Environment and Community Ecology Remade as Part of New Community Paradigms

The previous post of this blog revisited and updated the New Community Paradigms (NCP) wiki page Community Arts. The next wiki page to be updated is Environment. Admittedly, Climate Change has not been a primary focus until recently. The focus has been more on democratic community governance. Recently though issues such as the #GreenNewDeal has clearly shown that Climate Change is a manifestation of governance.

As with most of the NCP wiki pages, Environment is a collection of resources gathered over time. It is by no means comprehensive nor is there any assertion of personal expertise in their selection. The sites selected are only a sampling of useful sites that could be applied in creating new community paradigms.

There have been a number of changes since the last time Environment was featured. In addition to the loss of some sites, there has also been a change from the Brain to Kumu as a primary systems mapping tool for NCP. A meta-oriented change made early was moving from a concept of Community Environment to Community Ecology. The word ecology being judged as providing a greater biological orientation to the concept of community than the word environment. For better comprehension, the Environment wiki page has been organized into three sections. The first of which is Community Science / Education / Systems Thinking and Practice.

The latest new resource is the Home of Environmental Data & Governance Initiative (EDGI) which seeks to improve environmental data stewardship and to promote environmental health and Environmental Justice through the analysis, through Digital Justice, of federal environmental data, websites, institutions, and policy. Towards an Environmental Data Justice Statement: Initial Thoughts - EDGI provides a good introduction of their efforts.

Public Lab, is a DIY environmental science community with a strong democratic ethos as reflected by their Public Comment section. Public Lab injects community knowledge into civic decision-making about local environmental concerns, listing scores of DIY citizen projects on its extensive community populated Wiki website. The Science of Collective Discovery provides Open Source Stories, featuring organizations like Public Lab and others on how citizens are using open hardware to make groundbreaking discoveries.

NAAEE | North American Association for Environmental Education is a force multiplier for environmental education, promoting excellence in the field and expanding the reach and impact of their collective work.

The Climate Leader Climate Interactive tool provides an introductory training series in systems thinking to help fuel the global response to climate change. En-ROADS is a fast, powerful simulation tool for understanding how we can achieve our energy transition and climate goals through changes in our energy use, consumption, and policies.

The next section us Climate Change for the Better. The Citizens' Climate Lobby is a non-profit, nonpartisan, grassroots advocacy organization focused on national policies to address climate change by taking action on climate change solutions.

The Post Carbon Institute is intent on leading the transition to a resilient world providing individuals, communities, businesses, and governments with the resources needed to understand and respond to the interrelated economic, energy, environmental, and equity crises that defines the twenty-first century by envisioning a world of resilient communities and re-localized economies thriving within ecological bounds. The closely related Homepage of Resilience provides not only a community library with space to read and think, but also a vibrant café to support building community resilience in a world of multiple emerging challenges: the decline of cheap energy, the depletion of critical resources like water, complex environmental crises like climate change and biodiversity loss, and the social and economic issues which are linked to these.

The Project Drawdown lists one hundred potential solutions to reverse global warming from retrofitting to refrigerant management. While the Solutions Project seeks to accelerate the transition to 100% clean energy by championing a movement that is more inclusive, more collaborative, and more celebratory through storytelling, grant making, and capacity building and by honoring clean energy leaders, investing in promising solutions, and building relationships between unlikely allies.

Global Green USA works in partnership with local governments and other public agencies that are ready to “do” sustainability. They help create innovative and replicable policies, programs, and procedures so that sustainable practices become standard in the planning, design, construction, and operation of the built environment.

C40 Cities Live - Blog is a network of large and engaged cities from around the world committed to implementing meaningful and sustainable climate-related actions locally that will help address climate change globally.

Taking a more business-oriented perspective is the Portland State College of Urban & Public Affairs | The Initiative on Triple Bottom Line Development. Their Triple Bottom Line Tool is unfortunately on hiatus.

The final section consists of sites seen as addressing Energy & Climate Data. Climate Change being recognized as a Wicked Problem, the data being presented can be particularly complex. This is especially true with USA Energy Data which presents an interactive map detailing America’s daily energy use by Saul Griffith, co-founder and CEO of Otherlab.

The EJSCREEN: Environmental Justice Screening and Mapping Tool is a US EPA developed environmental justice (EJ) mapping and screening tool purportedly based on nationally consistent data and an approach that combines environmental and demographic indicators in maps and reports. Unfortunately, certainty doesn't seem as possible with the current federal administration.

Taking a more expansive approach to the issue and recognize the potential contribution business and perhaps more conservative perspectives, the Carbon Tracker Initiative seeks to align the capital markets with efforts to tackle climate change. The Carbon Disclosure Project - Global climate change reporting system provides a transformative global system for thousands of companies and cities to measure, disclose, manage and share environmental information with the view that market forces can, hopefully, be seen as a major cause of change when provided with the necessary information.

The Greenhouse Gas Data Publication Tool is another EPA tool that explores Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Emissions from Large Facilities. The Home for Environmental software tools for accounting, carbon footprinting & sustainability performance, although located in the United Kingdom, is intended to bring together people needing to do some form of environmental assessment (and particularly quantification) with people that have developed tools to do these assessments and calculations. Their tools vary in format, including documents, spreadsheets, websites, and other software programs.

The Challenge is research published in Nature Sustainability with the vision of, ”A Good Life For All Within Planetary Boundaries” (summarized in The Conversation) that is the first to quantify the national resource use associated with achieving a good life for over 150 countries. Recognizing that no country in the world currently meets the basic needs of its citizens at a globally sustainable level of resource use. The Climate Wizard enables technical and non-technical audiences alike to access leading climate change information and visualize the impacts anywhere on Earth.

The site Bombs in Your Backyard - ProPublica provides a full map of sites contaminated with military toxic waste and explosives some of which are located near schools, residential neighborhoods, rivers, and lakes.

Environment was placed under the Community Ecology map of the New Community Paradigms Wiki map project which can assist in both discovering and communicating unrealized connections and redefining connections. One can get from an element narrative (Environment) to the underlying map (Community Ecology) by clicking the white space of the map. One can highlight and select an element (Environment) in the Community Ecology map by selecting the text in the narrative section and mousing over and clicking or by selecting the element’s colored circle within the map. One can get back to the relevant New Community

Paradigms wiki page using the URL, e.g., newcommunityparadigms.pbworks.com/w/page/44793688/Environment in the particular narrative section of the element.

What the Kumu Community Ecology wiki map graphically reveals is that the concept consists of Sustainability and Environment, as well as Streets and Transportation, each of which can connect back to the NCP wiki map through an On Kumu Wiki Map link. Community Ecology bridges back through Planning the Urban Landscape (formerly Built Environment) to Places and then on to the concept of Livable Communities and beyond.

All of this though only provides resources not answers or solutions which must still be developed by those searching for ways of creating new community paradigms.

Evaluation through Logic Models versus Theory of Change with ABCDE

Now that a larger framework has been created in the last post for Wendy McCaig’s conversation concerning perspectives on evaluation, we can take a more direct look at Measuring Success in ABCD – Continued. We will be working with Kumu relational mapping again, so I will be explaining a few things along the way since it has been awhile and for some readers, this could be the first time. 

The  CDCD Asset Mapping Process graphic Wendy provided has been re-created, and displayed on the right-hand side, of the interactive Kumu map CDCD, Citizen-Driven Community Defined. 

Also available is an interactive Kumu version of the Approaches to Poverty Map that Wendy provided in her blog post, 3 Approaches to Poverty: Relief, Betterment, Development. Wendy's original maps are also available within the narrative section of the Kumu map by clicking on the underlined link. A lightbox will be revealed on top of the screen. As explained in the Kumu map narrative section, the lightbox is closed by clicking the X at the top right corner. Other maps will be provided separately in this post but are also included in the narrative section of the Kumu map CDCD, Citizen-Driven Community Defined or in other related maps. 

Within the narrative section of each Kumu map, if you mouse over dotted underlined text then that element will be highlighted in the related map. Click the underlined text and the narrative for that element to open up. Click the map's white area and the narrative and map will reset. In the Kumu environment, the maps stay in one window. 

There are differences with the interactive Kumu versions of the maps and Wendy’s graphics. The Kumu CDCD Asset Map includes the social concerns that the community initiatives are supposed to address. Wendy’s map displays multiple Resident Led Initiatives for each Action Team. The Kumu map only reflects a particular initiative for each neighborhood, each of which addresses a particular community concern related to kids’ safety.  

The Kumu Approaches to Poverty map has both the Poverty Alleviation component and the Wealth Creation component but are displayed as separate circles. The Spiritual Need element is placed between these two. 

The Social Problems and Community Focus of Wendy’s article is on kids’ safety within an environment besieged by gun violence, sexual predators and unsafe streets made all the more dangerous because the kids don’t have anywhere else to play. Each Neighborhood Initiative addresses one of these concerns.

The intention is to dynamically integrate the CDCD map and Approaches to Poverty map together to begin to answer the five community questions posed by Nurture Development.  

 1. What are the things that only residents/citizens can do in response to this issue?

 2. What are the things that residents/citizens can lead on and achieve with the support of institutions (governmental, nongovernmental, for profit) in response to this issue?

 3 What are the things that only institutions can do for us?

 4 What are the things that institutions can stop doing which would create space for resident action?

 5 What can institutions start offering beyond the services that they currently offer to support resident/citizen action?

In addition, there is the inclusion of three possible Paths of Influence found at the bottom of the Kumu Approaches to Poverty narrative. Again, mousing over each of the dotted underlined paths reveals that path within the map area to the right. Clicking on one of them will open the narrative and reveal the elements involved in that path while clicking on the map white space will take you back. 

The idea for the paths of influence is based on the ABCD theme of “From what's wrong to what's strong.” The Social Emotional Needs of one person could be seen as a deficit but addressed in the aggregate by connected others towards any one person's needs or a group's needs or everyone else’s needs, especially if combined with the communal addressing of Spiritual Needs becomes a strength. 

Under Influence Path 1, the journey is a politically oriented one in which the community attempts to influence the government institution.  Under Influence Path 3, the journey is more of one of partnership in which the community needs to work both with the government institution and on its own at the same time. It is still possible though for the community to take Influence Path 2 in which the community takes action on its own though as reflected in the actions of Better Block and its provision of open source placemaking, it can sometimes be a matter of asking for forgiveness rather than permission.

Two of the Neighborhood Initiatives are seen as primarily addressing Social Emotional Needs. Showing the kids that the community cares for them. At their current degree of interaction, though these community actions through specific members fit 1. What are the things that only residents/citizens can (or would) do in response to this issue? To what degree they address other needs are questions that would still need to be asked. 

Resident Led Initiative 3, takes place in Neighborhood C. In this case, it is very likely that the possible choices invoked are “(2) What are the things that residents/citizens can lead on and achieve with the support of institutions (governmental, nongovernmental, for profit) in response to this issue?”, or “(3) What are the things that only institutions can do for us?”, to resolve physical safety needs or fulfill environmental needs related to health and welfare such as parks. In such circumstances, the community needs to go beyond providing only social-emotional support. Circumstances will dictate which of the paths of influence or others the community decides to take. 

It might be possible to expand programs such as the Cocoa Station under skill 2 to environment 3 and others to help create a more pedestrian-friendly environment. Additional skills could be added to each neighborhood and more detailed understanding of each environment and applicable social concerns could be provided. 

None of this has, however, reached a point of evaluation. Not only evaluating the individual projects put out by the community but also evaluating the means by which the community puts out such projects and implements them. In the last post, Cormac Russell provided a number of different evaluation methods, Developmental Evaluation, Most Significant Change, Narrative Therapy and Marshall Ganz's work (pdf) on Public Narrative moving to a Theory of Change and on to a Theory of Practice, all  beyond the standard Logic Model’s limitations that concerned Wendy.  Part of the reason that they are more comprehensive is that they are initiated when the project or program is beginning or even prior, question assumptions and extent even beyond completion.

Marshall Ganz's work (pdf) could be especially relevant to the paths of influence getting people to tell their stories in a manner that creates community cohesion thereby focusing community resolve. This post and the related Kumu map will focus on a Theory of Change, specifically as envisioned by Acumen. The example provided is based on the Last Mile Food Truck project proposed in the Financial Modeling and Last Mile Homeless Food Truck blog post series. A second Acumen course was taken on social impact using the first course as a foundation. The Acumen Theory of Change involves considering one’s assumptions at each step of the process and acquiring evidence to support one’s conclusion. There are also other questions to be considered and a recognition of possible pitfalls.  

The example provided is specific but it needs to be remembered that it is also hypothetical. The blog series was on the Acumen Financial Modeling course involved far more than financial accounting considerations including the systemic difficulties inherent in implementing such projects. The financial models proposed were though fantasy finance or imaginary impact investing as is the concept of social impact here. The full extent of lessons learned has of yet to be determined and revealed, so further inquiries can be expected in the future.

The more relevant question is how this could be related to the three neighborhood initiatives and the particular paths of influence they might take. Were some of the solutions proposed low hanging fruit or could more ambitious projects be developed by the community with our without the assistance of government or non-profit institutions? Assistance would not necessarily have to be directly related to specific projects, it could be related to how the community approaches change through processes such as placemaking with the Project for Public Places or participatory budgeting through the Participatory Budgeting Project or other means of greater community. The relevance of the mapping process is not the completed maps but the process of the community expanding and enhancing its efforts at community empowerment.

ABCD, Social Networks and the Commons connecting Associational Life

Cormac Russell had an interesting discussion with Wendy McCaig on Twitter a while ago during which I made a suggestion that the topic would be suitable for a blog post. Wendy took the suggestion to heart and wrote, Measuring Success in ABCD – Continued, the "Continued" being from a previous post,  3 Indicators of a Strong Community. Which as the first part looked at evaluating communities on an Asset Based Community Development basis, as a whole, in terms of social capital bonding (connecting neighborhood residents together) and bridging (connecting volunteers from outside the community with residents, or I would presume, the community with other communities within a common jurisdiction), while the second part, Measuring Success in ABCD – Continued, looked at evaluating programs, activities, and projects within a community, by the community and for the community but still needing to interact at some level with institutional entities be they government or nonprofit. These are different forms of social networking that need to be made to work together.

In a post from 2015, 3 Approaches to Poverty: Relief, Betterment, Development, Wendy differentiated between a Poverty Alleviation System which addresses surface issues, such as institutions providing individual relief or means of individual betterment and a Wealth Generation System which looks to underlying causes that impact overall community development. Institutions, however, can use control of the first system and surface issue level to restrict access to the second system and underlying cause level. The question is how the community can integrate the two systems together putting a causal understanding of the Wealth Creation system on top of a Poverty Alleviation System that works through community development to address individual betterment or relief as needed. In the meantime, there is still the need to face the numerous challenges found in all communities and sometimes that requires the assistance of institutions.

Institutions insist, for arguably good reasons, upon evaluations as criteria for receiving funding but this can put the community into a dependent role. A dilemma then facing Wendy is that most institutional funders of public services, whether government or non-profit philanthropy, including United Way, want agency defined outcomes, linear measurements of attendance or level of engagement found in the traditional Logic Model, not community led impact. Cormac suggested a number of alternative forms of evaluation and assessment including Developmental Evaluation, Most Significant Change, Narrative Therapy and Marshall Ganz's work (pdf) on Public Narrative moving to a Theory of Change and onto a Theory of Practice.  There is evidence based research for these approaches, the challenge is educating funders to the importance of this to community development.

This also raises the importance of a community answering five questions raised in the Nurture Development post, What We’ve Tried (in isolation) Hasn’t Worked: The Politics of Community so that the locus of the question and control is the community, not the institution.

1 What are the things that only residents/citizens can do in response to this issue?

2 What are the things that residents/citizens can lead on and achieve with the support of institutions (governmental, nongovernmental, for-profit) in response to this issue?

3 What are the things that only institutions can do for us?

4 What are the things that institutions can stop doing which would create space for resident action?

5 What can institutions start offering beyond the services that they currently offer to support resident/citizen action?

The last four questions raise related follow-up questions. What influence does the community have over the institution to induce it to do for the community what it can’t do for itself, or to support the community in doing what it can do for itself, or to create space for the community to grow in that capacity, or what the institution can do to go beyond its current level of community support? This is not only a question of capacity for both the community and the institution but of motivation as well, particularly if other communities are competing for institutional influence on a political basis. 

This raises the concerns put forward by what was deemed the Scottish Conflict Model in the last post whether it is feasible to bridge to an institution when the relationship between a particular community and the ruling institutions may be a confrontational one. In such cases, there is an even greater need for social networking through bonding and bridging. It needs, however, to be tied together in a manner that is collective and inclusive.

As reported in Asset Based Community Development Lessons for Systems Thinking, “A viable way to be collective and inclusive from the bottom up, according to Cormac and those with a similar mindset, is to work through the concept of the communal Commons to enable some type of Coalition of the Doing in determining the relationship between Capitalism and the Commons".  

It becomes a matter according to Cormac then of not reforming (institutional) systems but reclaiming the Commons. The Commons, according to Wikipedia, “…is the cultural and natural resources accessible to all members of a society, including natural materials such as air, water, and a habitable earth. These resources are held in common, not owned privately.”

As cited in ABCD Conflict Consensus Debate and Systems Thinking 1 of 2, “In outlining ‘12 Domains of People Powered Change’ Russell provides paths for solving some of the most pressing social problems by restoring bonds among people.

"The challenge is not the reformation of institutions, it’s the reseeding of associational life. When our associations strengthen, they will not only put manners on our institutions but will also stop outsourcing citizen and community work onto those systems. Then we will begin to discover that the Good Life is ours for the creating.”

Cormac Russell

Cormac cites Ivan Illich in discussing the limits of institutions in advocating for a return to the commons. 

"In areas of childcare, healthcare, mental health, environmental and ecological sustainability, local prosperity and public safety, we desperately need to start a new conversation that takes a view from the bank of the river, a view that does not dismiss the river, but takes it in, alongside the rest of the ecosystems (our non-institutional capacities).”

Cormac Russell

According to Cormac, the average person has 51 other persons in their associational lives. He cites Dunbar to argue that we need 150 persons. So one measure is the other 99 relationships. The Dunbar, to whom he is referring is Robin Dunbar, the originator of Dunbar's Number, a suggested cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships. Here is a ForaTV video RSA video of Dunbar explaining his theory. 

The number of 150, according to Dunbar "refers to those people with whom you have a personalized relationship, one that is reciprocal and based around general obligations of trust and reciprocity." According to Cormac, these are friends and neighbors not other service users, family or professionals, “It comes down to how many unforced and unpaid for relationships of acceptance we have in door knocking distance.”

There is not, however, a single Dunbar Number but rather a scale of numbers, of ever-widening circles of connection.  According to Dunbar, there is a cognitive limit to the number of relations that any one primate (including humans) can maintain because "this limit is a direct function of neocortex size, and ... this in turn limits group size where stable interpersonal relationships can be maintained." It consists then of four layers, or "Circles of Acquaintanceship," which scale relative to each other by a factor of 3— 5 intimates, and then successive layers of 15, 50 and 150. The first group, of three to five, is our very closest friends. Then comes 12 (the size of a jury) to 15, those whose death would be devastating to us. The next circle is made up of 50 persons, or “the typical overnight camp size among traditional hunter-gatherers like the Australian Aboriginals or the San Bushmen of southern Africa.”  The number of people increases while the emotional connection decreases with each successive circle, so it is not just walking distance but emotional distance as well.  Beyond the 150 number, there are further rings, for example, fifteen hundred being the average tribe size in hunter-gatherer societies, the number of people who speak the same language or dialect. Even larger circles involve even greater levels of complexity.  

It is upon this basis, a system of associational relationships to develop community wealth that Asset Based Community Development seeks to help communities find solutions to community challenges. This requires not only connections but diversity as well according to Professor Scott E. Page. 

Within this framework, the Commons are both place-based with associational networks as a people based commons,  and the Social Network is also both people based with the commons as a place-based defined social system so that the smallest associational successes of ABCD can reverberate through the entire community (system).

ABCD and Scottish Questions - Determining the Direction a Community Faces

The last blog post argued against the idea that Asset Based Community Development or ABCD is ‘neoliberalism with a community face’ as argued for by the study’s authors, Mary Anne MacLeod of the University of Glasgow and Akwugo Emejulu of the University of Edinburgh. 

ABCD is not established upon the logic of free market relations nor hostile to state-sponsored social welfare, it is just not wholly dependent upon it. An authentic ABCD model, doesn’t have a built-in distrust of the state but rather a wariness of what the state can do and is open to but does not necessarily support free market ideas, especially those brought from outside of the community. It is not based on theories and practices that seek to individualize and privatize social problems. 

The reason why  ABCD is being successfully implemented in the US and the UK, since the 1980s, is not then the neoliberal consensus dominating economic, political and policy debates in these two countries. Views expressed in ABCD literature by such as Kretzmann and McKnight may look to reduce dependency and increase individual responsibility but neither skepticism nor mistrust of the state are key themes. They don’t concur with either David Cameron’s position on ‘a culture of entitlement’ among the poor or with Wiggan's argument that poverty and unemployment originate in the poor choices and behavior of individuals rendering an  expensive, albeit well-meaning system of state support ineffective, while reinforcing social problems. 

This does not mean, however, that neoliberal politicians cannot use asset based jargon for their own purposes and it is only fair to ask who should be keeping an eye out for this. Further, discussions of dependency and responsibility suggests to the authors that an assets agenda in Scotland, placed within a wider debate regarding the role of the state in austere times, could potentially be used to justify a reduction in the state’s role in tackling social problems such as Glasgow’s persistent health inequalities.

This post will attempt to consider more carefully the other components of the study’s authors’ perspective. An important concern of the authors of the study is whose interests are being ultimately served and whose voices are being marginalized when the power held by different parties is unequal between different individuals and across groups in different sectors, seeking, perhaps only ostensibly, to work collaboratively and build partnerships.

In Scotland, the authors tell us, a tradition of strong social democracy champions a primary role for the state in the lives of its citizens bringing tension to this question. The authors assert that although ABCD has been championed in Scotland, there is some skepticism about it and how it might be used to enhance or transform contemporary community development work.

While policy makers and commentators in Scotland may recognize the opportunities, challenges and tensions that a discourse of assets creates, they are also aware that, as McLean asserts, ‘...a clear political position and direction to the debate remains absent’. The problem is that ABCD, though it may have political impact, is not a political question, especially not one to be asked by political institutions. 

ABCD is seen then as creating both challenges and possibilities in relation to austerity and welfare reform in the UK. The concern that there is a significant potential for the asset based approach to not only sideline the issue of inequalities, but to also increase them cannot be dismissed out of hand. The extent this concern is absent from the key literature in this area is unknown but a lack of literature has already been recognized.

The debate is more directly then between different competing analyses and means concerning causes and especially solutions to social problems in the context of the United Kingdom. If work is needed to avoid asset based approaches perpetuating inequalities and ensuring that resources and support are available to those most in need then arguably ABCD has a primary responsibility and, I believe, capacity for this.

It has to be understood that there is a difference between an asset based approach and Asset Based Community Development.  A determining factor and perhaps a fundamental difference between a general asset based approach and Asset Based Community Development, as I understand it, is the determination of the locus of control for a community.  Anything that takes the locus of control away from the community itself placing it in the hands of an outside agency, no matter how well meaning or benign is not ABCD. It is this sidestepping of this fundamental principle that is behind most attempts to usurp ABCD for political purposes and a common means of doing so is through specialized language.

The authors cite both McLean and IACD in the identification of a range of methodologies involving an asset based approach, including asset mapping, appreciative inquiry, participatory appraisal and co-production. McLean goes on to point out correctly that, “…many examples of asset based work may not use the 'asset' terminology".

The resulting ambiguity of the concept stemming from the "plethora of concepts" as used by government and decision makers comes through then, 'with some degree of abandon without taking on the real and challenging demands which each of them involves if they are to be effective’. 

A need to clarify the meaning of an asset based approach and an expressed concern that it is ‘all jargon’ was also raised by community development workers and activists attending a ‘Shaking our Assets’ conference. Yet participants also described what they considered the best aspects of an asset based approach in terms of: ‘co-production’, ‘community involvement’, ‘influence’, ‘shifting the power balance’ and ‘participation’.

The authors recognized what they saw as some potential benefits of a general asset based approach. ABCD, seen as a more consensus-based approach to community development work, could increase individual and collective responsibility for social problems and social welfare. Consensus within ABCD, it should be kept in mind, is foremost within the community itself.

An asset based approach offers a potential means for increasing democratization, both in terms of  community projects planning and delivery, as well as the designing and delivery of public services by engaging people in defining both the problem and the solution, using a more co-productive way of working, through what was  called a “we’ll-do-it-with-you mode”. This still though leaves questions as to exactly where the locus of control is situated.

A focus on assets could allow for a more direct involvement in setting the priorities for service planning and delivery, recognizing that asset based approaches might offer the potential for changing attitudes of health and other public sector professionals in terms of listening to and valuing the interests, skills and knowledge of individuals and community groups. This, however, suggests a shifting of the locus of control.

An asset based approach then is asserted to reflect a consensus building model, that is consistent with the views of Kretzmann and McKnight, as suggested by study participant Mary, a community development worker:

“It’s very much about recognising the skills that everybody has when we put them together both individually, both within partnerships or projects which we form, between a group of people working together, or much wider than that the public sector working with the private sector...It’s very much that collective when everybody works together and its greater than the sum of the parts when you pull all of those resources together.”

Another study participant Rachel, also a community development worker, conversely provides a different perspective: "I think our systems and bureaucracy are stifling it [the asset based approach]. We are just so full of systems that are so hierarchical [that] kind of stop people from contributing in the way that they could."

This raised issues of power relating then to the challenges of taking a genuinely democratic approach with certain themes in the literature, as cited by the authors, highlighting the ways in which a supposedly ABCD model frames social welfare services as disempowering. More precisely, several study participants spoke of asset based work in terms of its potential and dilemmas in relation to oppositional community activism for social justice with some participants being confronted with a real dilemma about using what was identified as an ABCD approach because of the contradictions they experience when considering neighborhood-level solidarity work. 

This analysis is still tentative and open to revision based on feedback.  An endeavor to look for resolution will be sought within the next blog post. 

A Second Look at Neoliberalism with a Community Face and Asset Based Community Development.

The last post took a look at Cormac Russell’s blog post Neoliberalism with a Community Face? A Critical Analysis of Asset-Based Community Development in Scotland?, which took a look at the original article Neoliberalism with a Community Face. While I agreed with his assessment, it was from knowledge through a secondary source available to me a year or more ago. Thanks to Cormac and others, the initial article is easier to find, so it is possible now to start taking a closer look.  This is my perspective and not an attempt at an objective analysis. A second look did not change my overall position but it did demonstrate that the issues were more complicated than first appreciated. 

The authors of the initial article, Mary Anne MacLeod, University of Glasgow and Akwugo Emejulu, University of Edinburgh, took a feminist research approach with an interest in critically examining the implications of Asset Based Community Development or ABCD,  “…for the least powerful in society and whose interests might be served—and whose silenced—by this focus on, ‘strengths’ .”  No objections with this or with their decision to use snowball sampling but doing both I believe could be problematic. If you start with a specific perspective in choosing study participants who then recruit future subjects from among their own acquaintances, the chance for a skewed outcome seems increasingly probable. 

One can find a range of perspectives within the ABCD Institute, at Northwestern University,  on various approaches such as Collective Impact. Depending upon ten practitioners to get an in depth understanding of ABCD seems limited, especially when half of those participants interviewed occupied what were termed strategic policy positions. To what degree did those positions truly incorporate ABCD into their daily routines?

The authors go on to assert that they organized, coded and analyzed their data in relation to the patterns or  "stable regularities" emerging from the interview transcripts until reaching saturation point which could again suggest at least a potential toward biasing the outcome. 

I cannot say that this approach was wrong but if one's premise is that they ended with the wrong conclusions then this may be because of the path they took. From my perspective, they should have at least taken an extra effort to interview someone such as Cormac, or someone else they cited, who had a clear ABCD outlook. 

The authors also start with a problematic philosophical premise in identifying Asset Based Community Development with neoliberalism, which they see as a:

(T)heory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterised by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade. The role of the state is to create and preserve an institutional framework appropriate to such practices.

Their data analysis process focused on the changing nature of the Scottish welfare system through what they saw as a rise of neoliberalism and a decline in a historical tradition of social democracy. 

"In this ideological context, we argue that ABCD represents a capitulation and compliance with the prevailing neoliberal reforms of the American welfare state under the Reagan Administration."

The perspective of the authors is that the embedding of free market principles into community development organizations, which then seeps into the logic of local people may, in the long run, be counter-productive to social and economic interests of marginalized groups.

Besides contrasting different theories of economics, the authors also contrast conflict models of social action, in the tradition of Saul Alinsky, with what they see as consensus models of social action. 

It is, according to the authors, because organizations supporting conflict models of social action were actively targeted and de-funded that allowed consensus-based initiatives like ABCD grew in influence. 

Because ABCD does not seek to organize against the elimination, reduction and/or privatization of public services, it is accused of accommodating neoliberalism in both theory and practice. From this point on whatever is wrong with neoliberalism is wrong with ABCD and any arguments by the New Right against the welfare state, as breeding a culture of dependency best remedied by free market principles are also by association shared by ABCD. 

Neoliberalism, though, is primarily an economic framework which has been used both by Reagan, as a Republican and Clinton, as a democrat in terms of governance. A Tweddle-Dee, Tweddle-Dum difference for some perhaps with a political tradition far more diverse than what we have in the USA but it makes an important difference in understanding the roots of ABCD.

The authors seemingly define community only in its relation to the state and the state to the community. According to them, ABCD supporters seem not to recognize that, ‘systems’ can both harm and protect liberty and rights. That it is not the role of community development to simply disavow the state. Instead it should make the local and national state work better for the most marginalized. Transferring various state responsibilities to individuals and communities is not the way to reform the state.

The [welfare] state can be a cumbersome, bureaucratic and self-serving institution that undermines individual liberty and innovation. But it can also be a key guarantor and protector of equality and rights which makes individual liberty possible and meaningful.

As a result, ABCD intervention, resulting in the shifting of state responsibilities for social problems onto individuals and communities is seen as troublesome.

The author’s argument for a deep skepticism and distrust of the state’s ability to function for the benefit of society by ABCD is though wrong. ABCD is not, in my estimation, anti-state. It is closer to being anti-institutional but in truth it is pro-community. 

I can agree to a certain extent then, that as the authors state, for ABCD, ”...the idea of citizenship is explicitly separated from discussions of the state and the rights and responsibilities of citizens in relation to the state.”

That which ‘makes citizenship possible’ at least if I am interpreting McKnight interpretation of de Tocqueville’s community of associations correctly, is not a connection to or as a derivation of the state or its institutions but arises from what ‘today we call civil society’. A perspective held by this blog for some time.

Neoliberalism is a more modern continuation of the more classical liberalism arising from the Enlightenment, a bridge too far it could be argued but ABCD, itself, has far more in common with the late 19th and 20th century when, “…liberalism morphed from an individualistic philosophy to one that is more communal in nature.” There still continues to be a tension between the individual and the community.   

It does not follow then, as the authors argue, that ABCD, by framing notions of civil society and citizenship, as separate and independent of any notion of state responsibility (not removed from as the authors state), that it promotes privatization of public life.

The authors themselves admit that their, "... approach places significant limitations on the claims which can be made regarding representativeness and therefore on the generalisability of our data." Yet, generalize against an entire community empowerment discipline is what they did.

I believe it is still important to recognize that the authors, "...sought to examine the perspectives of our participants in their own words and attempted to understand the meaning of their views in relation to the socio-cultural context in Scotland ". 

It does seem that what precisely constitutes ABCD in Scotland arguably remains open to interpretation. While I disagree with their portrayal of ABCD, the argument as to which is better for Scotland is less settled. I won’t try to insert myself directly into that discussion but I will take a look generally at some of the issues raised concerning this question.