Peter Westoby

The structure of dialogic practice within developmental work

A critical first step in community development work involves initiating and responding to contact with others. Contemporary approaches rely heavily on the ability of practitioners to communicate effectively with the people with whom they are working. Prior to “facilitating” “good public processes”, or “mobilizing” “common pool” resources, or even “empowering communities” to “do it themselves”, practitioners must first build good local-level relationships. This article examines the various structures of interpersonal communication within community development settings. Given that the objective of that communication is to bring parties together, we focus our attention on the use of dialogue in building a developmental process between individuals. The article provides a framework for understanding the structural make-up of dialogue by exploring the use of dialogue processes within community-level practice settings. In the main section of the article, we draw on two distinct narrative exchanges to demonstrate the structural make-up and critical aspects of dialogue processes.

Working with young people from refugee backgrounds in Australia

Social workers who are new to working with young people who are refugees may feel overwhelmed, out of their depth and inclined to defer to powerful psychiatric discourse. Arguing a role for social work engagement with young people as they face the personal, social, communal, cultural, political and economic challenges of settlement, this paper proposes a reflexive, deconstructive and dialogical approach within a broadly ecological model. All settlement tasks require mediation through the powerful discourse (language, values, constructs, social practices) of both the young persons own community and those of the new context. Creating spaces where young people can identify and negotiate the forces vying to shape them underpins and complements the urgent task of combating ethnocentricity in Australian institutions.

Peaceful community development in Vanuatu: A reflection on the Vanuatu kastom governance partnership

Vanuatu is undergoing intense, often confusing processes of change as people struggle with the interactions of customary and ‘introduced’ governance norms and of subsistence and market economic dynamics. A partnership between the Malvatumauri Council of Chiefs, the Australian Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies and AusAID has emerged to provide a context for customary and other community leaders to discuss and work with some of these pressures of change. This briefing provides a short overview of some of the issues and observations that have emerged over the first few years of the partnership and examines the implications of bringing peacebuilding or conflict resolution approaches into community development.

Teaching Community Development Personal practice Frameworks

The article, drawing on the results of a small research project investigating a cohort of student-practitioners who had studied a course titled ‘Frameworking for Community Development’, considers the implications for teaching within a university setting. The findings of the research discuss such topics as, what a personal practice framework is, the process of creating such a framework by practitioner-learners, and the use of traditions. Within the discussion the article argues for a shift away from using a ‘personal practice framework’, to a ‘subjectively held practice framework’, reflecting an increased awareness that the journey towards constructing a practice framework is itself an active engagement in a community of practice, rather than, or as well as, an intellectual or introspective personal journey. Furthermore, the article proposes that to create an experience of elicitive learning in a community of practice today runs counter to the usual learning style of universities. It requires opportunities to talk, to learn together, and to be with uncertainty and ambivalence, to challenge each other. The article contributes significant new social work thinking in relation to both reflective practice and teaching for community development.

Privatising development and environmental management: undermining social license in the Ugandan plantation forest sector

Conceptually located within the literature on privatisation of forestry, and environmental initiatives more broadly, this article examines how companies such as Green Resources in Uganda are achieving legitimacy, or failing to do so, in communities, thereby threatening what is understood as their Social License to Operate. Green Resources makes strong claims related to positive community investment, aimed towards social and environmental outcomes, recognising the importance of such investment for ongoing legitimacy both at a community level, and in terms of numerous licenses and certifications in the context of devolved environmental governance. Drawing on case study field research during 2011–2014, findings indicate that the SLO of Green Resources is under significant stress due to various forms of community response. Our findings lead to a discussion and conclusions about the contradictions and tensions emerging between the privatisation of development processes and corporate-led community investment, such that SLO becomes ever precarious. Our article builds on prior literature that applies SLO to analysis of the extractive industries, by arguing for the importance of including industrial large-scale plantation forestry into the lexicon of extractivist industrial development studies.

Flirting with danger: practice dilemmas for community development in disaster recovery

This article takes as its focus the contribution of community development to disaster recovery. It examines the experiences of community development officers employed in response to a series of devastating natural disasters within the state of Queensland, Australia. Utilizing the lens of the “dilemmatic space,” the article reveals three practice dilemmas for community development workers in disaster recovery: the struggle over discourse, the difficulties of dual accountabilities, and the challenges of legitimacy in intervention. The article concludes by examining the implications of these findings and the need for what is called ecological or organic practice to be applied to the disaster recovery context.

Exploring the interface between community development and cooperative development within South Africa – a challenge of theory, practice and policy

During the past few years within South Africa there has been a proliferation of state-led community development initiatives tasked to form community-based cooperatives. It is into such a context that research was conducted during 2011–13 into how South African community development workers understand and conduct their professional practice in relation to cooperative formation. Findings from the research consider issues such as: a dilemma of statecraft – working within instrumental contexts; the emotional work required of the practitioner; and, finally, confusing the developmental process. The discussions contribute to both theory-building and practice wisdom, while also contributing to South African cooperative policy.

The Place of Social Learning and Social Movement in Transformative Learning: A Case Study of Sustainability Schools in Uganda

This article analyses the sustainability school (SS) program of the National Association of Professional Environmentalists (NAPE), Uganda. The focus is on how the social network, enabled by the SS program, fosters social and transformative learning. The significance of this approach to community-based education for social change, including in the context of resource conflict and displacement, is considered. Findings focus on the local-level impacts of the program, including the ways in which collective and community organizing, and educational methodology shape both social and transformative learning. Discussion considers the importance of not only the “social” element of transformative learning but the need—within conflict and dangerous contexts—to link the social explicitly to building organization and a social movement that provides a structural container for people to engage in critical thinking and social action.

Carbon markets and the new ‘Carbon Violence’: A Ugandan study

Abstract This article examines the expansion of the global carbon economy, including a critical evaluation of its local level impacts. The authors describe the growing international support for carbon markets amongst governments, international institutions and financial investors as a response to human-induced climate change. By putting a price on carbon, proponents argue that carbon markets represent a win-win-win scenario; delivering benefits to local landholders where ecosystem services occur, as well as conferring benefits to investors and the environment. Plantation forestry represents a rapidly expanding sector in the broader carbon economy, with plantations representing one of a number of ‘flex crops’ able to be variously sold on the basis of their value as fuel, timber and carbon storage. To examine the impacts of expanding plantation forestry carbon markets, we take the case of Green Resources, reportedly the largest plantation forestry operator on the African continent. Drawing from in-depth research in 2012-2013 with affected communities in Uganda, the article examines the diverse historical and contemporary structural violence on which expansion of plantation forestry allegedly relies. Building upon earlier literature on violence (for example, Galtung [1990] and Watts [2001]), the authors introduce a new term ‘carbon violence’ to frame the distinctive forms of reported violence occurring alongside the burgeoning plantation forestry industry.

Re-thinking ‘tradition’ and community development practice: integrating Derrida's ‘trace’ and Peile's ‘creative synthesis’ into a reconceptualising of ‘traditions’ and community development practice

This paper examines and critiques the notion of ‘tradition’ within community development literature. Appreciatively, the paper presents a typology of how the community development literature uses the notion of tradition—as geographically-defined, methodologically-oriented and intellectually-rooted practice; and also discusses the functions of tradition as ‘inspiration’ for community work practice. Critically, the paper discusses the limits of the concept, offering a cautionary note to the potential pitfalls of a focus on tradition. It proposes Derridas ‘trace’ to moderate tradition as ‘stagnation of practice’. Furthermore, Peiles ‘creative synthesis’ is discussed to show how ‘parts’ of, or traces of different traditions can be appraised, modified and synthesised, through a creative process, into a new ‘whole’ which appears different to the sources of its constituent parts. Finally, the paper discusses the findings of a small research project that investigates the multiple ways ‘tradition’ is used or made sense of, by a small cohort of experienced community development workers within Brisbane, Australia.