Unit 3 Principles of Community Development PDF

Preview

Summary

Lecture notes on the principles of community development...

Description

UNIT 3: THE PRINCIPLES OF COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT Introduction There are lot of people around the globe engaged in the process of development whereby their role is to mobilize members of community and stakeholders to address real problems among people. They all come from different backgrounds, trainings and school thoughts when comes to community development and may represent a wide spectrum as engineering, education, health, agriculture, religion and culture, in brief, community developers may bring vast experience from their different fields of deployment but the most important element must be the common goal or interest of community development. Ethical principles Human Orientation The most important abstract human need is dignity. Essama-Nssah (2004) sees it as necessity of public policy to enable citizens to choose to lead fulfilled lives. People s concrete needs are addressed whereby the focus is also on human dignity, happiness and contentment. Human orientation is against a situation whereby people are affected by the physical development. The important aspect here is that human beings as dignified free being who channel their own life in co-operation and reciprocity with others, rather than being passively shaped or pushed around in the manner of a ‘flock or ‘herd’ animals. Nussbaum (2000: 78-80) list the following central human capabilities as an indicator of human dignity: • Life: the ability to avoid premature death • Bodily health: the ability to have good health with adequate nourishment and shelter • Bodily integrity

• Sense, imagination and thoughts: the ability to use these to imagine, think and • reason in a truly human way. • Emotions: the ability to have attachments to things and people outside oneself • Practical reason: the ability to conceive of the good and engage in critical • reflection about the formulation and implementation of one’s life plan • Affiliation: the ability to live with and towards others, and to engage in various • social interaction with dignity and respect. • Other species: the ability to live with concern about the world of nature. Participation People are mobilized not to be involved but to participate fully, that is to have a role in planning, assessment, implementation, and evaluation phase of community development. It is of high important that community member are made part of decision making because one way or another, those decisions will affect the. The liberal view emphasis that through participation, a vibrant local knowledge base is used for development. Empowerment The concept of empowerment has been loosely used by most people without a clear understanding of what it entails. Like for an example if they teach one a certain skill they claim that they applied empowerment. It is important to avoid tokenism or window dressing, which is putting people on positions just for the mere fact of placing them. Ownership CDWs should practically gain the sense of ownership of the project. Ownership is a critical concept in community development because people assume that ownership means that they are in control in literal sense that they even entitled to make decisions without involving other.

Sustainability The golden rule of community development is that no community development project should damage the environment because sustainable development does not compromise a single universal goal. The frank definition of sustainable development states that it is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generation to meet their own needs. Release It has been mentioned that development‘s ultimate goal is to eradicate poverty completely, not to address or deal with some manifestation of poverty. In other words, the success of development will come after people are living out of deprivation trap. Practical principles Learning talks to gaining skill and knowledge from the project but in western culture people become so conditioned to ideas of excellent, perfection and professionalism. Compassion Now it becoming clear CDWs is very special unique people with a broad range of skill that are carried by something that are closed to sympathy and empathy. The facilitating and enabling task of the CDWs is not just another ordinary job whereby anyone can assume the role. The principle of compassion is very ironic as CDWs. A simplest explanation of compassion is that the person with compassion stands in the shoes of the object of his/her compassion. Adaptiveness As stated in the previous study unit, CDWS must avoid blue print projects because they are likely inflexible. Adaptiveness require change of mind set because one is entering a new environment or new setting so is in high demand to be optimistic. Simplicity

The principle of simplicity contrast with the notion ‘bigger is better’, no ‘simplicity does’. Chambers (1978:211) talks of the big project trap and says that the learning, releasing approach is not suited to complex techniques. This principle is quiet clear, the smaller and simpler a project the easier it is to get long-lasting results. Principles give basic guidelines on roles and responsibilities for those who participate in the project development. In other words, principles bring order as it is mostly documented and clear on who does what? Who owns what, what are the goals and objectives. The ethical principle s mandate is to inform or influence the approach towards development before project establishment and during the process and on the other hand the practical principle concerns about the implementation and ensures that the disadvantages are the most beneficiaries....