The re-signification of state-funded community development in Ireland: 1 A problem of austerity and neoliberal government

Introduction

Put simply, community development is ‘a process through which … people collectively attempt to influence their life chances’ (Meade et al., 2016: 4). Due, however, to the normative yet promiscuous deployment of the term in diverse contexts, community development simultaneously refers to a professional practice and an activist commitment; it is promoted by the state, in partnership with the state, and against the state; communities are alternatively constructed as potentially active subjects, as deficient or competent actors; and there are ongoing tensions about the relative valuing of its processes and the developmental or democratic outcomes it is expected to generate (Ife, 2013; Shaw, 2011). Community workers’ practice is often constructed as value driven, informed by social justice principles, and as demonstrating a concern with the nurturance of collective action, participation and citizen empowerment (Ife, 2013; Shaw, 2011). But in the everyday contexts of practice globally, values are mediated through the interests and power-plays of invested actors that include local and national governments, social movements and non-governmental organisations (NGOs), private and state funders, professionals and diverse community ‘representatives’ (Meade et al., 2016).

Commencing with a brief discussion of how community development came to be identified and deployed as an anti-poverty strategy internationally and in Ireland, this article characterises community development as a ‘technology of government’, where my understanding of ‘government’ is shaped by governmentality perspectives that have emerged to interpret and extend theoretical insights from Michel Foucault’s Collège de France lectures. Although Foucault (2009: 109) registered a strong note of ambivalence about the centrality of the state to contemporary governmental practices – ‘maybe the state is only a composite reality and a mythicized abstraction whose importance is much less than we think’ – this article privileges the state as a policy actor. My analysis focuses on the changing rationalities and reforms through which the Irish state seeks to govern community development; specifically, how the eventual displacement of its flagship Community Development Programme by the Social Inclusion and Community Activation Programme has been justified and operationalised. I do not claim that the state conclusively determines or controls all community development practice in Ireland, but that governments now demonstrate a more aggressive concern with defining, directing and aligning purposes and outcomes in the community programmes they fund.

Peck (2010: 106) points to ‘neoliberalism’s shape-shifting capacities’, whereby it mutates to accommodate diverse and ostensibly contradictory practices, ranging from ‘budget cuts to regulation-by-audit, from welfare retrenchment to active social policy’, while still constituting ‘a deeply consolidated and a crisis-driven form of market rule’. From 2008, Ireland’s recession was called upon to legitimise the enactment of austerity measures across the social policy and welfare systems resulting in significant retrenchment in resources for community and voluntary sector activities (Harvey, 2012). Aside from impacts such as funding cuts, staff reductions and the closure of services, austerity rationalised and effected profound changes in the structures, knowledge-base and norms of accountability governing the state’s community programmes (Crowley, 2013; McGrath, 2016; Meade, 2012; Power, 2014). Community development’s purposes were re-signified accordingly. As Newman (2014: 142) explains, ‘re-signification is a form of cultural practice’ whereby ‘chains of signifiers are disrupted and reconnected in order for a concept to take on a new meaning’ and it often coincides with ‘projects of de-politicization and welfare reform’. This article contends that these re-significations and reforms reflect the ongoing encroachments of neoliberalism, as both ‘ideational-ideological project’ (Peck, 2010: 106) and assemblage of practices, within Irish community development policy.

Community development as anti-poverty strategy

In Ireland, really existing community development has been shaped from ‘below’ by social movements and voluntary action, from ‘above’ by policy-making and from ‘outside’ by changing concepts of and ideas about the social role of community (Meade, 2012). For the post-independence state, which in 1922 was wrestling with the after effects of anti-imperialist and civil wars, economic crisis was a constant threat, and it responded with a mix of fiscal, social and cultural conservatism (Garrett, 2012). Social policy and welfare provision evolved slowly and its often punitive character reflected the ideological preoccupations, moral fetishes and class interests of the Catholic hierarchy and dominant political and economic groups (Ferriter, 2005: Garrett, 2012). In the absence of an active state presence, various forms of voluntary organisation, typically centred on parishes or geographical communities, stepped in to provide elements of a social or developmental infrastructure. The Catholic social movement Muintir na Tíre (Devereux, 1993) and the Credit Unions were early exponents of the kinds of self-help/mutual aid discourses that would become synonymous with community development. Alternatively, oppositional groups also emerged in rural and urban settings, during the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, to protest the state’s failure to provide basic services, guarantee economic opportunities and protect social, cultural and civil rights; in such cases ‘community’ was a signifier of critique and demands for deeper democratic and structural reform (Meade, 2012). The creation of an identifiable community development sector during the 1980s and 1990s was also influenced by the presence in Dublin and the larger cities of ‘women’s educational projects in low income communities’ (Hayes, 1990: 6). Espousing a participatory ethos and combining elements of critical community education and personal development, projects affirmed the central role of women as members, leaders, activists and as paid workers within this emerging practice field.

Internationally, an early form of state-sponsored community development is recorded by Mayo (2011) as occurring between the two world wars. In the face of burgeoning anti-imperialism in Africa and Asia, local programmes were instituted by the British Colonial Office to ensure continuity in economic and social relations in the pre- and post-independence periods, and to impede any ‘serious dislocation of the vested interests of the status quo’ (Mayo, 2011: 76). Similar rationalities or a ‘will to civilise’ have informed many subsequent deployments of community development. Since the 1970s and in its contemporary manifestations, community development is often constituted through state-led interventions that seek to engage and/or activate ‘disadvantaged’ communities. Among the harbingers of this policy approach was the US War on Poverty of the 1960s. Its Community Action Programme promised ‘to effect a permanent increase in the capacity of individuals, groups and communities afflicted by poverty to deal effectively with their own problems so that they need no further assistance’ (Office of Economic Opportunity, 1965, in Cruikshank, 1999: 73), while the British Community Development Projects were launched from 1968 as part of an Urban Programme to respond to an alleged ‘deadly quagmire of need and apathy’ (Callaghan, 1968: n.p.). Although distinct in their scale, organisation, operations and subsequent association with resistance and critique, from a policy-maker’s perspective both programmes were expected to activate community participation in order to target the cycles of disadvantage and personal disempowerment to which poor communities were presumed to be susceptible (Cruikshank, 1999; Loney, 1980).

Ireland ‘rediscovered’ the problem of poverty in 1971 and following its accession to the European Economic Community (1973) the state became a partner in the roll-out of the first European Anti-Poverty programme. It centred on ‘pilot schemes and studies’ designed to ‘test and develop new methods’ that would be implemented ‘as far as possible with the participation of those concerned’ (European Commission, 1975: 1). Launched in 1975 the programme included a community action stream that was overseen by a National Committee and involved a mix of urban and rural projects (Meade, 2012; National Committee on Pilot Schemes to Combat Poverty, 1981). The novelty of this anti-poverty strategy, with its emphasis on community development, was underscored in an address to the Dáil (Parliament) by the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Social Welfare (1975: n.p.).

They offer the hope of early and important contributions to policy on service delivery and uptake; on community development and local community action; on social provision through coordinated effort and on the introduction of new policies. These projects will involve real positive action and will be characterised by a quite radical approach to the identification and tackling of deprivation. Participation will be stressed at every stage.

A second European Programme (1985–89) again affirmed the productive role of community development in the social policy armoury. By 1986, the Combat Poverty Agency (CPA) was established on a statutory basis and charged with ‘assisting, encouraging and the giving of information on, community development as a means of overcoming poverty’ (Government of Ireland, 1986: n.p.). A state body was now formally tasked with rationalising and promoting community development.

The community action/participation/development elements of the various anti-poverty programmes ‘enrolled’ poor communities as both subjects and objects of social policy delivery (Clarke, 2010: 639), as people who could be incentivised to change and act. There are, however inherent conflicts in reconciling these competing identities, biddable object/active subject, as the histories of the European Economic Community (EEC), UK and US programmes revealed. As programmes were operationalised, issues of dispute emerged between communities and policy-makers that still vex community development processes: the depth and scope of popular participation; appropriate chains of accountability and control; the respective roles and authority of the local and national state; constructions of poverty and its causes; and the relative weighting afforded to personal and structural change (Cruikshank, 1999; Loney, 1980; National Committee on Pilot Schemes to Combat Poverty, 1981). These histories also illustrate how such programmes became distinguishable as ‘technologies of government’, shaped by distinct if not always consistent rationalities and assumptions about who and where poor people are and how to activate them.

Community development is ‘government’

Representing community development as a ‘technology of government’ means recognising it is a means by which communities are problematised, targeted and mobilised in the name of outcomes such as empowerment, social inclusion or labour market participation (Clarke, 2010; Cruikshank, 1999; Rose, 2000). Foucault understood government as the ‘conduct of conduct’ (Davidson, 2011), and it incorporates the full range of programmes, projects and actions that seek to rationalise and direct behaviour in particular ways (Foucault, 2009). As Rose (2000: 323–324) explains, the state is not the sole author of government in contemporary society and a range of actors, ‘experts’, interest or advocacy groups, professional and private bodies strive to conduct the behaviour and shape the identities of selves, communities and societies. These are positive expressions of power, not in a normative sense but because they are socially productive; they are ‘broadly consistent with particular objectives such as order, civility, health or enterprise’ (Rose, 2000: 323).

Governmentality perspectives are concerned with the rationalities, governmentalities, inspiring interventions, but they also analyse the techniques and technologies through which rationalities become practical or practicable (McGregor et al., 2013). Areas of interest range from the intimate to the macro, from how we are exhorted to trim our waistlines to the distinctive characteristics of austerity in individual welfare states. Given neoliberalism’s dominance within international political economy, governmentality studies interpret how states ‘devolve’, transfer or relinquish particular responsibilities, while governing ‘at a distance’ (Rose et al., 2009: 9). Neoliberal governmentalities typically promote personal responsibility, entrepreneurialism, competitiveness, economic efficiencies and accountability among the individuals, institutions and communities targeted (Larner, 2000). Clarke (2010: 641) points to the clouding of ‘conventional distinctions between realms and roles’, between state and civil society or community and government, as diverse actors become subjects/objects or ‘co-producers of welfare, care, community and the “social fabric”’. However, it should be emphasised that ‘government at a distance’ is not a new or entirely neoliberal phenomenon in Ireland and, as Garret (2012: 271) observes, there are connections ‘between the historical and the contemporary’. A range of social policy functions was abdicated by the post-Independence state to the religious orders of the Roman Catholic Church, which took a particularly active role in the regulation of families and children, in the reform of so-called sinners and in the management of various institutions of confinement where acutely authoritarian forms of government were enforced (Garrett, 2012).

Contemporary civil society organisations are ‘governmentalised’ in that they self-identify and are responsibilised as sites and solutions to the problems of society (Pyykkönen, 2015: 10) while state agencies or central government are themselves ‘products’ of the complex interplay of governmental rationalities and practices. Despite the asymmetries of power involved, civil society actors repeatedly make demands of the state, while simultaneously claiming territories of government and presenting as experts on particular societal problems (McGregor et al., 2013; Pyykkönen, 2015). A governmentality perspective on community development thus invites us to view the ostensibly separate ‘community’ and ‘state’ sectors as proximate, overlapping and in certain instances mutually constitutive. The preceding discussion of the anti-poverty programmes highlights the state’s role in engineering community projects. Alternatively, local activists may have viewed programmes as opportunities for lobbying the state, for politicising their wider communities and for ‘conducting conduct’ – their own, their neighbours or that of state officials – in the name of democracy, equality or social change. Again, a closer reading of the poverty programmes’ respective histories might reveal how the various actors involved navigated and shaped resulting relationships: how community development emerged from and reflected dynamics of antagonism, cooperation, consensus, distrust or power struggle.

Governmentalities are not static and they are repeatedly revised in the name of new problematisations and priorities (Rose et al., 2009: 22). Therefore, the following sections analyse how governments, from 2009–16, reconditioned their support for Ireland’s landmark Community Development Programme. ² Focusing on a period of ‘policy change’ allows us to identify mentalities and technologies of government otherwise ‘obscured from view by their very commonality’, ‘how they became contested’ and re-signified (McGregor et al., 2013: 1237). Governmentalities are expressed through discursive shifts and problematisations, and the ‘regimes of truth’ (Foucault, 1994: 238) both arising from and legitimising recent Programme transformations are explored. These include the advisors utilised, the knowledge drawn upon and the evidence now expected from Programme implementers. As will be shown, government is also constituted by institutional changes, funding efficiencies and technical reforms (McGregor et al., 2013; Rose et al., 2009). These have tangible effects for how community development is done within state programmes, as new technologies for monitoring, reporting and accounting are deployed for use by community workers (McGrath, 2016).

From Community Development Programme to Social Inclusion and Community Activation Programme

In a 1988 publication, the CPA lobbied for a community development focused anti-poverty programme that would provide ‘integrated’ and ‘secure’ funding, while allowing projects to access resources on an ‘independent’ basis (1988: S3.2). It cited the ‘urgent need to involve marginalised communities in collective, flexible and creative social programmes which ensure that they become partners in and not the victims of development’ (1988: S1.3, emphasis added). These discourses, with their accent on partnership, which itself became a dominant theme in Irish policy-making and government during the 1990s, were replicated in Social Welfare Minister, Michael Woods’ own discursive construction of the rationalities informing the Community Development Fund (CDF) that he launched in 1990. Continuing the approach adopted in the EEC pilot-schemes, the CDF initially provided grants for the establishment of 15 community resource centres/projects (CDPs) and the employment of project coordinators in targeted areas of disadvantage. Minister Woods (1991: n.p.) envisaged that local projects would mobilise the ‘involvement of’ of poor communities ‘in developing approaches to tackle the problems they face’ while ‘creating successful partnerships between the voluntary and statutory agencies in the areas concerned’.

As it was extended to other communities, the CDF was subsequently rebranded the Community Development Programme and later the Community Development Support Programme. From 1990 to 2002, and despite changes in government, official policy towards the Programme was unequivocally expansionary and evangelical. The productive role of community development in the government of poverty and in inducing desired behaviours from poor people was accepted as a self-evident truth. As former minister Dermot Ahern (1999: n.p) explained:

Support for community development continues to be an integral part of the Government’s overall social and economic development strategy. Community Development is the means by which the capacity of disadvantaged local communities and communities of interest to participate in mainstream development initiatives is increased.

Independent research consultancy NEXUS (2002: 63) was in 1999 charged with evaluating the Programme, to ‘present the rationale for funding’ it within ‘an overall social development and anti-poverty strategy’, to ‘measure and document’ impacts, and to suggest modifications to ‘structure, policy or funding’ consistent with cost-efficiency and ‘effectiveness’ (NEXUS, 2002: 5). The evaluation report recommended the establishment of a Strategic Development Group representing the diversity of Programme partners along with the adoption of new techniques and systems for documenting the work of constituent projects. This would enable the gathering of information about the particularities of local project environments, their resources, everyday work priorities, methods and outcomes (NEXUS, 2002: 63). Nonetheless, and as Power (2014: 92) highlights, the evaluation was largely ‘positive’ in tone. NEXUS (2002: 63) declared itself satisfied that CDPs had ‘very significantly’ enhanced the ‘circumstances’ and ‘opportunities’ available in ‘some of the most disadvantaged communities in the country’.

In 2001, the Programme was extended to incorporate locally based Family Resource Centres (FRCs), but the following year that decision was reversed and the FRCs became attached to a new Family Support Agency. Such moves were an early indicator of government ambivalence about the need to streamline its ‘community’ initiatives. Additionally, and confusingly, over the course of the Programme’s history, the title and policy focus of the government department to which it was affiliated was liable to change: the Department of Social Welfare, Department of Social, Community and Family Affairs, Department of Community, Rural and Gaeltacht Affairs, and finally the Department of the Environment, Community and Local Government. Coinciding with the transfer of the Programme to the Department of Community, Rural and Gaeltacht Affairs, Minister Éamon Ó’Cuiv (2003: n.p.) in 2003 initiated a ‘review’ of the ‘schemes’ being funded by the department in order to ensure ‘optimal coherence’. This action revealed that the internal diversity of programmes was now being problematised and it instituted a new layer of disciplinary oversight and control, whereby individual project priorities would require approval from ‘above’. Local projects were thenceforward expected to submit work-plans to local councils’ City/County Development Boards for endorsement, evidence that the government now sought ‘a more co-ordinated engagement by the State with communities’ (Ó’Cuiv, 2003: n.p.; also, Meade 2012; Power, 2014). However, the Programme did not change substantively until the end of the decade when concerns about ‘coherence’ and effectiveness amplified, and the enactment of austerity, local government reforms and the delivery of evidence-based efficiencies rationalised more radical revisions to its structures and goals.

By 2009, 185 community development projects along with a range of other Local Development Social Inclusion (LDSIP) and LEADER companies were funded through parallel but distinct programmes in the Department of Community Rural and Gaeltacht affairs. There were notable differences in the organisational culture and degree of community participation in decision-making elicited through the schemes: CDPs were directly managed by committees of local volunteers while LDSIP companies serviced a wider geography and their management boards were constituted by partnerships of business, trade union, state and community sector representatives. Against a backdrop of austerity and a systems-wide review of public expenditure, the previously ‘independent’ CDPs were aligned (or merged) with LDSIP companies and brought under their management. ³ Rationalising the urgency of reform, Minster for State, John Curran claimed in 2009 (n.p.) that alignment would ‘minimise structures and provide a single integrated delivery structure for all areas’, ‘enhance monitoring and evaluation’ and would mirror ‘international best practice’. His reference to best practice was not simply rhetorical, as the government had commissioned the recently established ‘think and do tank’ (CES, 2016: n.p.), the Centre for Effective Services (CES), to provide a systematic literature review, drawn from the ‘international evidence base’, on ‘what works’ in community development (Bamber et al., 2010: 1–2). Shifting governmentalities are reflected in the discrediting of accepted rationalities, discourses and practices, and so it was in this era of reform. Deviating from previous advice to the government, the CES maintained that programmes that ‘vary substantially at local level also become very challenging (and sometimes impossible) to evaluate using orthodox scientific methods. This in turn renders them non-accountable for outcomes and cost effectiveness eroding political and public buy in’ (Bamber et al., 2010: 2–3). In contrast, the CPA (1988: section 3.2) had advocated ‘more autonomy and control’ for local projects while NEXUS (2002: 6) allowed that ‘considerable differences’ are to be expected in their operations and methods. Against a view of community development as necessarily led by community aspirations and priorities, the CES (Bamber et al., 2010: 110) asserted that ‘effectiveness in an individual programme is a function of coherence across the whole range of actions related to that programme’. The CES was more in step with the neoliberal rationalities then guiding public sector reform and its ‘evidence-based’ pronouncements about coherence provided the government with additional ballast for policy changes that were by that point probably already inevitable.

Section 36 of the Local Government Reform Act (Government of Ireland, 2014: n.p.) established Local Community Development Committees (LCDCs) in Ireland’s 31 local authority/council areas to deliver a more ‘coherent and integrated approach to local and community development’. Working within the local-government system and constituted as public–private partnerships, LCDCs are responsible for coordinating and overseeing the delivery of all publicly funded community development. Alongside the ‘intermediary agency’ Pobal, they are also charged with managing and monitoring local delivery of the Social Inclusion and Community Activation Programme (SICAP), the final stage in the displacement/replacement of the Community Development Programme. SICAP was launched from April 2015 to December 2017 in the wake of a tendering process to find implementers for its key elements or ‘lots’ as they are described (Pobal, 2016).

Regarding the totality of changes outlined above, we see that the physical anchoring of community resource centres in specific localities has finally given way to SICAP’s ‘lots’ of services or activities that are contracted via competitive tendering processes (Department of Environment, Community and Local Government (DECLG), 2014). The practice of community management of projects, once normalised, has ended and the scope for community participation in decision-making curtailed accordingly. Quasi-democratic rationalities have been ceded to economic ones. Although tendering for SICAP contracts has so far favoured the non-profit Local and Community Development Programme companies established after 2010, community activists fear that tendering represents a definitive step towards ‘privatisation of the community sector’ (Holland: 2015, n.p.). This has been denied by the government but, as the following section demonstrates, the governmentalities rationalising community development policy are vulnerable to ongoing incursions by the practices and ‘vocabularies of neoliberal efficiency’ (McGregor et al., 2013: 1241).

Austerity and community development’s problem with effectiveness

Peck (2010: 106) contends that when neoliberalism fails, ‘it tends to fail forwards’ and so it was in Ireland in 2008. Even though the economic crisis had been precipitated by successive governments’ unwillingness to regulate speculative housing and financial markets, the failures of neoliberal policies ultimately rationalised and effected new expressions of neoliberalism (Fraser et al. 2013; Mercille, 2014). The state’s political/economic response centred on a bailout of Ireland’s banking/financial system through a project ‘of class restoration’ that responsibilised ‘ordinary workers and citizens’ for the ‘bank debts [of] financial and property elites’ (Fraser et al. 2013: 50). O’Flynn et al. (2014: 925) document how the combined forces of government and mainstream media democratised ‘blame’ for the crisis to the entire population, while simultaneously scapegoating ‘public sector workers’ and welfare recipients – especially unemployed people, single parents and alleged welfare-cheats – as leeching off the economy. From 2008, a succession of aggressively punitive budgets curtailed welfare payments, recalibrated or withdrew allowances and introduced new taxes and charges, while the disciplinary logics of austerity occasioned the imposition of new flexibilities, forms of performance management and employment embargoes within the public service (Allen, 2012; Fraser et al. 2013; Garrett, 2012: Mercille, 2014). ⁴ As Barry (2014: 8–9) highlights, austerity’s consequences were also gendered, restricting fields of employment, such as in the public sector, and forms of welfare, including payments for carers, child benefit and other social supports, that are particularly important for women. In winter 2010, the Irish state acceded to the distinctly neoliberal conditionalities associated with a bailout from the Troika of the EU, European Central Bank and International Monetary Fund. The government’s dogged resolve in effecting reforms, along with the public’s apparent resignation in the face of wide ranging fiscal ‘adjustments’, incited widespread and troubling caricatures of Ireland ‘as best pupil in the austerity class’ (Allen, 2012: 436).

Austerity had devastating implications for the funding, viability and scope of the Irish community sector. Harvey’s (2012: 13) detailed analysis of public spending retrenchment reveals that between 2008 and 2012 community and voluntary organisations were disproportionately impacted: anti-drugs initiatives, family support projects and the Local Community Development Programme lost about 29%, 17% and 35% of funding respectively. National bodies charged with promoting equality, anti-racism and poverty proofing in public policy were in some cases amalgamated and in others disbanded (Baker et al., 2015). Among those closed was the CPA, which had advised the government on and consistently promoted state investment in community development. Consequences for local and voluntary organisations included the loss of core services, the erosion of working conditions (Harvey, 2012) and the normalisation of what Crowley (2013: 151) calls a ‘survival agenda’.

In order to provide a ‘rational basis’ for austerity’s roll-out, the government established a Special Group to identify state departments, programmes and funding streams that could be reined in or abandoned. Demonstrably neoliberal in its construction of reform, the Group also saw its remit as interrogating ‘why public service provision might be warranted, rather than allowing the private sector to provide the service’ (McCarthy, 2009: vi). The two-volume Report of the Special Group on Public Service Numbers and Expenditure Programmes (McCarthy, 2009: 4) proposed cuts of an estimated €5.3 billion within a year and identified staffing reductions of 17,300(c.). It recommended closure of the Department of Community Rural and Gaeltacht Affairs, home of the Community Development Programme, with either the re-allocation of its functions to other departments or their cessation. Of particular concern was ‘the efficiency of a structure which consists of a large number of very small organisations’ (McCarthy, 2009: 17), what might alternatively be understood as the defining characteristic of community development groups. Its recommendations included the centralisation of all funding for community projects, mergers and rationalisations of local organisations, and an expanded role for local government in directing service delivery.

While the McCarthy report resurrected themes that had been anticipated in Ó’Cuiv’s 2003 review of the Community Development Programme, the earlier review did not incite the scale of transformation that occurred from 2009 to 2016. Austerity provided motive and opportunity for more radical reforms. The 2009 report problematised business as normal in Department of Community, Rural and Gaeltacht Affairs as well as the mentalities informing community development policy to date and, in this latter regard, the CES functioned as its echo-chamber. From a Foucauldian perspective, problematisations ‘emerge when existing forms of government come under scrutiny’ ‘as insufficient or inadequate’, when ‘foundational assumptions’ begin to be regarded as unstable (Braun et al. 2010: 512). In the McCarthy report (2009: 18; see also McGrath, 2016) reform was not merely a function of spending reductions, although they were prioritised, it also commanded greater attentiveness to the ‘effectiveness’ of ‘delivery mechanism[s]’ and the detailing of ‘benefits for consumers and taxpayers’: neoliberal efficiencies must be achieved and, crucially, they must be shown to be achieved. ⁵

The re-signification of the economic crisis as a public-spending crisis, and the consequent rendering of state spending as conditional on evidence, meant that community development was directed to generate an ‘impact that is easier to measure and evaluate’ (McCarthy, 2009: 18). What ‘works’ would no longer be left to the vagaries of deliberations between community workers and communities. Accordingly, the recent Our Communities; A Framework Policy for Local and Community Development in Ireland (DECLG, 2015), privileging an economic bottom-line, confirms that effectiveness in community development will be determined and demanded by the government into the future:

There is an ongoing imperative to focus on economy, efficiency and effectiveness. It is intended that this Framework Policy will provide a structure to help manage expectations and to set realistic targets in line with available resources (DECLG, 2015: 11).

Re-signifying community development

Governmental practices create ‘field[s] of possibilities’ where conduct ‘has a trajectory, a set of performed limits’ (Thompson, 2003: 121). In 1995, a briefing document on the Community Development Programme called Working Together Against Poverty was published with a foreword from the Democratic Left, Minister for Social Welfare, Proinsias De Rossa. It outlined official and foundational rationales underpinning the programme and its expected achievements. They included:

‘encouraging greater participation in public decision-making which leads to more effective and better targeted policies and programmes at local, regional and national level’

‘influencing change in structures, policies and processes which contribute to poverty and exclusion’

‘developing a collective response to community needs’

‘ensuring equality of opportunity and challenging discrimination and prejudice’

‘seeking an equitable distribution of power and resources in order to ensure a fairer society’

‘enhancing the skills and self-confidence of people experiencing poverty and social exclusion’

‘developing alternative methods and models of working which seek to directly involve and empower groups and individuals within the community’ (Department of Social Welfare, 1995: 3).

This iteration of community development identified who and what local projects could legitimately act upon, and its discourses reflected the influence of the CPA (1988). It also included standard allusions to empowerment, participation and up-skilling communities, while evoking a normative commitment to social justice and reform. Notably, the intended subjects/objects of ‘change’ included ‘structures, policies and processes’, which were implicated in the persistence of poverty and inequality. Community development was thus signified as an ongoing, open-ended cycle of change that elicits new forms of conduct and understandings in citizens and potentially state institutions. This is not to pretend that the Programme licensed radical structural critique or activism; the document’s title, Working Together …, itself reinforced the consensus logic of partnership then dominating Irish governance (Meade, 2012; Crowley, 2013). But it did extend the field of responsibilisation beyond poor communities and individuals.

The unveiling of SICAP reflects notable discursive shifts within government policy, although the semantic association between community development and anti-poverty policy is maintained. While SICAP’s ‘vision is to improve the life chances and opportunities of those who are marginalised in society, living in poverty or in unemployment through community development approaches’ (Pobal, 2016: 5), the word activation has prominence in the programme title. As Clarke (2005) argues, activation is not synonymous with work activation alone; citizens today are activated to engage in a plethora of productive activities and, like all technologies of government, community development inevitably implies some sort of activation agenda. However, SICAP’s Programme Goal 3 renders the correspondence of activation and employability explicit:

To engage with marginalised target groups/individuals and residents of disadvantaged communities who are unemployed but who do not fall within mainstream employment service provision, or who are referred to SICAP, to move them closer to the labour market and improve work readiness, and support them in accessing employment and self-employment and creating social enterprise opportunities. (Pobal, 2016: 5)

This goal reflects a more widespread punitive turn in welfare reform and social protection during Ireland’s period of austerity. Fraser et al. (2013: 45–46) record how practices such as the ‘profiling’ and ‘monitoring’ of job-seekers, and the ‘application of sanction mechanisms’ to the non-compliant, were instituted as labour market reforms at this time of high unemployment. They also note that community organisations were recruited to host ‘workfare’ type employment placements, where welfare allowances were a substitute for real wages. Indeed, when compared with the 1995 publication, all three of SICAP’s Programme Goals seem more restrictive in their designation of community development’s actors, actions and fields of possibility. Goals 1 and 2 are:

To support and resource disadvantaged communities and marginalised target groups to engage with relevant local and national stakeholders in identifying and addressing social exclusion and equality issues;

To support individuals and marginalised target groups experiencing educational disadvantage so they can participate fully, engage with and progress through life-long learning opportunities through the use of community development approaches. (Pobal, 2016: 5)

‘The field of visibility’ of a given governmental regime refers to the means by which it becomes possible to ‘picture who and what is to be governed’ and the arrangements and outcomes towards which they are to be conducted (Dean, 2010: 41). SICAP’s tighter Programme Goals instruct implementers/community workers to activate disadvantaged individuals and communities towards economically and socially productive forms of conduct; engagement with other stakeholders, education and employment. Community development is signified as more technocratic, less overtly political: contrast SICAP’s reference to ‘equality issues’ with allusions to ‘discrimination and prejudice’ or ‘equitable distribution of power’ in the earlier Programme. Policy-makers and state structures are now rendered invisible as objects of government: it is the conduct of poor, unemployed or educationally disadvantaged citizens that must be modified in the long-run.

Community development’s meanings have never been fixed and it has long been deployed for divergent political and social purposes (Shaw, 2011). Evidently, the rolling out of SICAP announces another stage in the re-signification of ‘official’ community development in Ireland. In line with the neoliberal logics of austerity, it is being deployed towards a results-driven work-activation agenda, and its normative commitments have been stripped back so that structural critique, democratisation, community participation and the re-responsibilisation of the state now lie beyond its purview.

‘Knowing’ community development

The complicated journey from Community Development Programme to SICAP has begotten operational changes in how contracts are awarded and how work performance is directed, monitored and ‘known’. Minister Alan Kelly (2014: n.p.) rationalised competitive tendering for SICAP’s local-level implementers in typically technocratic terms: it was instituted ‘in accordance with the Public Spending Code, best practice internationally, legal advice and … the optimum delivery of the services’. But tendering processes are not only technocratic, they too circumscribe fields of possibility. Competitors must demonstrate their capacity to deliver outcomes efficiently: processes underscore the provisionality of public-subsidy. In line with neoliberal governmentalities, ‘prudent’, ‘calculating’ and ‘responsible’ conduct is expected and elicited (Rose, 2000: 324). Additionally, recent reforms have intensified the use of technical systems for documenting, monitoring and reviewing the work being undertaken at local level. SICAP implementers must adhere to and work with: illustrative guidelines on ‘programme’, ‘headline’ and ‘key performance indicators’; a categorisation of beneficiaries and target groups; an information and communications technology (ICT) based Integrated Reporting and Information System (IRIS) for recording outcomes; and ‘performance monitoring’, with ongoing, mid-year and end of year returns, and incorporating nine distinct stages of information generation (Pobal, 2016: 44–52). Analysing their deployment within the preceding Local and Community Development Programme, McGrath (2016: 185) highlights how such ‘information systems’ have ‘become key to gaining standardized knowledge from individual projects and organizations’. They specify the means, methods and moments through which community workers make their achievements knowable to funders and Programme administrators, Pobal. Those actions also carry material consequences. Implementers are warned with respect to SICAP’s annual reviews, that failure to achieve contracted targets will precipitate a recouping of monies ‘linked to the proportional shortfall’ (Pobal, 2016: 69). In contemporary Ireland, the governmentalities of state-sponsored community development are anchored in the everyday through work practices that include group facilitation, advice-giving, conflict management or strategic planning, but equally and increasingly through the various actions associated with the manufacture and management of evidence.

Since recent reforms both generate and hinge upon ‘evidence’, a politics of knowledge is therefore at stake. This has impacted on how work becomes knowable, while also coinciding with a changing of the guard of accepted experts (Meade, 2012; Power, 2014). Decommissioned in 2008, the CPA had been the government’s primary advisor and source of expertise on community development. Ultimately its statutory status, tendency towards advocacy and its normative allegiance to community development processes rendered it disposable when pitted against the neoliberalising rationalities guiding public sector reform. The CES, as a rising governmental actor, promises to make ‘relevant, usable evidence available to policy-makers, service commissioners, providers and practitioners … [helping] them to generate evidence through their own practice’ (2016: n.p.). Philanthropy funded, flexible, adept at moving between contracts, and thus embodying the entrepreneurial spirit of neoliberal times, it has secured a substantial portfolio of research and consultancy, establishing itself as Ireland’s ‘go to’ expert on social service delivery. However, even it has conceded that determining an evidence base for community development is not straightforward. In an irony possibly lost on policy-makers already committed to austerity, the Effective Community Development Programmes report (Bamber et al., 2010: 15) admits that its deployment of ‘the concept of “effective” practice does not refer to principles that have been established beyond doubt by social scientific methods’: instead, it deploys ‘effective’ ‘in the sense that the term “promising” is used in other fields with a larger social science base’. Presumably, a report entitled Promising Community Development Programmes would be a less compelling source of legitimacy for governments intent on transformation.

Obviously, this article offers only a partial insight into overlaps between the politics of community development and those of austerity. It has likely fallen for the allure of ‘official discourses’ as articulated in ‘policy documents’ (Larner, 2000: 14): therefore, some qualifications are necessary. Foucault (2009) himself acknowledged that attempts at conducting conduct may fail or be refused and he invoked the concept of ‘counter-conduct’ to refer to the variety of possible resistances against government. While workers and ‘clients’ are enrolled as active participants in the transformation of community development, we cannot presume to know if and how ‘effectively’ they do so. Between the bottom-lines of policy and the frontlines of delivery, there are spaces for agency, flexibilities and subversions in the determination of what community work means. Given the preponderance of women as workers and as activists in the sector (Power, 2014), the workplace ‘reforms’ discussed above are likely to be highly gendered in their real-world effects. A feminist analysis, such as that undertaken by Power (2014), draws attention to how women workers are conducted by, how they in turn conduct and, alternatively, how they might resist, these governmental practices. Additionally, protests by trade unions and community workers marked the announcement of the ‘winning “bids”’ for SICAP contracts (Holland, 2015), while movements like Dublin’s Spectacle of Defiance and Hope (2016) assert the rightful place of critique, democracy and creativity in community development. Alternative deployments of community are evident in the praxis of locally based mobilisations against the water metering and charges regime that has been imposed on Irish citizens since 2014. Together these disparate counter-conducts can be understood as ethically informed interventions in the policy sphere, as attempts to contest and redirect neoliberal rationalities, practices and sources of evidence (Davidson, 2011: 32; Thompson, 2003).

Conclusion

Mitchell Dean (2010: 202–203) proposes that ‘the ethos of the welfare state has been displaced by one of “performance government”’, through which the various actors, including community groups, that effect social policy are ‘placed under the discrete and indirect surveillance of regulatory authorities’. Ireland has long relied upon community development organisations to activate and deliver social services and supports. While acknowledging that community development has always been both a technology of government and the subject of government by the state, it is important to acknowledge that forms of government vary in the extent to which they accommodate human agency or the cultivation of critical subjectivities. Neoliberal governmentalities extend the regulation of human subjects through enforced competitiveness, targets-cultures and the insuperable logic of economic efficiency. Beyond the imposed discipline of funding retrenchment, Ireland’s government of austerity has been characterised by: the problematisation and re-signification of community development and its purposes; the fetishisation of effectiveness and efficiency; a re-casting of community development’s ‘experts’; and the deployment of a knowledge production infrastructure which responsibilises community workers to become hyper-vigilant about outcomes. State-funded community development’s fields of visibility and of possibility have been narrowed. It has been diverted from critique, however reformist and consensus-minded, and re-tasked with labour market activation.

Kitchin et al. (2012: 1306) observe that Ireland, perhaps not unusually, exhibits a distinctive ‘species of neoliberalism’, where its political and ideological aspects are down-played as policy-makers couch rationalities or decisions in the language of pragmatism and the ‘commonsensical’. Preoccupations with ‘effectiveness’ in community development reflect such tendencies. However, over its history, in Ireland and internationally, community development’s effectiveness has always been framed by conflicting expectations, interests and political commitments (Shaw, 2011). Therefore, a critical analysis of ‘effectiveness’ may be less a case of asking ‘what works’, than of questioning ‘who is asking’ and ‘why they need to know’. The McCarthy and CES reports provided rationalising cover for neoliberal reforms that occurred within the manufactured imperatives of a ‘public’ spending crisis. But their problematisations of coherence and efficiency were a louder echo of policy-makers’ own ambivalences about the variety of community organisations being funded, ambivalences already on record since 2003.

Referencing governmentality studies more generally, McKee (2009: 475) acknowledges how they challenge the assumed coherence and centrality of the state as a governmental actor; yet, she argues, there is still scope to recognise how the state shapes the ‘policies that regulate our daily lives’, particularly where it retains discretion around funding or budgets. In Ireland, despite the growing emphasis on alternative/philanthropic sponsorship (Forum on Philanthropy and Fundraising, 2012), state agencies continue to dominate the resourcing of community development. The discursive shifts and technical reforms currently being operationalised have practical consequences for how communities experience and how workers enact state-funded programmes. But these evolving governmentalities do not exhaust all understandings or deployments of community: the activation of the citizenry, however narrowly conceived, always carries within it the seeds of resistance and counter-conduct.