What is Community Development?:
Using participatory action research to
change power, poverty and inequality
Margaret Ledwith
Emeritus Professor of Community Development and Social Justice
University of Cumbria, UK
Epistemology and ontology
‘…action research should aim not just at
achieving knowledge of the world, but
achieving a better world’
(Kemmis, 2009)
PAR research spawned
radical community development
1968: ‘revolt, reaction and rebellion’
Urban Programme: response to social unrest
Community Development Project, 1969
‘Cycles of deprivation’ theory
AR exposed flawed analysis
Political/structural vs personal/pathological
Gramsci, Freire, feminism
Grassroots social movements – theory in
action
CD Praxis: a contested space
between top-down and bottom-up
CD principles: social and environmental
justice
CD vision: just and sustainable world
CD values: ideology of equality
CD process: popular education for
participatory democracy, practical projects and
collective action for change
CD theory: analyses of power and
discrimination
Power in the research process
Equalising power: outcome and process
Ideology of equality = mutual respect,
dignity, trust, reciprocity in action
Dislocates researcher as external expert
Co-researchers in mutual inquiry
Researching with not on people
Process becomes participatory
Experience becomes empowering
Participation: a radical concept!
My points:
A participatory worldview versus a competitive
worldview
Transformative concepts - participation,
empowerment, social justice – hijacked, diluted
My questions:
What are the challenges that this presents in
practice?
Swimming against the tide?
Movement for change?
Hegemony pathologises:
Participation as empowerment
Becoming critical:
‘extraordinarily re-experiencing the ordinary’ (Ira Shor)
Creating critical dissent dialogue:
‘questioning answers not answering questions’
Collective action in community:
Scholes Community Garden
Collective action on policy:
Migrant Rights Centre Ireland’s campaign
for policy change on work permits
Local to global action:
local projects link to movements for change
A better world is possible!
My point: Unless PAR moves out in
iterative cycles from the personal/local to
the political/structural nothing will change.
My question: What are the challenges to
PAR to move beyond the specific to the
general in iterative cycles of co-creating
knowledge for collective action?
The true measure of a nation’s
standing!
 ‘The true measure of a
nation’s standing is how
well it attends to its
children – their health
and safety, their material
security, their education
and socialization, and
their sense of being
loved, valued, and
included in the families
and societies into which
they are born’
(UNICEF, 2007: 1).
Child poverty: PAR contextualised
in its political times
1979-1997: child poverty increased from 1:10 to
1:3 in UK
 State of the world’s children: Childhood under
threat (UNICEF, 2005): one in every two children of
world in poverty
UNICEF report (2007) on child well-being in rich
countries: UK bottom of 21 countries
Poverty discriminates
Lone-parent households
Low paid households
Households without an adult in paid work
Minority ethnic families
‘Dis’abled children or those with a
‘dis’abled parent
Looked after children
EQUALITY: are all children at
equal risk of poverty?
27%
36%
41%
47%
69%
of children from white families
Indian
Black Caribbean
Black non-Caribbean
Pakistani and Bangladeshi
Source: Child Poverty Action Group (2008) Child Poverty: The stats, London:CPAG
POVERTY KILLS:
And reduces life chances
Low birthweight, infant death, childhood
accidents
Underachievement at school, truancy or
exclusion
Low self esteem, low expectations
Teenage pregnancy
Youth suicide
Malnutrition
Unemployment and low wages
Homelessness
Long-term illness (morbidity)
Premature death (mortality)
From ‘no such thing as
society’ to ‘the big society’
‘Poverty’ implies injustice
Child Poverty Act, 2010, embedded ‘pledge’ in law
Institute for Fiscal Studies: child poverty will rise
by 2014 due to ‘big society’
Higher in UK than comparable countries
Entrenched inequalities – wealth and power
‘Povertyism’ pathologises poor people
Resistance to redistribution of wealth
Destroying the hopes and life chances of
generations of young people
World crises of social justice
and sustainability
Widening gap between poverty and prosperity
within and between countries
Strange phenomenon of increasing poverty in rich
countries
Globalisation – neoliberal free-trade principle
prioritises profit over people and planet
Structures of oppression reproduced on global scale
Politics of disposability
Critique and analysis
My point: ‘inadequate action research’ is
decontextualised from social, economic,
political structures’ Kemmis (2006)
My question:How can we ensure that PAR is
contextualised within the structures of power
that it seeks to change?