Asset Based Community Development or ABCD seeks to define an ideal relationship between institutions, including the agencies through which policies are implemented in pursuit of their mission, and communities, particularly what has been termed colony communities or marginalized or dependent or so-called hard-to-reach (HTR) communities.
As Cormac Russell has said, the carrying capacity of a local community depends upon good stewardship of that community’s welfare ideally requiring the correct sequencing of nurturing at three levels to discover the community’s underpinning capacities and in a way that does not function to harm the social capital of the community. The result of such good stewardship in times of crisis should be sufficiency and the potential for greater abundance, not scarcity and abandonment. These three relationship levels, however, presume a benign power relationship or better between community and institution.
The first level is recognizing that there are things that communities do best on their own without institutional assistance. This requires asking though, what are the things that only residents/citizens can do in response to an issue? These should be determined regarding the strengths of the community, not its deficits.
These are the things for which a community already has the adequate inherent carrying capacity to do best on their own though this may not yet be realized. The efforts are purposefully applied by the community and should not be supplemented by purposive institutional programs. Any involved agency is hopefully facilitating these efforts to help make the efforts more efficient and helping to remove barriers not creating them. This though cannot be assumed.
The second level is recognizing that there are things that communities can basically do themselves but with some help from outside agencies. This level is beyond the carrying capacity of what a community can do solely on their own but could perhaps do with some help from an outside agency.
The carrying capacity of the community is not fully adequate to the task either because the extra needed capacity to some extent remains external or is inherent but has not been fully realized. What then are the things that residents/citizens can lead on and achieve with the support of institutions and their agencies (governmental, non-governmental, for-profit) in response to that issue? As important, can those agencies be expected to provide support to the community in doing what it can’t do for itself?
If so, those outside agencies should then ideally facilitate such activities so that the carrying capacity of the community goes as far but no further than is sustainable. Outside agencies should seek to be in the right relationship with communities and provide proportionate support that does not displace or diminish community power.
The third level is recognizing that there are things that communities need to have done for them by outside agencies. The required carrying capacity is both external and unrealizable by the community. The questions for the community then are not only what are the things that only institutions can do for us (residents/citizens) but as important, what can the community do to induce the agency to do for the community what the community can’t do for itself.
The agencies should then seek to do those things in as transparent and accountable a manner as possible but the scaling required to address the issue may be imposed on the community rather than induced by the agency.
The Nurture Development post, What We’ve Tried (in isolation) Hasn’t Worked: The Politics of Community, raised questions that need to be answered by or for a community so that the locus of control over a community’s carrying capacity is by the community, not an outside institution. The factors defining the three levels of relationships between communities and institutions can be expanded to enlarge the overall community based social carrying capacity.
The community needs to develop the extended carrying capacity or social capital to be able to determine:
- What are the things that institutions can stop doing which would create space for resident action, enlarging the community social carrying capacity?
- How agencies can create space for the community to grow in that capacity, moving from dependence to self-sufficiency and independence.
- How the agency can determine, what the agency can do to go beyond its current level of community support?
- What can institutions start offering beyond the services that they currently offer to support resident/citizen action?
The community often either does not have the carrying capacity or social capital on its own without help which is either never offered or if given can be threatened so that the institution and those who benefit maintain control. This means purposefully enhancing the inherent but yet still unrealized carrying capacity of the community to add to its needed social capital. It is difficult seeing this done through the purposive actions of an institution. A call for an institution to unilaterally remove barriers that it put in place would seem to argue against that community having sufficient carrying capacity on is own to scale to the next level.
The institutions are expected be to either move the community to a greater sense of inherent and realizable carrying capacity or to accept responsibility for external and unrealizable but still desired carrying capacity as part of its mission.
This requires a purposeful systemic change for which whether at first internally realized or unrealized is likely initiated through external carrying capacity if only as a catalyst. A required a change in the power relationship between the community and institution, an enhancement in social capital or the type of carrying capacity utilized by the community from direct and independent with the community directly doing things on its own to more indirect but controlled, things are done through an agency but the community holds greater control.
Cormac has pointed out that the power relationships of communities with outside institutional agencies have changed over time with institutions claiming that service delivery is neither sustainable nor ironically empowering. Austerity, defined by these institutions and implemented by agencies, means the communities now have fewer outside resources available so have more of the responsibility for maintaining carrying capacity, including taking over care of those who are highly service dependent, which is again a form of harvesting of that community's carrying capacity.
A question then is who specifically is the "We" whom Cormac speaks of that needs to learn from communities what they can do and care enough about to do with or without outside help. Who is the “We” that not only helps communities determine what they can do with some support, and only then helps in determining what external resources are needed but also helps in negotiating with the government institutions or enhancing the carrying capacity of the community to do such on their own?
Now I know that the answer is us, being both the enemy we have met as well as being the ones that we have been waiting for. The devil though is in the details. Direct democracy, in some form, combining both participatory democracy, emphasizing ABCD and deliberative democracy, emphasizing Systems Thinking is one potential path to needed new community paradigms.
part 1
part 2
No comments:
Post a Comment