Introduction

This chapter concludes the book with philosophical reflections on the nature of ‘community’ as an ethical space and ‘community development’ as an ethical practice. While it may be more usual to begin a text with an abstract philosophical framework within which subsequent practice-oriented chapters are placed or judged, in this book we develop a vision of community and community development at the end. This chapter builds on the diverse narratives of the many ethical challenges relating to policies, organisations and practices recounted by the authors in this volume. They are rooted in the daily doubts and dilemmas faced by people working for transformative change – often in challenging circumstances in the context of a profoundly inequitable world. By turning an ethical lens on this practice, we have focused attention both underneath the macro political and institutional structures and beyond the merely technical and practical toolkits for work on the ground. We have been given accounts of the complexities, uncertainties and contradictions of community development work and the fine textures, including the knots and broken links, that make up the fabric of the ethical spaces in which it is located. What does this mean for our conceptions and theoretical understandings of community and for how we characterise the work that creates, maintains, develops, unsettles and even destroys the ethical space of community?

A philosophical angle on community

Community economists Katherine Gibson and Julie Graham (2006) (writing as J.K. Gibson-Graham), drawn on by Gradon Diprose and Ann Hill's Chapter Nine in this book, use the work of French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy (1991) and North American feminist Iris Marian Young (1990) to argue that ‘we need to liberate community from its traditional recourse to common being … a commonality of being, an idea of sameness’ (Gibson-Graham, 2006: 85–6). In a similar vein, Italian political philosopher Giorgio Agamben argues for an ‘inessential commonality, a solidarity that in no way concerns an essence’ (1993: 19).

In this way of thinking Gibson-Graham and Agamben are trying to disrupt the philosophical idea of community as ‘common’ or ‘unity’. Instead they imagine community as an ethical space where there is no essence of community, but instead there are people making conscious ethical choices.