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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