Download Theorising the Practice of Community Development: A South by Peter Westoby PDF

By Peter Westoby

ISBN-10: 1472423097

ISBN-13: 9781472423092

According to 25 years of group improvement perform, six of that have been lived in South Africa, Peter Westoby's ground-breaking monograph strikes clear of dominant normative money owed of group improvement to supply an appreciative and demanding research of concrete examples of neighborhood improvement idea and perform. by way of interpreting neighborhood improvement tales as skilled at the flooring, Westoby is ready to exhibit how the terrible are establishing themselves utilizing quite a few sorts of group improvement in addition to demonstrating how the nation and non-state actors try to organise, interact or accompany the terrible via group improvement. The e-book additionally breaks new flooring in theorising the perform of group improvement, drawing inductively from the tales analysed. the variety of South African contexts and the proliferation of other forms of group perform, make this a highly tricky activity. regardless of this, Westoby argues it's one worthy venture given the seriousness of the demanding situations dealing with the negative and innovative social switch brokers inside of South Africa. during this venture, Westoby attracts upon a different analytical framework to assist light up present group improvement coverage and programme demanding situations, in addition to perform dilemmas and knowledge.

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Additional info for Theorising the Practice of Community Development: A South African Perspective

Sample text

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.

For example, Wittgenstein (1976: 41) argues that, ‘[inexact] does 26 Theorising the Practice of Community Development 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.

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.

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