Introduction

Community development is understood – by practitioners and governments, by enthusiasts and critics – as an essentially political practice. In this chapter, then, we focus on the politics of deploying ‘community’ in programmes of development, empowerment and containment. Community development has been the focus of a series of attempted cooptions and reinventions as governments have sought to deflect its goals, incorporate its workers and depoliticise its activities. However, it has also been the focus of numerous reinventions as the political landscape has shifted and new generations of activists have aspired to bring about radical political and social change. The fracturing of the political settlements in many nations following the banking crisis of 2008 and the subsequent experience of austerity, coupled with images of popular uprisings in some of the nations of North Africa, Latin America and Eastern Europe, is producing new political aspirations and actions. Sometimes, these aspirations are understood through the distinctive entanglement of the romance of ‘community’ and the promise of ‘development’ (Ferguson, 1994; Escobar, 1995; Joseph, 2002).

However, the politics of community development are elusive. There are huge differences between community development in the US, the UK, India, Latin America, and other nations or regions. Time, as well as place, makes a difference: it is possible to trace the different national cycles of community development activity and draw attention to their different political aims, actions and outcomes. Time, we might suggest, itself carries ideological connotations: in some places community development signifies radical and new forms of political reinvention and renewal. However in others – not least the UK – it is associated with the discredited politics of the 1970s, and with the unfulfilled goals of numerous governmental programmes of renewal in the decades that followed. Nevertheless, notions of both ‘community’ and ‘development’ continue to serve as objects of political and governmental desire.

But this chapter does not aim to be comparative, nor do we set out to trace one particular history. Rather we seek to show how community development has been the focus of numerous political projects, and then go on to trace two crucial political processes that are in play in such projects. The first is the politics of translation.