Does Community Development Work?: Stories and practice for reconstructed community development in South Africa

What makes community development effective? How can we ensure that this work is responsive to the decolonial turn, the call for effectiveness and the need for justice?

Highlighting useful practice frameworks for community development workers - both citizens and professionals - to navigate an increasingly uncertain world, Does Community Development Work? calls for a new quality of reflection and reflexivity. It sets out a post-structural, deconstructive and decolonizing perspective on community development.

Grounded in stories of South African history and community development practice - dealing with issues such as housing, land, cooperatives, education, community protests and urban farming - this book combines story, conceptual insight and theoretical discourse. These detailed stories present a wonderful illustration of the global and South African history of community development.

The book concretizes the vision of several notable individuals including Steve Biko, Mahatma Gandhi, Es'kia Mphahlele and Neville Alexander, whose writings and actions contributed to community development practice.

Table of contents

PART I

2. The South African context: The double story

3. Where we are coming from

4. Community development effectiveness - how do we know we know?

PART II: INTENTIONS AND IDEAS

5. Reaching for a social reconstruction tradition

6. Reconstructing frameworks for practice

PART III: AN ASSEMBLAGE OF STORIES AND POSSIBILITIES

7. Accompanying, horizontal learning and structuring: political practice and the Southern Cape Land Committee

8. Action learning and research, food security and Abalimi Bezekhaya

9. Staged place-based community development and the Hantam Community Education Trust

10. From marginalisation to destiny: anger, violence and community protest in South Africa

11. Informal housing and community development: A historical and human rights approach

12. 'Seeing like a state' and neo-colonial cooperative development within South Africa

13. Interlude: In dialogue with Es'kia-the decolonial turn

14. In conclusion: Promissory reflections