This edited collection critically explores the funding arrangements governing contemporary community development and how they shape its theory and practice.
International contributions from activists, practitioners and academics consider the evolution of funding in community development and how changes in policy and practice can be understood in relation to the politics of neoliberalism and contemporary efforts to build global democracy from the ‘bottom up’.
Thematically, the collection explores matters such as popular democracy, the shifting contours of the state-market relationship, prospects for democratising the state, the feasibility of community autonomy, the effects of managerialism and hybrid modes of funding such as social finance.
The collection is thus uniquely positioned to stimulate critical debate on both policy and practice within the broad field of community development.
Table of Content
Chapter 1: Funding, power and community development: an introduction, Fergal Finnegan and Niamh Mc Crea
PART 1: New configurations of power and governance
Chapter 2: Critical issues in philanthropy: power, paradox, possibility and the private foundation, Erica Kohl-Arenas
Chapter 3: ‘Walking the tightrope’: the funding of South African NGOs and the governance of community development, Natascha Mueller-Hirth
Chapter 4: The reinvention of ‘civil society’: transnational conceptions of development in East-Central Europe, Agnes Gagyi and Mariya Ivancheva
Chapter 5: Social finance and community development: exploring egalitarian possibilities, Brendan Murtagh and Niamh Goggin
Chapter 6: Corporate funding and local community development: a case from the mining industry in Australia, Robyn Mayes
PART 2: Questions of state and grassroots democracy
Chapter 7: Funding community organising: diversifying sources, democratising civil society, Robert Fisher and Hélène Balazard
Chapter 8: ‘It is time to re-territorialise utopian thinking’: community, the commons and the funding of autonomous movements in Latin America – An interview with Marcelo Lopes de Souza
PART 3: Modes of agency and horizons of possibility
Chapter 9: Keeping the show on the road: a reflective dialogue between a community worker and a funder, Lin Bender and Japhet Makongo
Chapter 10: Local philanthropy and women’s empowerment: the case of Tewa, the Nepal Women’s Fund, Rita Thapa
Chapter 11: Communities of hope? Gendered re-signification of microcredit in rural India, Debarati Sen and Sarasij Majumder
Chapter 12: Building alternative communities within the state: the Kurdish movement, local municipalities and democratic autonomy, Ulrike Flader and Çetin Gürer
About the author
Fergal Finnegan became interested in issues of community development and equality through his work as a community educator in Dublin. He is now a lecturer at the Department of Adult and Community Education, Maynooth University where he is a co-director of the Doctorate in Higher and Adult Education programme. His research interests include social movements, popular education, biographical research, social class and equality and higher education.