What makes community development effective? How can we ensure that this work is responsive to the decolonial turn, the call for effectiveness and the need for justice?
Highlighting useful practice frameworks for community development workers - both citizens and professionals - to navigate an increasingly uncertain world, Does Community Development Work? calls for a new quality of reflection and reflexivity. It sets out a post-structural, deconstructive and decolonizing perspective on community development.
Grounded in stories of South African history and community development practice - dealing with issues such as housing, land, cooperatives, education, community protests and urban farming - this book combines story, conceptual insight and theoretical discourse. These detailed stories present a wonderful illustration of the global and South African history of community development.
The book concretizes the vision of several notable individuals including Steve Biko, Mahatma Gandhi, Es'kia Mphahlele and Neville Alexander, whose writings and actions contributed to community development practice.
Table of contents
PART I
2. The South African context: The double story
3. Where we are coming from
4. Community development effectiveness - how do we know we know?
PART II: INTENTIONS AND IDEAS
5. Reaching for a social reconstruction tradition
6. Reconstructing frameworks for practice
PART III: AN ASSEMBLAGE OF STORIES AND POSSIBILITIES
7. Accompanying, horizontal learning and structuring: political practice and the Southern Cape Land Committee
8. Action learning and research, food security and Abalimi Bezekhaya
9. Staged place-based community development and the Hantam Community Education Trust
10. From marginalisation to destiny: anger, violence and community protest in South Africa
11. Informal housing and community development: A historical and human rights approach
12. 'Seeing like a state' and neo-colonial cooperative development within South Africa
13. Interlude: In dialogue with Es'kia-the decolonial turn
14. In conclusion: Promissory reflections
Peter Westoby has been involved in development practice for over thirty years, working as a grassroots practitioner, facilitator and scholar in diverse contexts such as Australia, PNG, the Philippines, Vanuatu, India, South Africa and Uganda. He is currently Associate Professor of Social Science and Community Development at Queensland University of Technology, Australia, and a Visiting Professor at the Centre for Development Support, University of the Free State, South Africa.
Lucius Botes is a professor in development studies and the director of research development in the Faculty of Economic and Management Sciences, at North-West University (South Africa) and a director of the Karoo Development Foundation and he acts as a development and research consultant to international and national organizations, government departments and companies, and is a director/trustee of various NGOs.
