by Gary Craig
| ABSTRACT Community development is often thought of as an essentially local approach to problem-solving. With the globalization of the economy, and the emergence of transnational organizations concerned with social and/or economic issues, community development needs to rethink its approach to incorporate a global dimension. This paper sets out some of the parameters for that debate, reflecting both on how global processes affect local communities and ways in which community development workers can make use of global mechanisms. |
I want to take this opportunity to reassess the relationship of community development to other forms and levels of social and political action, particularly at a time when poverty is growing in extent and depth in every country of the world; and to reflect on the significant global economic, ideological, political and social processes of which we must take account in thinking about the place of community development.
First, there has been a remarkable growth in interest in the concepts of community and community development at local, national and international levels. It is not unreasonable to ask whether concepts which appear to derive support from such a wide range of actors mean very different things. This ideological confusion permeates the use of many important concepts. On the political right, for example, those who argue for rolling back the boundaries of the state do so allegedly in the pursuit of individual freedom; on the left, those arguing for the empowerment of the poor also claim this as the route to freedom.
These different political projects have quite distinct implications for community development. For example, in the UK, at local government level, there has been a remarkable growth in the number of city councils developing anti-poverty strategies (Alcock et al., 1995), to address the growth of local poverty consequent on central government's economic and social policies. This anti-poverty work is often underpinned by a concern for community development and the participation of the poor. Most of these local councils are now Labour-controlled, run in opposition to policies of recent governments - the local state moving in where the central state has moved out - although their scope for ameliorative action is limited by very tight financial controls imposed by central government. This concern with community participation might be thought of as admirable but more cynically it might also be regarded as merely another means by which cuts in essential services are hidden behind a rhetoric of voluntarism and community involvement: self-help can mean the route for democratic participation in decision-making, as on the political left, but it can also mean social services on the cheap (as on the liberal right). Each UK national political party is attempting to seize the moral high ground, presenting itself as the party of family and community, claiming the language of empowerment as part of its ideological heritage. The right-wing UK economic think-tank, the Institute of Economic Affairs, demands that the Conservative Party identify a sense of community that is compatible with individual freedom (Green, 1995), this from a party whose Prime Minister told us a few years ago that "there is no such thing as society". The Labour Party currently espouses the communitarian ideas of Etzioni who argues that "a good society is one in which people live freely, take responsibility for themselves, their families and their communities, and solve most problems at the level of the neighbourhood and household" (Anderson and Davey, 1995). On the face of it, this sounds like a political programme which would be strongly supportive of community development. Seen from another perspective, however, as the latter commentators go on to argue, comrnunitarianism gives social democratic parties a package which, in the face of mass unemployment about which they can do little and a welfare state which they increasingly regard as unsustainable, "is classless ... attractive to conservatives and compatible with economic austerity". For yet others, it apparently offers a middle way forward from both the failures the free market and overpatronizing welfare bureaucracies.
The attraction of communitarianism thus appears to lie in its ability to satisfy a wide range of political agendas. Yet all this rhetoric emerges at time when, as Mayo (1994) notes, "there has been official support for community participation and community development from international agencies through to government and local government organisations.. but . reductions... in aid to precisely the types of community organisations that have been mobilising self-help efforts." When moral and political agendas of right, left and centre appear to be merging, when all kinds of political parties can speak of their commitment to empowerment, freedom and self-help, it is all the more necessary to observe that our global context is characterized by ideological confusion.
A reassertion of the ideological basis of community development is as urgent a task in very many other countries as it is in the UK. Certainly within the European Union, whose raison d'être remains dominated by economic rather than social development, there has been a continuing debate about the real meaning of community development and its place within strategies to combat poverty. The Council of Europe's Charleroi declaration argues that "the main thrust of the fight against poverty should be directed at the community life of the poorest sections of the population rather than at the reinforcement of social aid arrangements which alleviate the effects of poverty but do not tackle the causes of precariousness." It went on, "not until poor people truly participate in our economic, legal and education systems will poverty have ceased to exist", and to argue that "the recognition of the right to participate in decision-making is a necessary precondition for basic human rights" (Yeates and Conroy, 1993). It is encouraging that many countries continue to support anti-poverty work based on community development principles (Imig, 1996). Yet we have to recognize that these initiatives compete both financially and ideologically with right-wing and often authoritarian perspectives to offer solutions to social and economic disintegration. The task of ideological clarification is also just as urgent in such countries as South Africa which are attempting to build an inclusive national community development policy for the first time.
The Charleroi declaration could as easily have emerged from within the arena of international development and particularly from those NGOs which have, in their praxis, done much to challenge the alleged efficacy of the "trickle-down" theory of development. However, in this global arena, too, one can find quite contradictory understandings of the meaning of community and community development reflecting very different political and economic agendas. Alongside NGO aid agencies, the more formal UN supranational agencies also demonstrate an apparently increasing interest in strategies to promote community participation as a means of enhancing the development process. The Brundtland Commission (WCED, 1987) argued that one of the main prerequisites of sustainable development is "securing effective citizen's participation" and the Human Development Report (UNDP, 1993) commented that, in the face of current challenges for development, "people's participation is becoming the central issue of our time." Even the World Bank, better known for its fiscal conservatism than for its social and political risk-taking, has argued that community participation can be a means for ensuring that Third World Development projects reach the poorest in the most efficient and cost-effective way [although, reverting more to character, it expects the poorest to share the costs of development as well as its benefits! (Paul, 1987)].
Organizations such as the Community Development Journal, which has been arguing the virtues of community development since 1965, can, with some justification, be sceptical of this almost revivalist "community" rhetoric. We need to explore and expose the real agendas of the many organizations and individuals which now claim "community" for their own. To what extent, for example, are they concerned with social justice, with respecting the dignity and humanity of all, with their right to participate in decisions which affect them, with mutuality, or equality? Or are they in reality, for example, advocating community development as a means "helping people to adapt their way of life to the changes they have had imposed on them" by wider economic and political forces little concerne with their needs and desires? A clear, and highly ideological, task for those of us who are committed to community development, in our public, professional and private lives, is to argue for a view of community development which is not hijacked by those supporting very different political agenda: for the promotion of a view of community development based on tolerance and human dignity, on needs and not greed, on creative inter-dependence rather than destructive competition.
The ideological confusion described above has sprung in part from the collapse of the East European political regimes. Right-wing ideologues have enjoyed a period of political triumphalism, claiming that socialism was dead, that the inherent superiority of capitalist forms of economic organization had been demonstrated for all time and even that history, in terms of competition between different ideologies, had come to an end. As the dust has settled round the events of the late 1980s, it has become clear, to paraphrase Mark Twain, that rumours of the death of collective solutions to social and economic problems have been exaggerated.
A second parameter to consider is the globalization of economic power. This of course is not a new phenomenon, indeed Boyer and Drache (1996) argue that "the internationalisation of economic activity has not changed dramatically from the time when Great Britain was the leading global power" at the end of the last century. However, it is apparent that the consequences of economic decisions are felt more quickly than ever by increasing numbers of those who do not take the decisions, and indeed who may be thousands of miles from where the decisions are taken. To paraphrase another economist, one person supplying capital from thousands of miles away may decide to dismiss thousands supplying labour from a mile away. It is a truism that change is happening more rapidly than ever but the costs and benefits of social and economic change are unevenly distributed and the globalization of economic power represents not a more equal sharing of that power but an increasingly unequal concentration of power, particularly in the hands of those, such as the fixers of financial markets, who have no democratic mandate. It is a telling reflection of the speed of economic change that a British civil servant recently defined a permanent job as one which lasted more than six months!: compare that with the stories of both my grandfathers who each retired only a generation ago, having worked for one employer, the railway company, for all their working lives. Community workers are often called on by government to contribute to the peaceful management of the process of economic change but our task is patently not to help people adjust to the insecurity and fragmentation of their lives but give voice to their own needs and aspirations above the clamour of communities being disrupted and factory gates being closed. It is to argue for different kinds of economic change, in the interests of those most affected by poverty and insecurity.
I was, in the mid-1970s, part of what was probably the most well-resourced UK anti-poverty programme. In our community, there was a run-down factory owned by a multinational engineering company. This led to a local perception that the company also was in decline. Literally overnight, with a single decision to close that factory, Vickers disinvested more from that local community than we, in our relatively large-scale community development project, were able to put in over a period of ten years. Not only this, but as we explored the reasons for the factory closure and attempted unsuccessfully to prevent it, we came to understand that Vickers had a corporate global economic strategy, dependent on investment in low-wage areas and on the summary abandonment of ageing and unprofitable capital and human resources. Modest local community work aims of supporting a few workers back into the labour market were overwhelmed by the consequences of one globally determined econornic decision. Our political response, as community workers, together with other community workers faced with similar decisions in the motorcar, shipbuilding, property and telecommunications industries elsewhere, was to support the building of international alliances between groups of workers (and, where possible, with local residents) within the companies at different sites, giving the workforce an international countervailing voice (Craig, Mayo and Sharman, 1979). That continues to be an important role for community development, aided by the growth of global communication. Our experience highlighted also the need for community workers to draw local communities into the research process, so that local strategies are increasingly informed by an understanding of the local or global sources of their poverty and exploitation (Nelson and Wright, 1995).
This story of the unequal way in which local communities bear the costs of industrial change is a familiar one to anyone working in the more industrialized West in the past twenty years. Now, as a measure of the increasing rate of change, some of these low-wage areas are themselves beginning to face the consequences of economic restructuring as companies move on again: ironically, much of the recent economic growth within the UK has been to do with the movement of multinationals back into the UK, seeing it correctly after years of political attacks on organized labour as an even lower-wage area with a compliant workforce. As Conrad Russell also observes, the global market is in part a free market in jobs - jobs (that is, capital rather than labour) which will move wherever the lowest wages are to be found.
Along with the globalization of economic power, we also have to confront the ideological hegemony of the free market, as the apparent solution to all economic ills. This may appear to be a daunting task. The collapse of what was caricatured as "the evil empire" was anticipated, by those who welcomed the political demise of communism, as offering the possibility of widespread economic growth and prosperity for all. The reality of the so-called "free market" is of increasing numbers of people in poverty, of social division and exclusion. Thus, despite the enormous ideological traffic into East Europe which claims that "the market knows best", there is growing awareness east of the Danube that the unmitigated liberal capitalist route did not offer prosperity for all but, rather, growing social and economic division. In Hungary, for example, as Tausz (1990) has argued, the most obvious consequences of the emerging market economy for ordinary Hungarians were growing unemployment and homelessness. Perhaps even more sharply the former East Germany, unification with its overarching emphasis on competition and individualism, has brought with it a fear that the security of a state-sponsored helping culture (however bureaucratic and corrupt) would be undermined (Chamberlayne, 1995) and that their poor would effectively underwrite the higher living standards of their newly united Western co-nationals.
This understanding is echoed in other contexts. Rahman (1995) argues from his perspective in Bangladesh that the end of the Cold War took "the pressure off global and national vested interests to make any serious pretence towards socio-economic development to promote the well-being the masses" in the poorer countries. Rahman argues not for a return to the Cold War but for the development of systems of political and economic organization where social needs are no longer subordinated to the ability to pay, and which are driven neither by competition between world powers nor by the self-interest and greed of the market. "Whatever the Russian people may have thought about the political project of communism, it is clear their present disenchantment stems from a grounded appraisal of the ecomically and socially divisive consequences of market solutions. As Hobsbawm (1996) puts it, "in much of the ex-socialist world, the backlash against the market brings back into politics those who wish the state to return social responsibility". In the meantime, the ultimate "triumph" of the market is captured by Moscow assuming simultaneously the mantle of illegal market, mafia and crime centre of the world and by the economic "tigers" of the East becoming noted more for their contribution to sex tourism.
Mayo and I have argued elsewhere (Craig and Mayo, 1995; see also Latouche, 1993) that the failure of free markets to deliver significant benefits to other than a minority of the populations which they cover is indeed a global issue, that it is precisely "free market approaches to development that have been at the root of increasing poverty and social exclusion in both the North and the South and that the associated strategies of structural adjustment, [so vigorously pursued by the World Bank and its associated agencies], have been exacerbating the problem of unmet needs within the poorest countries." It is not possible to discuss this in detail here, although wherever you turn you may hear the kind of analysis put forward by George (1996) or French (1996) in relation to Jamaica, that "structural adjustment and liberalisation have wreaked havoc in so many communities"; that women in particular have often survived "only through resorting to petty vending, migration or prostitution" (or all three, as in Africa, SE Asia and Central America); and that, as Oxfam reports, secure employment has been undermined, over half employment in Latin America now being casualized compared with only 11% ten years ago. where structural adjustment, driven through by the political Right, has been supported by local military repression, political citizenship itself has been under threat.
However, we go on to show that across the world, local community and political opposition is growing to structural adjustment policies with their consequences of increased, and unequally shared, hunger and poverty. The "trickle-down" theory of economic development, described memorably by Galbraith (1992) as "if you feed enough oats to the horses, some will pass down the road for the sparrows", is now also widely discredited and not only, I think, in the eyes of the sparrows. Ironically, the free market model suggests a declining economic role for the state: in fact, in all major economies including the USA and the UK, state expenditure increased over the past 20 years as a proportion of GDP even where there has been a strong emphasis on the privatization of formerly state-run enterprises.
The failure of the free market to deliver a world corresponding to the vision of community development is powerfully demonstrated in the recent experience of the UK. Since 1979, the UK has had a succession of conservative governments committed, in the economic sphere, to the pre-eminence of market forces facilitated by a small, but focused, political structure, the combination Gamble (1994) has characterized as the "Free Economy and the Strong State". Despite the rhetoric of "rolling back the frontiers of the state", we have, however, experienced the most strongly interventionist state in recent memory in order to create the conditions for a so-called "free" market. Thatcher"s liberal experiment has been adapted by other European governments and, more recently, in New Zealand. There, Labour's structural adjustment programme in the late 1980s led to soaring unemployment and a dismantling of the welfare state. New Zealand's flirtation with uncontrolled market economics now leaves it with its own social corollary, the highest suicide rate within the OECD. The Federal Australian government now looks set to follow the same dismal liberal economic trajectory, cutting education and welfare expenditure.
The economic, social and political consequences of this liberal doctrine have been devastating and the UK's experience can act as a paradigm for what has happened, or has yet to happen, in other countries. Friedman claimed in 1962 that capitalism lessened the extent of inequality; the reality is that, as the UNDE showed in 1992, the gap between rich and poor throughout the world had doubled in the previous thirty years. The United Kingdom is a misnomer because it is, by income, wealth, race, gender and age, probably more divided now as a nation than it has been within my lifetime and as a result, also more violent and insecure. Since 1979, the number of those on state social assistance benefit has grown by more than 50% to almost 12 million, or one-fifth of the entire population; three times as many children are dependent on benefit now than were in 1979, and the rate at which the number of poor people grew in the UK through the 1980s was greater than in any other EU state, including countries often patronized by the UK as poor, such as Portugal and Greece. Compensating for price increases, the bottom 10% of the UK population saw their living standards drop by onesixth through the 1980s whilst the share of income and wealth owned by the top 10% of the income distribution correspondingly increased.
Wage differentials are now wider in Britain than they were at the end of the nineteenth century, an ironic reversion to Victorian values. A study by the National Children's Home (1994) indicated that "over one and a half million families in Britain could not afford to feed their children an 1876 workhouse diet at present [benefit] levels" (Craig, 1995). Other studies reveal growing numbers of young homeless adults close to starvation (Craig, 1991). Meanwhile, one-third of pensioners cut back on basics such as clothing and food in order to pay for heating bills, some dying of hypothermia nonetheless; and mortality rates, which have been falling for years, have been found to be increasing in some deprived areas. Following the privatization of water supply in England, some families now find that they cannot afford an adequate supply of water, with the attendant risks to health that that implies. Is it really possible to talk about community empowerment, as the Right do, in the same breath as a political strategy which has such social and economic consequences?
Past government responses to claims that poverty is worsening in the UK have been characterized by ridicule, denial and scapegoating. Successive recent Social Security Ministers, for example, have suggested that "we have reached the end of the road for poverty", claims underpinned by the manipulation of official statistics and by policies which increasingly make the experience of poverty one which is hidden from public view (Craig, 1995). Ironically, at a time of global communication which provides images of the world's poor in my own front room, "my" government denied that the poor existed in my own backyard. The last UK government refused to act on the accord on poverty to which it signed up at the Copenhagen Social Development Summit, arguing that poverty is an issue only for Third World countries. The irony of that statement appeared lost on the Prime Minister. When the UK Monitoring Committee on the UN Convention on Human Rights highlighted the growing number of British children living in poverty and noted that "the phenomenon of children begging and sleeping on the streets of Britain has become more visible", the government's response was that the UN should confine its attention to countries such as Brazil where there were "real" problems of poverty. Similarly, when Oxfam, one of the best-respected UK international aid agencies, announced it was exploring the need for a UK anti-poverty programme, government and press reaction bordered on the hysterical, accusing Oxfam of being "patronizing" and "insulting" and of launching an attack on government policy. Of course, that is precisely, if implicitly, what Oxfam was doing but the suggestion that Oxfam and the UN should turn their attention to where there were so-called "real" problems of poverty missed the point; it is not that absolute and relative poverty might not be worse in some other countries - which they undoubtedly are - but that the processes creating poverty in the UK were in essence exactly those, operating at a global level, which were creating poverty in other countries. Ironically, Oxfam argues that it can no longer pursue a global development praxis without also applying its analysis to the UK: to do otherwise would be both patronizing to the people of the other countries it worked with and inconsistent to the poor of the UK. The UK government is meanwhile perfectly happy to encourage the work of Oxfam, and other aid agencies, abroad, as it serves the useful function of diverting attention from the distinct aims of British government development "aid" much of which serves to enhance British economic, political and security interests amongst increasingly dependent poorer countries. UK aid has increasingly little to do with the expressed needs of "the broad masses who never wanted their forests denuded, their valleys flooded or their military armed with the latest electronic gadgetry. Recent examples of so-called UK development aid include preparing Bulgarian Airlines for privatization, and producing a film on how a Slovak stock exchange might operate. As Curtis (1995) argues, "around 70% of Britain"s bilateral aid programme is tied to the purchase of British goods and services... [and] ... the United Nations Development Programme estimates that just 6.6% of Britain's bilateral aid is spent on human priorities, such as basic education, primary health care and the provision of safe water - the areas that would be prioritised if poverty reduction were a serious concern.
One of the groups most adversely affected by UK economic and social policy has been young adults leaving school, hundreds of thousands of whom have effectively disappeared from British civil society, no longer being recorded in employment, housing or social security statistics and only emerging into public view to beg on the streets of every major city. The implications for social and political citizenship in the UK are no less alarming than are raised by the position of the street children of Uganda or Brazil. This group has suffered more than most from the process, classically described by Ryan, of "blaming the victim". The UK Minister for Rousing commented that "beggars are those you step over as you leave the opera", as if their condition was in some way entirely unrelated to government economic policies. Parallels with the treatment of poorer countries are again obvious. Third World countries failing to achieve significant development (i.e. economic restructuring) targets are blamed for their failure just as the poorest UK residents borrowing from moneylenders are blamed for their mounting debts. We are invited to overlook the facts that many poor countries have become overwhelmed by the cumulative demands of servicing Western bank debts, or "persuaded" that the maintenance of defence expenditure to protect their alleged geo-political interests is more important than health expenditure in the interests of their poor (Tansey et al., 1994).
It is, incidentally, a further ironic twist that, as international aid agencies such as Oxfam move away from direct service provision towards work emphasizing the importance of supporting people to own the process of development for themselves, UK domestic NGOs are being driven in quite the opposite direction. These agencies, which traditionally have had strong self-help, community development and campaigning roles, now find that they are drawn into an increasingly privatized welfare market, providing direct but low-cost services, dependent on cheap labour. As Rochester (1995) has observed, these agencies "which previously saw their role as helping to define need, often in conjunction with local groups, now tend to concentrate on meeting need defined by others."
A fourth major global trend I want to point to is the growth of inter-cornmunal conflict, based on differing combinations of race, national boundaries, culture or religion. In one week in 1996, thirty-seven civil wars and five crossborder conflicts were being fought. Hundreds of thousands of the poor are killed, millions are made refugees. So much for the "new world order". History teaches us how economic despair feeds into ideological fascism and, whilst we are not witnessing a full-scale revival of fascism in Western Europe, we are seeing there some of the same interplay between deteriorating economic conditions and political, ideological and social responses.
In South Africa, a long history of unmet social and economic needs and the related competition for extremely scarce resources has been associated witb violence, used in turn to accentuate racial and inter-tribal divisions. In Northern Ireland there has been 25 years of conflict based on religious sectarianism which has buttressed economic disparities; in Germany, racist firebombings have been driven by declining economic opportunities; and the former Yugoslavia has been witness to appalling acts of genocide in the name of religion and nationhood. Yet even in these situations of conflict and acute division, community development may have a key role to play. It is aid workers operating within a community development framework who are often called on to facilitate the process of reconstruction for refugees (Zetter, 1996). The CDJ (1994) has published analyses both of the growth of inter-communal conflict and of the ways in which community development, based on a respect for humanity, has built bridges between communities at war. The CDJ Australian Special Issue (April 1996) discusses the role of community development in the Kuri struggle for land they occupied many years before the Australian government came formally to recognize their existence - a recognition now undermined by attempts to weaken the Native Title Act.
What we appear to be witnessing in part on a global basis is the displacement of competing political ideologies by those based on race or religion, for example. The competition between socialism and capitalism is being overshadowed in places by that between fundamental Islam and fundamental Christianity, between black and white, between Sikh and Hindu, in a context where disillusionment with the failure of earlier political options, and increasing economic immiseration leave people more vulnerable to the promises of those that follow apparently certain creeds. This requires us to underline the universal value base of community development, connecting us to other disadvantaged groups, to confront the growth of sectarian identity politics on the global stage. It's also appropriate to comment on the relationship between more local identity politics and community development work. The growth of social movements based on the identity of race, gender, age or disability, alongside single issue campaigns, was one of the most remarkable political developments during the 1980s. It represented, for some, important opportunities for political action, for example through Rainbow Coalitions, and a way out of ideological confusion. However, identity politics is not of itself necessarily the basis for progressive forms of action. Community workers need to interrogate the claims of such groups to establish the extent to which they support the key values of respect for the humanity and dignity of all. This does not deny the need for community development which takes gender, age, race or some other social division as its focus for organization and there are examples of positive practice in many areas such as disability (Barnes and Mercer, 1995) which show how community development focused on identity can retain a non-divisive and internationalist perspective (see also, for example, CDJ, 1985, 1992a). But we must ask about the extent to which this work has a broader value base and a practice which supports the struggles of other oppressed groups.
This leads on to the fifth strand in our global context, the increasing globalization and realignment of political power, through the construction of supranational political structures and institutions. This is a rather more complex and contradictory phenomenon since it has to be seen alongside the growth of nationalism and indeed the fragmentation of some nation states along ethnic and religious lines into smaller entities. Whilst the free market model suggests that national and indeed international political institutions are of marginal relevance, multinational companies, by their nature, require no fixed political constituency and can play one set of national economic interests off against another. Political entities are, however, often rather more enduring and indeed some commentators regard nation states as continuing to have a central role in focusing movements for equality throughout the world (Boyer and Drache, 1996). But the growth of supranational structures has to be seen not simply as a political phenomenon. The febrile debates within British political parties over the terms of UK membership of the EU are as much about where the future economic and security interests of the country lie. The EU itself is moving towards admitting Eastern European countries so that greater market opportunities can be offered to the West subject to certain political provisos such as boundaries secure against immigration from countries further to the east, the "Fortress Europe" mentality (Conroy, 1990) so clearly reflected in the UK's appalling refugee and asylum legislation. Similar processes are at work in North America under the slogan of "America First", and in SE Asia, which Australia increasingly defines itself economically to be part of, glossing over a set of rather contradictory historical and political considerations in the process. It is difficult to see where these tendencies will come to rest. One possible interpretation might be of a drift towards the creation of regional economic and political blocs, a form of global apartheid based on geography rather than race, and owing cohesion less to competition between ideologies than to control over resources (Sachs, 1993). World grain stocks are now down to about 50 days' food supply and oil is likely to run out in 50 years' time, so it may not be long before we see whether this speculative scenario emerges in reality.
What we can be sure of is that these sub-global divisions opening up are likely to create yet further international divisions between rich and poor, mirroring the divisions within individual nations; and that supranational political institutions are even less likely to be subject to democratic mandates. Against this, however, in the partial vacuum of governance left by those national governments happy to unload their social responsibilities onto the market, or to bow to the conservative agendas of supranational economic institutions (Deacon, 1995), it is important also to acknowledge the growth of multinational pressure groups which cut across regional economic and political loyalties, campaigning on issues to do with development, poverty, biodiversity, the environment and climate change. A focus on the values and methods of community development is often a key element in the manifestos of these groups. One important contradiction, which has been used to some effect within the EU, is that supranational political institutions can be used to exert political pressure downwards on individual nation states.
The final parameter is that of increasingly rapid global communication: the world is getting smaller. This has its own contradictions: on the one hand, a single money broker in Singapore can destroy a major UK bank overnight on the basis of a few phone calls; on the other, large-scale disasters can be responded to world-wide in a matter of hours. There are many implications, good and bad, for community development: but we should remember that amongst the euphoria of surfing the net, there are many countries that are information poor and may get relatively poorer: that, as Smith (1996) argues, a praxis which "revels in fragmentation and which ... [without a clear framework of values informing political action] indulges itself in global electronic networking is no answer for excluded and marginalised people'.
I point to one small way in which global communication can help us confront and use global economic power. It is an instance also of how we as community development workers can make connections between our personal and professional lives. This relates to the growth of tourism, now one of the most significant economic sectors in every country. Community development has had an impact in countries as disparate as Cuba and the Philippines in terms of thinking about the local social and economic consequences of inappropriate tourism (CDJ, 1992b). We have an opportunity to build links between "sending" and "receiving" countries, to demonstrate the need for and act on policies sensitive to the needs of the disadvantaged in "host" countries rather than the narrow economic interests of global tourist businesses. For example, when a democratically elected leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, under house arrest for many years, tells the world at great personal cost that tourism is undermining the Burmese people's campaign for democratic rights, we can act locally. It was not, after all, tourism (or cricket matches!) which brought an end to apartheid in South Africa - it was the local struggle of the South African masses, strengthened by the knowledge of global support.
This sketchy analysis may seem overwhelming in its consequences for action but the scope of the challenge for community workers everywhere is simply that faced by billions of people struggling against poverty, exclusion, illhealth and oppression, with whom we seek common cause. In our work, we can remember the Indian proverb which reminds us that an elephant can only be eaten one mouthful at a time! An appraisal of the tasks which community development has to face throughout the world can only be effective if it is based on an accurate analysis of the ideological, political and economic context within which it is operating. Within Britain, the political philosophy derived from that analysis is encapsulated in the slogan "Think Global, Act Local", a slogan which reminds us both that the processes which are manifested at a local level and which are often the site of local community campaigns - the replacement of housing by more shopping or commercial facilities, the dumping of polluted waste, the loss of employment opportunities - are themselves usually the consequences of decisions taken far from the local arena; and that such campaigns have to be informed by an understanding of the broader context within which the decisions are taken. None of this is an argument against local action informed by community development principles but is an argument for local action and broader alliances informed by that global understanding.
I conclude by focusing on what community development is, and what its contribution can be to this task of global improvement, on however modest a scale. Community development is a method of working with people; I do not use the term "method" here in the sense of professional practice, although that has a place in what we do, but in a political way, a way of working which essentially starts with the needs and aspirations of groups of disadvantaged people in poor localities and which struggles, first of all, to articulate and organize politically around those needs and aspirations, placing them at the front rather than the end of political debate. This is, and always will be, a challenge to existing forms of political organization which emphasize centralized forms of government, whether through the command structures of state socialism, liberal democratic forms or indeed the military autocracies which are increasingly common. It is also a challenge to a socalled "post-modern" world where the values of social justice, solidarity, citizenship and classlessness are increasingly threatened as a result of economic restructuring and the dismantling of public welfare, by fragmentation, insecurity and competition in the name of individual freedom (for which read "freedom for the few") and self-sufficiency (that is, "managing on nextto-nothing") (Williams, 1992; Hewitt, 1994). What community development strives for is to give ordinary people a voice for expressing and acting on their extraordinary needs and desires in opposition to the vested interests of global economic and political power, to counter the increasing commodification of human welfare and human beings themselves.
Throughout the world, oppressed people have found a voice in part through the work of community development activists, often in situations of great danger. The power of that voice will perhaps always lie most strongly in the ideas that it expresses. It is appropriate to end with the words of a Chipko spokesperson since it is clear that the political and economic struggles of the future will be increasingly about the sensitive use of limited resources. The Chipko movement is concerned with preserving the natural regeneration of forests in opposition to the desire of multinational logging companies which want to exploit timber resources and move on. Years of experience have bred in the Chipko a healthy scepticism of the claims made by development projects to bring lasting benefits to the poor. They argue "there are alternatives to expensive self-defeating projects, these require minimal involvement from outsiders. That the people are the most competent of managers of the resources that sustain them is a heresy against development, against outside experts." Yet these outside experts have become too often the precursors of structural adjustment and social and economic division. In the context of growing confusion about what community and community development really stand for, we have to be very clear about our own position. The Chipko tell that "there is a story in the villages about a fox that comes wearing a tiger's coat to terrify the people. When the real tiger comes, it wear's a fox's coat. We should beware of those who come saying they love the people." The challenge for community development is to reclaim our language and our politics from the foxes and the tigers of the world.
Gary Craig was editor of the CDJ from 1981 to 1997.
Address for conespondence:
Professor Gary Craig, School of Policy Studies,
University of Lincolnshire and Humberside,
Inglemire Avenue, Hull HU6 7LU, UK
Published in the
COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT JOURNAL
VOL. 33 NO.1 January 1998 pp. 2-17