The latest issue of the Community Development Journal (CDJ), IACD’s partner journal, edited by Keith Popple and Mae Shaw, takes a look back four decades to as period when community development was taking off domestically in Britain. A child of social democratic public policy and municipalism in Britain, community development, which since the 1950s had already been a feature of Britain’s overseas development programmes across the Commonwealth, inspired some politicians, civil servants and non governmental organisations to begin adopting community development approaches within Britain. Influenced also by the US War on Poverty, the British Labour government’s Urban Programme recognised the value of community development as a part of its strategy to tackle domestic poverty and urban regeneration from 1968 on.
The 1970s however began to see an end to the post war consensus between the Labour and Conservative parties in much of Britain’s social and economic development policies. But it was a decade where national and local planning and a pro active central and local government was at its apogee. These were the halcyon years before the arrival of the neo conservative privatisation programmes of Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative governments of the 1980s. And across the articles in the latest CDJ is a nostalgia for a decade of high hopes, yet one of smaller realities and certainly lost opportunities.
Much of the CDJ issue looks at the Labour government’s Community Development Programme (CDPs). This ten year programme (1968-78) of a dozen local action research projects around the country has had an enormous influence upon the academic world of British community development ever since. Less so community development practice. Indeed the community development teams involved in the 12 projects wrote little about the professional practice of community development, but they did contribute a huge amount to the analyses of the failures of the local state and its inability to tackle structural inequalities. The CDPs produced a number of very well written pamphlets during the 1970s. A time when most of us involved in community development had to rely upon US and overseas development resources. The publications output from the CDPs, together with the wonderful ACW (Association of Community Workers)/Routledge series of community development books, began to flood onto the essential books lists for community development students in Britain, and indeed other English speaking countries such as Australia, Canada and New Zealand.
I was working in Scotland in the mid 1970s with an organisation called the Scottish Local Government Research Unit. This was a think tank brainchild of one of the political architects of Strathclyde Region’s Community Development strategy, local Labour politician Ron Young. In the 1970s Strathclyde Regional Council (the region that included the city of Glasgow) became the largest municipal employer of community development workers in Europe. Municipalities across Britain started to employ community development workers from the 1970s on. My work at the time was to examine the extent to which professional community development support actually empowered people living in poor areas, looking at communities in Strathclyde, at the CDPs and at the work of community educators and organisers like Paulo Freire and Saul Alinsky. This was published in 1977 in my book The Community Worker as Politiciser of the Deprived.
Although the government closed the CDPs, being seen as too radical, many of its workers found subsequent employment within British local authorities. In the following decades it appeared that community development was finding a discrete place for itself separate from social work, youth work and adult education, with the setting up of a national institute called the Community Development Foundation and a national training standards body called PAULO (named after Freire), both funded by central government along with a national practitioners’ body called the Standing Conference for Community Development and the Association of Community Workers. And the return of a Labour government in 1997 saw community development ideas once more a central feature of much of its regeneration programmes. (Marilyn Taylor’s article in the latest issue of IACD’s Practice Insights magazine looks at this).
So far so good. But along comes the 2008 financial recession and the election of a Conservative/Liberal government and we saw savage cuts in funds for local authorities and a large number of community development redundancies. The Community Development Foundation and PAULO (now part of what was called a Sector Skills Council), the Standing Conference (which changed its name to the Community Development Exchange) and ACW closed as funding from government also dried up.
I would agree with the authors in the CDJ that the CDPs contributed hugely to our thinking and understanding of the causes of the challenges facing poor communities. But it was others, also working in community development from the 1970s in Britain, who took the lead in trying to forge a recognised community development ‘profession’. Indeed some of the CDP publications had concluded that community development work in itself could do little in terms of redistributing structural inequalities. This it has to be said somewhat disempowered many working in community development working with communities faced with large increases in unemployment and poverty as the 1970s ended. What we learnt was that community development work was certainly no panacea to addressing the ills of society, the economy and increasingly the environment. But we also learnt that community education and organisation can and does build up the capacity of the less powerful in society to understand and take action.
The 1970s in Britain are a long time ago. An age (now gone) when there was a political consensus, of sorts, that the national and local State had a responsibility for the tackling of poverty and a commitment to resourcing the participation of residents in that process. It was also an age when the local State in real terms had considerably more money. The central and local State has shrunken considerably in Britain and most other countries due to an ideological fixation since the 1980s with privatisation, the market and lower taxation. Britain’s towns and cities may appear to look more affluent, but one look at the Grenfell Tower fire disaster in London and we see communities suffering from poverty, hidden away from their richer Chelsea and Kensington neighbours by a dangerous facade of indifference and neglect. But what’s for sure, such communities are once again understanding what inequality means and are organising to challenge years of austerity.
Charlie McConnell
Charlie is a Past President of IACD.
THEMED SECTION: RESEARCHING RADICAL COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT PROJECTS (CDPS) IN 1970S BRITAIN
