Introduction

Inequality has become a matter of increasing concern worldwide and across a range of interests and actors. Even the powerful World Economic Forum in Davos in 2015 warned of the ‘inherent dangers of neglecting inequality’, including ‘[weakening] social cohesion and security’ (World Economic Forum, 2015). This broad consensus on the evils of inequality has occurred just as community development has re-emerged in global public policy debates. Such convergence is hardly coincidental or, indeed, unexpected. In contexts across the world, community development is being rediscovered as a supposedly cost-effective intervention for dealing with the social consequences of global economic restructuring that has gradually taken place over the last half century.

Of course, community development has a plurality of meanings and usages, which can generate considerable confusion and contestation (Meade et al, 2015). Historically, it has been deployed to both address inequality and to mask its causes. We have therefore decided to approach the term in as open and inclusive a way as possible. As the book's contributions from different parts of the globe attest, there is a variety of pressures, processes and practices that are involved when people act together to influence change in their communities, whether those communities are centred on place, shared interest or identity. This book asks what might be missing in assessments of the likely contribution of community development in the contemporary context in the absence of the explanatory, albeit contested, concept of class. It argues that a critical understanding of class is central to an analysis of inequality and the ways in which it is framed by community development strategies, both within and between countries. Without such a critical understanding, community development risks obscuring the underlying structural causes of inequality or even reinforcing potential divisions between different groups in the competition for dwindling public resources brought about by global processes of neoliberalisation.

Some of these concerns are not new; in 1978, for example, a group of academics and practitioners in the UK produced a book entitled Community or class struggle? (Cowley, 1978), which directly addressed these same questions.