Abstract
Margaret Ledwith begins the second edition of her book, Community Development: A Critical Approach with a dire assessment of our times. The author cites the blurring boundaries between sectors and movements toward a profit and market orientation at the cost of social justice and environmentally sustainable policy and practices. “There is,” she asserts, “an urgency for community development to reclaim its radical agenda” (p. 3). Her book is a critical and usable guide for creating or reclaiming such an agenda, grounded in both ideas and practice.
I write this review to accomplish three goals: First, to critique the author’s definition and explanation of radical community development; second, to highlight the author’s community model and other practical tools; and third, to discuss how the book can be used by educators and community leaders.
At its simplest, radical community development can be defined by its goal: To change the world. Unlike development that is about sustaining the status quo in community political and economic structures, a radical agenda is committed to get to the root of power inequality and oppression through critical examination. It is about changing the structures that are creating the inequality. A radical agenda might, for example, develop a bank cooperative in a community rather than support opening a branch of a multinational bank. The cooperative’s resources stay in the community. The branch resources go outside to support traditional economic structures. The development must include “community” and is committed, therefore, to a participatory process that empowers all the people who are involved. In describing the political context of development, the author is critical of devolution initiatives (such as the “Big Society” policies), designed to decentralize state power in health and social services. She advocates instead that the power to design initiatives be recognized in communities. The way Ledwith critiques these policies is characteristic of other critiques in the book and is an example of why the book is so informing. It goes deep, explaining how decentralization policies appear to empower communities when, in fact they do not. The popular critique of devolution is that “small government” most often is accompanied by funding cuts relegating the needs to underresourced communities. Rather than label this situation as “wrong” and in need of reactive measures, Ledwith evaluates the situation as a “disconnect” between economy and society. Her evaluation was deeper than the “popular critique.” She assesses the role of community development in this situation not to “provide an alternative to state services” but to be a “process of community empowerment that leads to autonomous communities” (p. 26). She then moves beyond the critique of the policies and gives concrete examples of how to actively engage with devolution policies by rethinking roles, need and connections based in the community.
Another example of the author’s depth is her critique of Paulo Freire and Antonio Gramsci. She moves through their “class-based dichotomous analysis” (p. 151) of oppression to a more inclusive and complex analysis of social inequality and structural oppression. She does this by presenting their ideas and then carefully discussing those ideas through lenses other than social class. The additional lenses include feminism, social justice, environmental justice, and sustainability. In each case, the author demonstrates that “. . . making sense of the world through a dichotomous analysis reduces life experience to an either/or which cannot accommodate the other” (p. 151).
Chapter Seven offers a powerful way to make sense of the world, one where an individual is not “one thing or another,” but rather a collection of many things that interact in their individual “lived experience” and require dialogue with others to realize the potential for community change. This dialogue, according to Ledwith, must be facilitated as part of a radical community development agenda and requires the integration of many lenses. The author models this lens integration in her “Model of critical praxis” (p. 41). Based on her own practice, this model illustrates how external and internal forces in communities impact local lives and how people come together to question and act together. This model is a useful tool for understanding how an individual’s ideology can be filtered through both theory and practice and can then come together in praxis informed by integrated action and reflection. This praxis is the basis of the “lived experience” dialogue, done in community with others working to make meaning of the social, political, economic structures and deciding what to question and how to move forward. The model offers a useful way to think about how one’s lived experience relates to the broader context of community development.
Actually engaging in radical community development, however, requires a set of honed skills. One needs to be able to structure a group process and that process needs to provide for a cocreation of knowledge. This book promotes a “cycle model” of community process based on action research. The cycle integrates a number of dimensions that include communicating and encountering the reality of a community, creating an intervention and making sense of what evolves from the intervention through dialogue and reflection. In Chapter Four, Ledwith includes a number of additional specific models for organizing in the community that can be replicated, critiqued, or both, as a basis of a community development effort. It also advocates for using stories as a powerful community development strategy tool.
One of the strengths of this book is the depth of the author’s experience and how she honors that first-hand knowledge in her writing. She refers regularly to her practice and experience and often uses examples of her work as illustrations or evidence. She models the idea that knowledge does, in fact, comes from the lived experience.
While the ideological critiques in this book may be challenging for some practitioners, this book has much to offer many audiences. The ideology of Freire and Gramsci, for example, may require practical discussions to be understandable and useful. Scholars may have a similar need to discuss the process and community-based tools to make the critical connection between theory and practice. I believe, however, that these are important discussions and would likely be transformational for those who take them on “in community.” This book can be a starting-off for those transformational conversations.