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Community development and
the contested politics of the late
modern agora: of, alongside or
against neoliberalism?
Martin Geoghegan and Fred Powell
Introduction
Bauman (1998, pp. 86 – 87) likens the contemporary idea of civil society to
the ancient Greek concept of agora as a site of political assembly or local
marketplace, an interface between the public and private spheres of social
life. He argues that in modern society, the agora has come under sustained
attack. Its enemy during the twentieth century was totalitarianism, whereas
as we enter the twenty-first century it is neoliberalism. In this article, we
identify the notion of community development as a modern discursive
form of agora and examine its politically contested relationship with neoli-
beralism in late modernity. We begin by noting the neoliberal assumption of
economic growth as ‘good change’, and contrast this understanding with
the reality of the pathologies brought about through untrammelled econ-
omic ‘development’. Community development, we then argue, exists in
relation to processes of commodity production and exchange in late moder-
nity, being a form of politics where citizens attempt to participate in their
socio-political milieus in order to influence developmental processes. We
link the emergence of community development as the late modern agora
to the democratic forces unleashed in modernism and the subsequent
quest for social justice. The meaning of community development as the
late modern agora is then explored, and we note the subsequent contestation
over its status, as revealed in variant ideological perspectives on the role of
civil society. In particular, we contrast three understandings and practice of
community development: the neoliberal version that sees the notion of
active citizenship as the outcome of the development of Putnamian social
capital, where civil society is subservient to the needs of economic develop-
ment; the corporatist version that advocates a partnership between the
state, market and civil society which realizes new forms of governance
that supersede the welfare state; and the activist version, where community
development is envisaged as local, nodal and global resistance to neoliber-
alism. In essence, we are posing the question: ‘community development: of,
alongside or against neoliberalism?’.
Community development and the
‘post-ideological consensus’
In our view, community development is a form of politics whereby citizens
participate in civil society through communicative action in order to
directly socialize policy issues. Ife (2002, p. xi) notes that sceptics have
suggested that ‘community development is dead’. Endisms are currently
in vogue among proponents of the much vaunted historical victory of capit-
alism over socialism in late modernity. For them, global neoliberalism as a
development model is underpinned by the normative assumption that
capitalist development upon modernization is ‘good change’ for the better-
ment of the planet (Thomas, 2000, p. 24). They view the world as having
achieved a post-ideological democratic consensus, based on the fusion of
minimalist expressions of democracy embodied in contemporary liberal-
ism, with social action organized predominantly through the market.
The age of contestation between market-led development embodied in
organized capitalism and state-led development embodied in twentieth-
century socialism is simply over in the global neoliberal analysis – what
has become known via its paradigmatic form as ‘the end of history’
thesis (e.g. Fukuyama, 1992). Zizˇ ek calls this a fundamental denkverbot –
a prohibition on thinking – and argues ‘today, actual freedom of thought
means freedom to question the prevailing liberal democratic, post-
ideological consensus – or it means nothing’ (Zˇ izˇ ek, 2002, pp. 167 – 168).
In this view, there must be a right to truth, one which permits criticism of
the prevailing post-ideological consensus if democracy itself is to survive.
Bauman (1998, p. 8) similarly asserts that we need to bring back ‘from
exile ideas such as the public good, the good society, equity, justice and
so on’. This is a view of the world in which community development has
a vital catalytic role to play in democratising democracy, where community
development as a late modern form of agora provides a vital public space for
democratic dialogue and political criticism in an era characterized by the
eclipse of the ability and interest of the ordinary citizen to influence the
practices and practitioners of ‘thin’ (i.e. liberal ) democracy, a democratic
form based on Madisonian representation in the political process by
elites, rather than on mass participation by the citizenry (see, Barber, 1984).
Critics of market-led development have demonstrated its limitations.
Davis (2007) in his remarkable book Planet of Slums has traced a global
trajectory of unregulated capitalist development since the 1960s that has
led to today’s unprecedented mega-slums of the Cono Sur, Sadr City and
the Cape Flats. He argues that in these vast shanty towns a new urban pro-
letariat has emerged unimagined by either classical Marxism or neoliberal
orthodoxy. Such developments raise the issue of ‘bad change’ and the rights
to, and need of, planetary citizenship – cosmopolitanism – in a globalized
world. The adage ‘think global, act local’ reminds us of the continuing
political relevance of the agora in late modern society as an arena in which
new emancipatory discourses can be forged that lead to late modern
solutions to late modern problems through participatory democracy
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