of Statecraft

Such cracks can be illuminated by reporting on a number of crucial dilemmas facing community workers. While there were several positive stories, such as told above, many community workers also talked about the challenge of whether to focus on real sustainability of community cooperatives or whether to focus on the requirement of reporting to the programme managers in the form of ‘outputs’.


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During interviews and observation, what emerged was a very clear analysis which can best be summed up in the following comment:

When people approach us to start a cooperative, and we support them, the enterprises usually work and are sustainable. But, when we, because we are under pressure to “produce” several cooperatives per year for the programme, and we push people to start a cooperative, they usually fail. (Participant in focus Group – CDW)

another participant also describes the problem:

in the municipality there is a unit called local economic development and when you look at the problem of CDW reporting, the one that gives me most points is when i form a cooperative with women, youth … but it is much harder to form a co-op, it is easier with a smaller group of two people or so. in co-ops usually you have up to 20 people, so it is a good number for the reporting, but hard to sustain. (Participant 6 – CDW)

or on an equally critical note, the same participant explained how:

each year every cDW must submit 12 cooperatives set up by community. i can do that, but the problem is i can’t tell good stories about that. for several reasons, they have not continued – I have tried and failed – because of finance and training – I also do not know how to start and sustain a cooperative. (Participant 6 – CDW)

Within these narratives, echoed by almost all the interviewees and informal discussions, are insights into crucial issues related to the instrumental pressures to form cooperatives as a numerical imperative. cooperatives are considered particularly useful because, if for example there are 20 members of a cooperative, then it can be reported that 20 jobs have been created. cooperative formation is then subjected to the instrumental and political needs of the state and ruling political party, which has staked its legitimacy upon ‘jobs, jobs, and jobs’.

returning to the last narrative, the pressure to deliver 12 cooperatives within a year, each with a potential 20 members equalling 20 jobs can deliver the appearance of 240 jobs. This is an appealing prospect for a government needing to ‘create jobs’ among populations that could be described as surplus to the central formal economy. One worker interviewed, responsible for registering cooperatives, explained that he was registering more than 20 cooperatives per month, but also lamented the ongoing collapse of many of them.

The comments above also provide an insight into the dilemma that kept appearing when interviewing workers. Do community workers focus primarily on sustainability of community initiatives, or do they focus on survival as workers


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and their programme? They sense that their managers really are only interested in reports that affirm outputs, rather than outcomes and impact.

Managing the Emotional Work of Practice

Building on the previous discussion, clearly the reporting/accounting requirements produce a real sense of disappointment about the constant failure of cooperatives – indicating significant emotional work required by the state-employed CD workers/practitioners. Such disappointment was at times also amplified as workers experienced real despair, not wanting to add another layer of failure onto the experiences of the poor – but also felt they had little choice.

one participant told a story of an initiative that unravelled. The story also provides an insight into the emotional work required:

I worked with a group of young people – saying you can’t wait for a job – don’t depend on someone else. I inform them to make a business plan together as a group, a company … Then they started, they called me for their meetings. i had to teach them accounting. The problem i encountered was when a few didn’t do anything, and then the fights started. The group dynamics become a problem if there is no communication – I told them there is no boss – you are all employees and employers, as a cooperative … it didn’t do any good, and then i feel bad that I failed them. I find I have to draw a line and only hold their hands for a small time, and then leave them because there is so much to do. (Participant interview 1 – CDW)

The telling statement is within the very final line – ‘leave them because there is so much to do’. The imperative to ‘deliver’ or at least account for development outputs in terms of quantity becomes more important than attending to, nurturing, sustainable development processes that lead to quality of life outcomes. The practitioner is aware that the tension and resultant way of resolving the tension leads to a feeling of failure: ‘i failed them’, but seems unable to navigate the dilemma or tension in a way that is acceptable to themselves (as a reflective practitioner), the young people (clearly needing some ongoing support in the development initiative) and managers. Such a finding is indicative of the many narratives of community workers. The emotional work required to stay engaged with their community practice is intensified by the organisational and institutional pressures.

A second significant finding in terms of the emotional work required of workers can be discussed in terms of the dilemma of failing to ‘transform mindsets of the people’. Many interviews indicated that state-employed community workers agreed with the ‘official’ government analysis that people had historically been over-reliant on government hand-outs or government funded projects. The official analysis, explained to me on several occasions, was that forming cooperatives is a way of transforming people’s attitudes towards the state, engineering a shift towards self-reliance drawing on business-oriented models of development and


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away from dependence. However, all the workers engaged within this research lamented that with cooperative formation ‘on the ground’ the main shift had been from government hand-outs in the form of government funded projects, to an expectation of government providing contracts to the cooperatives (through social procurement) and/or providing ongoing grants to the cooperatives to ensure salaries could be maintained in the form of stipends. This failure to transform mind-sets was experienced by community workers as frustrating. I heard many community workers share how they were tired because, ‘people here are lazy, they believe government must do it’, or, ‘when things get difficult people just give up’. some had an astute analysis that most people were forming cooperatives, not because they really had a vision, but ‘because they were hungry’, which enabled the workers to engage with care and humility, but the emotional work of seeing constant failure and lack of a mindset transformation, appeared to be undermining worker motivation.

Confusing the Relational Process

Another significant finding from the interviews was how the political and instrumental needs of the state led to confusion about how to catalyse cooperative formation, or any social economy activity, using a relational process (Burkett and Bedi, 2007). The ideological commitment to a collective economic enterprise confused the relational process, imposing onto people a previously designed strategy. Building on the work of Nobel Prize-winning economist Elinor Ostrom and her colleagues Poteete and Janssen (2010) it would seem that the conditions for successful collective action (in their research work referring to managing the commons; in this research project referring to formation of cooperative enterprises) are not in place. One participant talked about the endemic failure of cooperatives, stating that: ‘Every CD worker is meant to produce the outcome of one cooperative per ward. Yet they are all failing’ (TM – CDW).

Some practitioner analysis of these failures was linked to capacity issues – for example, a lack of financial literacy among cooperative members and government officials supporting the cooperative endeavours, but the main problem seems to be a misunderstanding of the delicate nature of nurturing collective action. In reflections on the cooperative enterprises, the assumption embedded within either the community development programme methodology and/or the community development work approach appeared to often undermine relational community practice.

in a nutshell i would describe the problem as confusion about ‘collective from below’ versus ‘collective from above’. Within the former, collective action is an emergent property of the relational and communicative work of building a group (which takes time) and the group together consciously choosing a collective structure, such as a cooperative, with some consciousness of the requirements of being a co-operator.


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some cDPs and cDWs understand this. for example, the same participant as previously quoted stated: ‘if you tell people to set up a cooperative then you have a problem because they don’t have a passion. But sometimes people come to us and say we want to set one up. This is a key – whether the co-op has come from people or not’ (TM – CDW).

‘collective from above’ implies an assumption or ideological belief that people can and will work together if there is an incentive, bypassing the relational and communicative work of group building. Within the narrative above, the CDW refers to this as ‘telling people to set up a cooperative’. The motivation for setting up the cooperative then is primarily state-led (or supply-oriented) rather than community or member-led. or to ground the analysis further, within the research project i asked every member talked to, ‘Why did you set up a cooperative?’ The reply in every case, with the exception of one person (the director of the financial services cooperative), was an approximation of, ‘Because the government told us to set up cooperatives, and that if we did they would provide grants’. The consequence of this was that only a handful of members or even community workers involved, understood anything at all of the cooperative and mutuality tradition. as already discussed, the pressure appeared to be pragmatic, instrumental and political, with the ideology underpinning the use of cooperatives as being two-fold. firstly, that collective action is better than individual; and, secondly, that collective action using cooperatives would lead to shifting people’s mind-sets from government-funded projects to self-reliant businesses.

in contrast, often collective ‘from below’ is either organic, or requires careful and discerning work of bringing people together, ensuring the ‘co-op has come from the people’. Certainly as the previously mentioned work of Ostrom et al. has clarified, putting in place the careful conditions for effective collective work are crucial for success – to bypass this is to ensure failure – echoing what many community development workers within this research were lamenting.

Discussion

Some crucial issues arise from the findings of this study. Firstly, findings indicate that, like comments made by prominent cooperative sector organisation COPAC, there is a potential problem with an approach to cooperative development that is oriented towards the ‘top-down’ logics (that is, building a sector, rather than enabling a movement). Drawing on Levi’s model of community development and cooperative formation interaction, the two south african national community development programmes, located within the constraints of an instrumentally-oriented statecraft, are focused on task-accomplishment and service-delivery emphasis. The lack of attention to process, or simply lack of time available, combined with workers’ lack of understanding of the long lineage of the cooperative mutuality tradition, appears to be undermining gradualist, dialogical and process-oriented work that might lead to stable and mature cooperatives.


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secondly, the narratives also indicate that cooperative formation is framed as job creation – that is, captured within the service-delivery part of the dilemma mentioned above. cooperatives are simply seen as one legal vehicle alongside others within a broader job creation and small and medium sized enterprise (SMME) strategy. Within my research there was never a mention of the importance of developmental work towards cooperatives within mutuality or a social economy tradition, or the significance of cooperatives as a humanising form of economic enterprise (Restakis, 2010). Cooperative formation motivation appears to have become captive to some contradictory logics, between, on the one hand particular ‘neoliberal logics’ (oriented to self-help and market-oriented business); and, on the other hand an intended progressive focus on social state intervention that targets populations who have had little previous role or place within the formal economy (see Ferguson, 2009). Cooperatives as a post-structural vehicle of social and structural change (McMichael, 2010), de-centring capitalist logics, appears to have been thwarted within the south african context.

Thirdly, community development workers are very conscious of what Hoggert et al. (2008) talked about as the ‘dilemmatic space’ of their practice – they are more than aware that there is a contradiction between the imperatives of the state – to ‘deliver’ and create livelihoods versus the realities ‘on the ground’ of actual practice. They have been trained to ‘see like a state’ (Scott, 1998) but are also able to see the problem of the state strategy in situ. Community workers are conscious of the contradictions that emerge as forms of new public management are imposed on both their work and their reporting processes. They are very aware that cooperatives are seen as a way of creating numerous jobs and are therefore very attractive to the state looking to create jobs. Furthermore, one significant consequence of this dilemmatic space is the emotional work required of state-employed community workers. Returning to the findings reported upon, it is clear that several of the workers interviewed and accompanied into the field struggled with the emotional guilt and frustration of setting up cooperatives knowing they were bound to fail due to inadequate inputs such as education, training and market access. Such disappointment was further amplified into despair for some workers, thereby contributing to a moral problem among workers as they struggled to integrate their sense of professional hopes with political and bureaucratic requirements.

Finally, findings indicated that a crucial element of community development, one related to the hopes for process-orientation and structural-change (Levi, 1986), is the capacities of community workers to utilise what is sometimes known as ‘development method’ (Kaplan, 1996; Kelly, 2008). This refers to the capability of a community worker to discern whether an individual person or group is ready in terms of willingness and ability, to cooperate around collective work. To move too quickly in initiating collective work usually leads to an unravelling of a community process: relationships are not strong enough, analysis has not been considered well enough, an individual is too domineering, or groups are not stable. in turn, to move too slowly could mean that momentum is lost, or actions and


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activities become too localised and unable to connect with broader movements tackling international or national forces. What is clear from the findings discussed above is that there is little space for such a discerning approach to method. interviews reveal that while many practitioners were aware of the need for such an approach, even if not named in such a way, their experience of practice was driven more by instrumental pressures to achieve outcomes. Their practice could well be characterised as ‘intervening’ – a process of using their power as public servants, as professionals wielding resources – to make things happen in the short term. There was awareness that there were few long term outcomes – for example, recognition that the cooperatives were failing – but there was little willingness to step back and reflect on the failure of method and structural choices.

Conclusion

in conclusion it could be argued that from a more macro-level perspective one of the dilemmas of the community workers was that most core ‘developmental processes’ of South Africa are being worked out within the class-based struggles represented by centres of power such as mining and agricultural related worker struggles. here endogenous development can be seen at its crux, as south african workers struggle for their fair share of the surplus generated by the capitalist development trajectory of one of the Brics nations. in contrast, most community development work occurs at the margins, among what has been previously described as surplus people or within the so-called second economy. attempts to generate economic or livelihood activity within this peripheral position continues to be highly problematic. The state sees the need to ‘generate jobs’ – the current Zuma led government’s legitimacy rests heavily on its ability to be successful in this endeavour. Seeing like a state then leads to grand plans and hopes for strategies such as cooperative development, located as a subsector of smmes and BEE. However, as per Scott’s original work, this research confirms the dangers of community workers seeing like a state.

from the perspective of previous literature on the subject of cooperative formation, what can also be captured as a crucial gap is illuminated by the story of Father Arizmendi’s work using study circles within the initial years of forming the mondragón cooperative movement. clearly the mondragón cooperative movement of the Basque region of spain is an inspiration to co-operators around the world. However, crucially, some of the unseen work was time invested by the priest/community worker Father Arizmendi who started his community work in the region in 1941, yet only established the first cooperative in 1956. Those 15 in-between years were spent initiating many community ventures, but what was crucial was conducting more than 2,000 study circles on social, humanist and religious topics (Whyte and Whyte, 1991: 29–32). It was in the context of such study circles that the Basques learned how to (re)create themselves as associational people able to cooperate in economic affairs.


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With this in mind the question is left, how do south african state-employed community workers and practitioners – tasked to develop cooperatives within their state-led work, thereby ‘seeing like a state’ – conduct their practices with community members, who have not yet learned the skilful art, craft and practice of cooperation (Sennett, 2012); that is, have not yet developed the capabilities to be co-operators? Surely investment in supporting the cooperative movement to run processes of community-based education and training around this mutuality tradition would pay more long-term dividends than attempting to ‘fast-track’ cooperative formation as a job creation strategy. The interaction between community development practice and cooperative formation requires an additional input of longer-term community-based education and training, stretching levi’s model to a three-fold set of practices that includes: (i) cooperative formation; (ii) community development; and (iii) community-based education. Without the latter there is a good chance the other two processes will fail. This has implications for theorising how to develop cooperatives and also for policy within south africa.

finally, in relation to policy implications the main required reform emerging from this research is an investment in community-based education processes that creates a demand for cooperatives from communities – a demand generated because their role in developing a healthy social economy is understood. This stands in contrast to the current emphasis on what can be characterised as an investment in supply-oriented development, whereby the state provides grants as a means of incentivising the formation of cooperatives.


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chapter 12

Training of community Development Workers within South Africa

Introduction

In his already-mentioned classic book Training for Community Development: A Critical Study of Method (1962: 69), T.R. Batten argues that, ‘training is the key activity of any community development programme’. Following Batten, this chapter considers my research into the training taking place within the South african national community Development Programme. many of the hopes of good community development work are built upon effective training of the workers. To fail in training community development workers (CDWs) is to ensure failure of programmes, albeit training by itself is rarely the solution to programme problems. Programme failure is also related to broader systemic issues, for example, decision-making processes, resources, culture of the organisation and so forth. Despite this caveat, i focus on how current training processes are failing to support the needs of cDWs within the national programme. in articulating these failures some possible ways forward are then discussed.

The Literature: Locating the CDw Programme within the Literature on Training CD workers

in this brief literature review i consider three literatures used in my approach to this component of the research project. The first is related to a literature on large scale nationally-oriented community development (CD) programmes, the second to how practitioners learn, and the third to how we understand training as a concept within educational and learning contexts.

in reference to the literature on large scale community development programmes, Batten (1962) suggests community development is profoundly different to most kinds of development work. Even though community development is intended directly to affect the lives of many ordinary people, it is different to most other development work in that it depends for its success on people’s willingness and active cooperation. It is a field of practice concerned with questions such as how to assist people to take the initiative and how to foster a sense of partnership. Batten (1962: 4) therefore argues that: ‘Planners and administrators of community development have recognised that for their purposes they need a new kind of worker: one who is able to get on well with the common people, knowledgeable


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about their way of life, in sympathy with their hopes and aspirations, and genuinely desirous of helping them’. He further argues that such worker[s]:

… need enthusiasm, good intentions, and liking and respect for people plus a wide range of knowledge and skills. [S]he has to be able to stimulate, educate, inform, and convince people who may be apathetic or sceptical. [S]he has to be able to win the confidence of local leaders, heal their rivalries, and get them to work together for the common good. [S]he has to be skilled in working with groups and whole communities. (ibid.: 5)

Batten also notes that community workers, employed as public servants, are inevitably surrounded by a hierarchy of administration and supervising officers. in the light of this he argues that: ‘… despite an excellent training regime with community development workers little will be achieved if this surrounding bureaucracy is unable to work in an enabling way with the grassroots workers’. (ibid.: 5). This focuses the gaze then on not only the training of community workers, but also on training the contextual stakeholders.

Batten also argues that in community development ‘the people’ are the ultimate authority; they provide the real mandate for a community-based initiative moving forward. if an administrative agency ignores this: ‘… if for example, by pressing too ambitious a programme on its workers, or by expecting them to achieve too much in too short a time, they in turn will be led to press too hard upon the people. They will then lose influence over them and be unable to do really effective work. This problem occurs most acutely in big, nation-wide programmes’ (ibid.: 7).

Furthermore, the chapter builds on the previously mentioned work of Hoggett et al. (2009), who when reflecting on the UK context for community development in 2008–2009, point out that operating in the boundary between the state and civil society has become more difficult for community workers. New liberalism has changed relations between the state and its publics, obscuring the civil sphere and facilitating the substitution of consumerism for citizenship. new public management has instituted a drive for quick measurable outputs from short-term projects within an audit and performative culture. As per the findings and discussion of chapter 10 and 11 these shifts do not support the long-term development goals of communities and amplify many practitioner dilemmas. This literature ensures that the study of the training regime for cDWs is again located within a broader institutional analysis.

More recently, Van Rooyen’s (2007) analysis of key lessons distilled from experiences of international community worker programmes, argued that two of the four key focus areas for effective national community development programmes are within the sphere of learning for workers – initial and continual training, and then ongoing support and supervision. her research indicates that: firstly, training courses should be developed contextually, particularly through incorporating ideas from the specific communities and areas where the work is located (Bhattacharyya, Leban, Winch and Tien, 2001: 22); secondly, some kind of


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Training of Community Development Workers within South Africa 167

training tools and practice opportunities should be developed (Morgan, 2000: 5); and, thirdly, ongoing support and/or in-service refresher courses are essential to reinforce and update the knowledge of the workers. This also assists in their continual professional development. recent research on community worker training within national initiatives identifies the importance of training (Finger, 1999: 3; Friedman, 2002: 175; Morreira, 1999: 14) concluding that this training should be: ongoing (Cruse, 1997: 3); community-based (Bhattacharyya et al., 2001: 22; Mariner, Roeder and Admassu, 2002: 31); problem- and solution-oriented; and draw on an experiential educational process (Finger, 1999: 3).

Prior to establishing community development programmes there is often a lack of people with expertise, either in community development itself, and/or also in training methodologies, resulting in trainers providing training along traditional didactic lines (Batten, 1962: 33). Such didactic lines lead to assumptions such as: the trainer trains and the trainees are being trained – the relationship is one of an instructor (rather than facilitator or provocateur). The instructor is assumed to be competent, and if allowed sufficient time will produce fully-fledged workers. The emphasis is therefore on preliminary or pre-service training. in-service is seen as a desirable ‘extra’ rather than essential, if not the key; members of a training group need the same content – same knowledge and skills, and input is designed into subjects or blocks; the trainer assumes a stance of authority over trainees, seeing themselves as more competent.

Evaluations in the field argue that such training assumptions work for much technically-oriented training: but not for community development training, or at least not human, relational and group dimensions of the work. Studies indicate that the best training consists of: case studies, role playing and direct supervised work experiences; combined with a consciousness that the way a group of trainees work with each other, named by George Lakey (2010) as ‘the container’, was crucial, and; recognition that how trainer models interaction with trainees was indicative. In a sense then the trainer–trainee relationship potentially models a good example of community development practice and the training process then becomes a laboratory for learning.

however, the core lesson from the literature on training community development workers is that ultimately no preliminary training will produce effective workers. firstly, there is never enough time to teach all that is imagined to be important; but secondly, and more importantly, there is a lack of worker experience in the field. nothing done at any preliminary stage can change that. Therefore, what is crucial is in-service training – which enables training to respond to the dynamic and diverse nature of community development. such in-service training can include refresher courses, seminars and workshops, but with a special need to focus on on-the-job training around in situ projects.

The second review of the literature briefly considers what is known about how community development practitioners learn. firstly, it should also be noted that the literature on how professionals build knowledge from practice has a long history, which contests notions that scientific evidence and formal education


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is the best or only way to develop professional knowledge. Building on the conclusions of the first literature review Gilbert Ryle (1949: 41) said, ‘we learn how by practice’. Theory, he said, comes later. Polyani (1967) identified that much practice knowledge is tacit, not easily made explicit, because it is drawn from experiences that are embedded in culture and community. argyris and Schon (1978) raised the interesting problematic that workers espoused theories which were not the theories evident in their practice. They promoted reflection, or ‘double loop learning’, as a means of bridging between what we say we do and what we actually do. In social work, Fook (2000) articulated processes of promoted reflection and reflexivity both to enhance learning from practice and to identify the role of taken for granted social or personal conceptions. Flagging Illich (1973), Lave and Wenger (1991) propose that practice learning may be less an individual, and more a social enterprise, that occurs in everyday settings rather than formal learning contexts. They use the term communities of practice to signal the process of engaging in learning with others in a shared domain of endeavour. i will return to such ideas within the discussion.

finally, referring to the third literature review, i recognise that training is often used within discourses of vocational and workplace training. The focus of such training is often on instruction and the underpinning philosophy is usually a neoliberal political economy – that is, training needs driven by employer needs. in contrast i highlight a literature which provides examples of training being used within the radical tradition – often focused more on democratic and participatory processes. The integration of learning and action within a radical tradition of training has been best articulated in an accessible way to community workers by Hope and Timmel (1984) but was recently reclaimed by Brookfield and Holst (2011). The latter go on to argue that the ‘term training has suffered a downgrading to the point that … many adult educators in North America [and elsewhere] … avoid using the word’ (2011: 66). In tackling this avoidance head on, and as part of reclaiming the radical idea of training Brookfield and Holst take the time to both review the many contemporary narrow definitions of what is generally considered to be training today, and then also overview historical and contemporary examples of training within the radical tradition. for example, they discuss, amongst others:

• The Highlander Folk School with its focus on leadership training and training for citizenship;

• Brazil’s Landless Workers Movement, with its training of people in cooperatives.

In distilling the practices of such a radical training tradition they identified the following key themes:

• Training as the mastery of action (practice) and the mastery of principle (theory) conceived dialectically;

• A central element is affective and relational – building the skills, understanding and confidence of people;


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• A significant amount of training takes place in the actual activities of social movements; it is training in action;

• Training is a mutual relationship where both the trainer and the trainee are trained;

• Training is participatory and democratic in methodology;• Training is not neutral: it is oriented to serving the needs of specific sectors

of society; is attempts to advance social change activism towards a more participatory and democratic society; it is, therefore, as much a political act as it is a pedagogical act (ibid.: 85).

This description of key practices resonates well with my perspective of training, justifying my ongoing use of the term.

findings

A caveat: as stated earlier within this chapter, while focusing this chapter on training I also acknowledge that training is not the solution to many problems facing any community development programme. The major challenges are usually related to broader issues such as organisational capabilities, structures, relationships, context and so forth. an organisation or programme often does not function due to these organisational issues, not training issues.

Confirming this acknowledgement, I found within the research process that even though the focus of this component of the research was on the training experienced or accessed by CDWs they were keen to digress into the broader issues affecting their work including the politics, internal dynamics and the lack of resources that they had to deal with on a daily basis. The issue of training was more my concern than theirs. For example, when talking through some of their concerns, trainees focused continuously on resources – lack of mobile phones, writing material and even pens. This lack of resources impacted profoundly on their morale. They felt unappreciated, uncared for. There was a sense that management was not really responsive to their requests for such support. however, having heard these very real concerns the research instrument still focused on eliciting participants experiences of training.

The Training Programme for CDws

Before discussing findings around the experience of the training, I first focus on findings about the current training programme provided to participants.

The research indicated that once recruited the community development trainees or candidates are initiated into a period of one year on-the-job training. Within the Free State this programme involves working in wards, while also attending five live-in training blocks into which eight training modules were provided by


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a training provider. for example, within the free state community development programme, the training is currently provided by an accredited consultant from limpopo. Within the Western cape the training lasted for one full year with the formal training offered at the university of the Western cape. candidates attended three three-month blocks followed by one-month field placements. The large quantity of trainees was subdivided into district groups. One trainee spoke of between 25 and 30 candidates in her group, manageable for two facilitator trainers assigned to each group.

Within the Western cape a variety of topics are covered including the following: facilitation skill; project management; meeting procedure; how to draft a business plan; communication; computer skills; and how government works. Furthermore, the training modules are situated within the South African national qualification framework (NQF), underpinned by a competency-based training approach. Within the Free State training each of the five blocks of trainings therefore consist not only of eight training modules, but are also broken down into specific unit standards each consisting of explicit learning outcomes.

having completed this programme, trainees ‘graduated’ with a level-four accredited certificate and were able to articulate into public service employees, officially titled Community Development Workers. As employees of the public sector further training is available, not so much in specific community development knowledge and skills, but from courses offered by the normal public service training provider. There is no tailor made in-service community development training. This has been identified as a gap by both co-ordinators of the CDW programme and participants in focus groups and interviews.

A Disjuncture between Training and Practice

Turning now to participants’ experience of the training, a key finding of this research project was that although participants felt initial block training was effective, as soon as they entered the field they experienced a disjuncture between their training experiences and the practice needs in-the-field. This is illustrated in the following dialogue that took place within a Free State focus group:

The training was done by [name] at Qwaqwa and the material which was used, according to my side it was excellent – and anything we have been taught has been excellent. The problem started when we went to the field – it was totally different story – we ask ourselves questions – we have been taught like this, but the practical work is different. (FS #1)

No, I think it did match – it was very good – everything we were taught was what we are doing, but problem is the practice – it is more intense in the real life. (FS #2)


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Both participants are highlighting the disjuncture between workshop/classroom pre-service training and the practice realities. There is no surprise here when we consider the literature reviewed earlier.

A Lack of On-the-job Support: In-service Training

Participant 2 above provides further analysis about the problem of the current training framework that again is workshop/classroom focused. S/he argues that the real problem was a lack of skilled support on-the-job:

We had blocks when we spend five days at school, in an old teaching training college … and then in between we were in our wards alone doing what we were taught. There was no one to help at that stage.

[Interviewer: No experienced community development worker to help you?]

No and it is challenging, because we have to work with [a] ward councillor and ward committees to train them as well. But it was not comprehensive enough – we need more training. i must not say let’s form a cooperative and then i can’t help, and then it fails – then I have failed them. If we only offer promises these people say “these people are wasting our time”.

This participant identifies two areas of training: content issues (in this case about how to set up and support a cooperative) and method (where and when the training should take place). Alluding to the discussion of the previous chapter, in relation to content the CDW feels like a fraud – s/he has been set up to fail in her/his work. S/he must resource others in a way s/he him/herself has not been resourced. furthermore s/he experiences profound despair at ‘failing’ people within the community. In relation to method s/he is arguing that the key failure within the training was not having a ‘trainer’ accompany the worker on the job.

Participants from the Western cape also indicated that there is not a dedicated programme of in-service training for cDWs. Training that does happen is often sporadic with no predetermined schedule or connection to a strategy based on surveyed needs. all cDWs are subjected to a system of performance reviews held on a quarterly basis. These reviews allow cDWs to indicate what their training needs are from a prescribed menu of options, mostly government related, for example, computer skills or labour law. However the frustration develops further when these requests are not followed up in the system, and over the years cDWs have become cynical about this aspect of the performance review process. They continue to fill it in because they have to. From the CDWs interviewed within the Western Cape, some have repeatedly made specific requests regarding training, that have relevance for their performance both individually as well as in team functioning. The following participant noted:


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We choose our training each quarter when we do our reviews, but for 95% of the time, we don’t get what we ask for. For example we did not get Xhosa [language skills] and we are part of a mixed team, so we find that we sometimes don’t understand each other in meetings. (WC #2)

it is clear that cDWs want training, but their ongoing needs are somehow being ignored in the system. It is not clear where the blockage occurs, whether it is their immediate line management or higher up. Such experiences affirm Du Gay’s (1996: 182) analysis that increasingly the responsibility of accessing training is with the CDWs themselves reflecting new public management approaches. My analysis is that also within these bigger bureaucracies performance reviews tend to become rituals without any substance or meaning – just useful in being able to tick off the block on the management checklist. As one CDW put it: ‘[When nothing happens] no explanation is given and we don’t ask’ (WC #1).

Peer Learning

Participants within the research did however argue that, despite the disjuncture between pre-service and available in-service learning and real needs, cDWs were finding ways of learning. One, a young energetic female practitioner, starts to reflect on how people learn in groups, as peers from one another: ‘… although much of what you taught us we learnt, in groups, discussion. some of us are slow learners and don’t understand when you talk or teach them. But if you are in a group we can be on the same level and talk – they understand in this way’ (FS #6).

again, the comment highlights a methodology issue. she is highlighting that while there are formal learning processes – often didactic within large groups – her experience is that most learning takes place within the small group discussions. Other participants also talked about how more learning was taking place informally when CDWs met together in the field and talked about their work, sharing stories/struggles/lessons. The following free state participant discusses how this takes place:

[Interviewer: If you were in a community and you didn’t know what to do where would you turn?]

I’d first talk to my colleagues – we encounter different problems; I’d ask what did they do. We keep contact with colleagues; we get to know each other in the training because we are together. … we meet regularly, every day because we have to move from our ward to the municipal offices to sign in each day. We all meet in the offices. (FS #4)

Her answer focuses on the collegial networks developed which are then the main resources in supporting practitioners in ongoing troubleshooting. This was reinforced by the comments of another cDW: ‘We meet once/month and then we


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discuss and share daily experiences and talk about to deal with problems. We can then tackle issues as a programme’ (FS #7).

Training of Other Stakeholders

The fourth main theme to emerge from the data was related to the need for training of other stakeholders. The following participant comments on the lack of training of other officials whom CDWs are meant to work with, supporting the arguments and conclusions of Batten (1962), as per the literature review: ‘The challenge was in the field – difficult for ward councillors and from other officials from other departments don’t understand our work. But it is better’ (FS #3).

other participants also argued this point: ‘The cDWs have not been popularised – the adverts were popularised, but the CDWs role has not been. Other officials do not know who we are and what we do’ (FS #5).

another participant also goes onto to critique some changes that have occurred within the programme. he argues that:

The other thing I want to highlight – our former public minister – she was concerned about the programme – they jot down the policies needed in this programme, but like politics after she left everything slowed down. We used to have one meeting a year; an indaba – but now three years has gone by and it is has been silent. (FS #1)

Within such a narrative is an understanding of the importance of bringing cDWs together regularly to learn together, share their experiences and distil good practice. according to the participant this used to happen, but no longer and with dire consequences.

Discussion

At best the findings indicate that the initial training regime offered, significantly underestimated what was actually needed on the ground. overall cDWs initially found the pre-service training to be good, but once in the field discovered it was highly inadequate. not learning from over 40 years of literature, the programming of training has made the core mistake of focusing too much on pre-service rather than in-service training. furthermore, the cDW programme has failed to engage successfully in the training of stakeholders relevant to the CDW work – mainly other government officials. Finally, CDWs affirm the need for a strategy of professionalism – one which I will return to in the conclusion. Having summarised the findings I now offer some ways forward.


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Capacity-building and Professional Development

A key finding is the need for the development of more capacity in CDWs as a result of in-service processes of learning, education and training. in many ways i reiterate ideas articulated elsewhere in this book, but take the risk of repeating them here for readers who might only read this chapter. Drawing on recent ‘capacity development’ literature, particularly the work of Ubels et al. (2010: 174–7), and thoughts of the cDWs involved in the research, future directions could include the following practices:

• initiate local-level action research and action learning processes that distil successful good practice at local level and then disseminate such practice through the national programme;

• spread such locally-learned good practice through horizontal learning peer-oriented processes, via local cDWs who have learned good practice. exchanges between wards and provinces would be effective mechanisms;

• Provide responsive and flexible capacity-development support to local CDWs and other involved local stakeholders to adopt new insights and develop better working practices. Such an approach requires not so much rolling out training modules, but freeing such capacity-development practitioners to accompanying local cDWs in understanding their local situation and working contextually. Capacity-building needs to be a process of supporting local cDWs in situ helping them to learn how to navigate the complexities of their daily work;

• Pay significant attention to the changing dynamics and working practices between the different sectors between programmes (of different government departments) and hierarchical levels (within the programme and the auspice department). Such attention requires the building of trust between programmes and levels, one facilitated through and by communication flow (mainly from the bottom-up, rather than top-down), and developing more participatory procedures for planning, budgeting and disbursement.

Of relevance to rethinking the training regime of the CDW programme is Chambers’ (2005: 119ff) more recent work on ‘scaling-up’ participatory practice. Building on his work I also argue that some of the relevant key lessons for the cDW programme include:

• Sticking to a flexible, trainer-friendly menu-oriented curricula rather than ‘falling-back’ upon a manual that prescribes what learning should take place;

• Identifying champions of change who have stuck with the CDW work for some time and who with their historical memory ensure reflective capabilities and some level of continuity of learning;


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• The development of a set of words, sayings and stories that reflect the transformational heart of the CDW work. Facilitator ‘words’ and ‘sayings’ such as ‘hand over the pen’, or ‘hold your agenda lightly’, or ‘start with the people, but don’t stay with the people’, which remind workers about process are important;

• Finally, keeping the training programme ‘on-track’ also requires the ‘hosting’ or coordinating organisation to remain engaged in its own ongoing transformational process ensuring that there is a supportive action learning environment that fosters experimentation, risk-taking, honest reflection, and change.

This last point is built upon within my next discussion.

Creating a Learning Organisation

My reflection on the findings also indicate that the national or provincial department or unit ‘hosting’ the cDW programme needs to be transformed into a learning organisation that enables communities of practice (Lave and Wenger, 1991) to thrive. such a learning organisation could be fostered in the following ways.

firstly, the policy arm of the relevant department could generate two to three key national level action-research questions that create a framework for discussion amongst districts and provincial offices. For example, the kinds of questions that seem pertinent would be:

• What is the key niche or contribution of the CDW programme within the complex nexus of other community-based and sector-oriented initiatives?

• What is a typology of practice that distinguishes the different activities CDWs are involved in facilitating?

secondly, a learning facilitator could be appointed within each area (possible a percentage of time from a supervisors existing role) whose role would be to strengthen what appears to be happening informally, through facilitating activities such as: creation of a buddy system among workers; monthly round-table discussions among groups of CDWs – with the goal of distilling good local-level practice and also thinking through the proposed national action-research questions; and, documenting with cDWs case studies of initiatives that have failed and succeeded and again, distilling the contributing factors.

finally, there should be a process of creating incentives for cDWs who demonstrate reflective practice, rather than focus simply on reporting numerical outputs and outcomes.


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Conclusion

south africa has not had a history of large-scale training or education of community development workers. The CDW programme is a key government initiative that can act as a catalyst for developing such educational initiatives. This is currently starting to happen with the development of the new national Community Development Policy Framework, and also an approved national qualification framework for community development.

Drawing on the literature, my experience and the research findings, I have therefore argued for a more carefully designed reform of the cDW training regime, focused primarily on: capacity-building of cDWs as a core focus of in-service training and finally the integration of such capacity-building into reimagined institutional contexts that need to be primarily thoughts of as a learning organisation rather than a ‘programme host’.

Reiterating the key issues highlighted in the 1960s by Batten, the ongoing processes of in-service training, technical expertise/support and close supervision seem to be low on the agenda of the cDW programme. such processes need to be carefully rethought as per the kinds of suggestions I have offered, recognising that such processes need to be complemented within a more integrated process of institutional change and integration.


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conclusion

This book attempts to answer the three main research agendas posed in the Introduction; the first two to do with an appreciative and critical ‘reading’ of community development within south africa, and the third to do with theorising practice. Those agendas were pursued through the guiding research questions:

1. how are the poor organising themselves using various forms of community development? Or in some cases,

2. how are the state or other non-state actors attempting to organise, engage or accompany the poor through community development?

3. how is the practice of community development theorised inductively, drawing on answers to the previous questions?

It is my contention that the first two questions have been mainly accounted for within the body of the book. The chapters on traditions, frameworks, NGO-led community work, and state-led community development provide the reader with a sense of what is going on within the field. It is a limited reading, recognising that many other stories of practice could have been analysed and many other interpretations could have been provided.

read together appreciatively these accounts of community development should lead the reader to conclude that the miT professor referred to within the Introduction chapter was talking nonsense. Clearly community development has a useful role to play within the lives of many people within south africa. however humble its contribution to social change, community development does have a role.

critically of course it would also be obvious to the reader that the way in which community development has been deployed within south africa is at times problematic. The latter chapters particularly focus on such issues, for example through the discussions about: community development fostering cooperatives as being marginal to the central endogenous development processes at work within south africa; the instrumental use of community development to serve government policy agendas; and, the political and programmatic dilemmas faced by practitioners. extending a critical perspective could also permit a more considered understanding of the conditions within south africa that have produced a ‘ripe moment’ for community development’s revival. for example, why is community development so popular at this historical moment within South Africa? Why is the state supporting the institutionalising of community development – within programmes, universities, professions – at this time? Again, a more appreciative


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genealogical study might infer that the state, as the key instrument of emancipatory practice, needs skilled practitioners. However, a more critical reading might alternatively argue that community development as deployed at least by the state, and also potentially by ngos, is useful within this moment of neoliberal peace (Tschirhart, 2011). In this sense community development feeds into the state’s needs for the poor to become self-reliant, to ‘stand up’ on their own feet, to be resourceful (rather than resourced), and also to participate in government consultations. Within this ‘reading’ community development is part of Duffield’s development-security nexus that deploys a model of social development which has no hope of shifting the structural problems facing the poor, but at least provides a measure of development and security. There is a socio-economic dimension as per the state’s goals around sustainable livelihoods and cooperatives; and there is also the political-security dimension as community development is deployed within a regime of governance or governmentality, as per local government participation processes. As a final comment related to these first two research questions I would like to suggest that over the next few years studying the social and political conditions that allow statements and pronouncements that attain the status of ‘truth’ and ‘common sense’ about community development within south africa will need to be invested in. my holding to an appreciative stance on community development does not allow a blinkered view to dominate the way in which power is deployed could be left unanalysed.

This main body of this concluding chapter however focuses on the third key research question, which in turn alludes to the title of the whole book. It also links back to the discussion of Chapter 1 about how theorising and practice are understood. As an inductive process I draw on both the framework set up within that chapter and also the kinds of lessons learned and conclusions about practice distilled within each chapter of the book. Contextualised by James Dunne’s work, numerous lessons can be learned about practice from the iterative study of this research project – emerging from the dance between my own perspective/horizon and also the data collected/interpreted.

In summary this theory of practice consists of four dimensions: firstly, that community development is a practice; secondly, that it is helpful to imagine community development practice as immersion in an ‘event’ or/and ‘story’; thirdly, that community development practice requires a particular kind of practitioner ‘practice wisdom’; and fourthly, there are a particular set of community development practices distilled from the inductive study. each is now discussed in turn.

Community Development as ‘a Practice’

firstly, i argue that community development within south africa, whilst many things, is also a practice in the sense that is defined by Dunne (2011: 14). Community development is, as he puts it, when defining a practice, ‘a more or


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Conclusion 179

less coherent and complex set of activities that has evolved cooperatively and cumulatively over time, and that exists most significantly in the community of those who are its practitioners’ (ibid.: 14). Community development within South Africa clearly has a history, that is, as a field of practice it has evolved cooperatively and cumulatively over time. There is also a degree of coherence, despite contestations related to what I have called different traditions and frameworks of community development. however, there is an emerging community of practitioners, as evidenced by gatherings at community development workshops and conferences.

it is also possible to argue that this ‘emerging community’ of community development workers is ‘committed to sustaining and developing its internal goods and its proper standards of excellence’ (ibid.: 14). Such a definition of practice fits south african community development well, alluding to a long lineage of practice that has accumulated particular knowledge and skills, and is also constructing various forms of ‘communities of practice’ such as associations, standard bodies, networks, and professional bodies. Drawing on the research accounted for within this book it is clear that community development workers within South Africa, to various degrees, are engaged in practice that fits the kind of definition above.

Again drawing on the framework discussed in Chapter 1 and reflecting on the south african situation, there are clearly internal goods to the practice alluding to at least two things. firstly, there are the internal goods related to the ‘desirable outcomes characteristically aimed at through a practice’ (Dunne, 2011: 14). Distilled within this research monograph and related to community development, these desirable outcomes include: collective processes of social change aimed at educational, economic, political, cultural or social changes; increased capacities for a group; further rights achieved; and projects initiated to the satisfaction of the participants. Secondly, there are the kinds of internal goods that ‘reside within the practitioners themselves’ (ibid.: 14), such as the competencies of a community worker, and also the virtues of the kinds of practitioner required (such as patience, humility, delicacy, tenacity and care).

for Dunne, while such internal goods are the constitutive core of a practice, there are also external goods – mainly to do with pay, standards, recognition or what i have previously called the ‘architecture of the profession’ (Westoby and Shevellar, forthcoming). Within South Africa there are energetic processes committed to establishing this architecture – through the formation of a national occupational category, the ongoing endeavours to develop a national association of community development, the establishment of university-based community development degrees and certificates and so forth.

it should also be noted that at its best, the external goods, or institutional structures of community development, can serve the practice’s internal goods. however, often there is substantial compromise as the former colonises the latter. This can be seen within the analyses provided within chapters 10–12. Within South Africa this remains an open question as both the internal goods are clarified and strengthened and the external goods are constructed and institutionalised.


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Community Development Practice as Immersion in an event or story

Secondly, reflecting appreciatively and critically on what I have seen, heard and read about in this research project i have concluded that community development can most helpfully be imagined as an event or story. in a nutshell, from this perspective community development is not what happens, but is something going on in what happens. So to think of community development as an ‘event’ is to think of something that is trying to happen in something. This event or story-like dimension of theorising community development also alludes to what can be understood as the ‘fabric’ of the practice. in a sense, my argument is that community development occurs not necessarily when the notion of community development is evoked. In other words, community development is not necessarily directly linked to, nor confined nor conjured up by the proposition that ‘we are doing community development’. Often the official programmes or projects observed within this research did not live up to the claims being made. however, as i sat and listened to people involved i could discern transformations. so, instead i argue that transformational work occurs in, or besides or even beneath community development work. My observation of the work accounted for within this book is that practitioners attentive to practice need to remain curious about what is going on in these in, beneath or besides spaces of official community development work.

In taking this approach I am also referring to what cannot be captured by evidence-based approaches to practice. such fabric includes the ‘volatile combinations of human passions and motivations’ (Dunne, 2011: 21). In a sense, the skilled community practitioner is not, through practice, imposing on any social situation a design, so much as, intervening in a field of forces; or immersing her or himself in a medium in which she or he seeks to bring about some transformation. in such intervention or immersion, the practitioner is always responding to something that is already going on, and exposed to the play of chance and vagaries of timing, needs adaptability and a talent for improvisation (ibid.: 21).

Grounding this in community development work, the kind of fabric I am discussing refers to the countless number of ways in which people in a community or neighbourhood might be open, indifferent, or resistant, to what a community worker is trying to animate. The community worker has to confront, or at least engage with myriad individual and collective ‘tempers’ (and temperaments), along with the complexity of visible and invisible forces at work (material, political, psychological, discursive). What needs to be captured when thinking about ideal practice is the infinite complexity of the community development situation (Mowles, 2013), of the fluctuating forces at play, and hence the dynamic generative or degenerate trajectory that is possible. Indeed, a community worker, haunted by the spectre of failure, can only really succeed when their intervention or immersion has the character of what Dunne calls, and i amplify, as an ‘event’ (Dunne, 2011: 21), through which people’s attention and energy is drawn into some emergent process whereby they themselves gain new insights, skills and authority.


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Conclusion 181

related to the idea of fabric the community development event is also a ‘story’ (Dunne, 2011: 21–2). In a sense, engaging in a community development process is to enact a story. A community worker, along with the people involved, each become characters, responding or reacting to incidents and episodes, and together either create a ‘narrative thread’ that holds an initiative together, or alternatively fails to, with energy and vision dissipating (Westoby and Kaplan, 2013: 10). Hence, as per my reflections on theory, every piece of community development practice is contingent on the event/s and story, and in a sense can only be understood, like most narratives, retrospectively. The variables that make a ‘success story’ can never be clearly identified. Eventfulness is inevitable, which in a sense highlights the dialogical nature of all community development practice – that is, the interaction between practitioner and context, with both being (re)shaped by the practice itself – requiring the responsive dance referred to below.

Community Development Practice as ‘Practical wisdom’

Thirdly there is a dimension of community development practice best understood as ‘practical wisdom’. Within a reimagining of community development practice as story or event, discussed above, the community development practitioner cannot fall back on propositions. They need to embrace the notion of practical wisdom within community development. community development practical wisdom requires the ability to recognise situations as somewhat typical, that is, a community development situation that has been met before and for which there is some kind of method, or already established ‘way forward’; or the opposite – that the situation is not typical – but that the practitioner is capable of responding adequately and appropriately. in doing this there is recognition that every situation needs to be respected in its particularity, but at the same time, recognition that the practitioner (with wisdom) is able to, ‘bring this particularity into some relationship, albeit one yet to be determined, with the body of [community development] knowledge … one’s adeptness then lies then in the capacity to mediate between the general and the particular’ (Dunne, 2011: 18). This in turn requires the capacity to engage each and every situation with fresh creative insight, knowing that context is always reshaping any kind of response; and recognition that such a way of responding requires a radical openness that ‘allows one’s experience to be quickened by new learning so that one develops finely discriminating judgement’ (ibid.: 18). In doing this there is a receptivity to the salient moment, knowing that receptivity might ‘call for a high level of imagination and emotional engagement by the self’ (ibid.: 19), which in turn acknowledges that judgement in the moment is also a confluence of both the personal and professional – that is, expressive of the kind of person as well as kind of practitioner that one has become.

finally, there is awareness that community development practice is often actually more about ‘artistry’ (Schon, 1983; Harding, 2013; Kaplan, 2002) than about design; and that this artistry is recognised as an embodied responsiveness


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(Westoby and Kaplan, 2013). Therefore practice becomes the ability to ‘skilfully dance the dance of relationship, being present and responsive to other, context and history’ – yet also be intuitive, empathic, careful, thoughtful, creative, playful and disciplined (Westoby and Kaplan, 2013).

Community Development Practices

The fourth dimension of this theorising of practice draws on the findings and discussion of many of the chapters of this book, but describes them in terms of actual ‘practices’. Again, this nudges the practitioner to not think in terms of propositions but in terms of the interplay between theory and context described above. i have described this in previous writing drawing on richard sennett’s work, as being like the practice of playing jazz – a musician has to become technically proficient, but that alone does not make a good jazz player. The practices get inside the jazz player and are drawn out or evoked in a context of resonant exchange. Within this framing, community development, conceived as an event or story, requires a practitioner to immerse themselves responsively into the context. in this immersion they are drawing on practical wisdom as discussed above, but are also drawing on tried and tested practices that can also be understood as performatives – as ‘doings’ that can evoke resonance or possibility of change, as hoped for within community development work. Within this book some of the identified practices include:

• understanding the significance of time in community work;• foregrounding observational skills – ‘to see what the people see’;• applying the wisdom, ‘start anywhere, go everywhere’;• nurturing cooperative leadership, conceptualised technically as 0–1–3;• fostering group analysis via dialogue;• building analysis ‘beyond where people are at’;• understanding the practitioner role as accompanying, and the corresponding

‘delicate relationship’ between practitioner and other characters in the event/story;

• drawing on an action-learning and action-research approach;• enhancing emotional capacities;• providing ongoing support, training and organisational development with

the goal of institutionalising a learning organisation;• utilising the practices of community-based education/training and horizontal

learning;• structuring the work for sustainability;• drawing on a co-creative approach to community–state relations;• recognising the trade-offs within scaling-up and scaling-across;


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Conclusion 183

• understanding the dilemmatic space of practice, becoming politically literature in complex political and instrumental spaces and enhancing reflective navigational capabilities.

These practices simply allude to a sample of community development practices that were distilled from the stories researched and accounted for within this monograph. There are many more, but they are indicative of the kinds of work required of a reflective community development practitioner.

Conclusion

South African community development workers, if willing to engage with the resources at hand – stories, associations, networks, journals, colleagues and so forth – can be a part of a vibrant ‘community of practice’. They can afford to feel as though they are on pretty solid ground, being part of an emerging community development ‘practice’. To associate with the practice and immerse themselves within a community of practice are two crucial elements in the journey of developing the practice wisdom and practices that are important for transformational work. equipped in these ways they can throw themselves enthusiastically into the fray of community development events and stories, playing their role as accompanier, enabler, catalyst, mobiliser, educator, enabler, guide and so forth. aware of their tradition/s of practice, building their practice framework, they will be/come powerful agents of social change within south africa.

it is my hope that this monograph contributes to the development and support of such practitioners. It is a dream that this researched resource – bringing together stories, historical perspectives, theoretical concepts, empirical analysis, and reflective biography – helps in that supportive process.


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