Optentia Book Launch: Does Community Development Work?

About the Book

What makes community development effective? How can we ensure that this work is responsive to the decolonial turn, the call for effectiveness and the need for justice? Highlighting useful practice frameworks for community development workers – both citizens and professionals – to navigate an increasingly uncertain world, Does Community Development Work? calls for a new quality of reflection and reflexivity. It sets out a post-structural, deconstructive and decolonizing perspective on community development.

Grounded in stories of South African history and community development practice – dealing with issues such as housing, land, cooperatives, education, community protests and urban farming – this book combines story, conceptual insight and theoretical discourse. These detailed stories present a wonderful illustration of the global and South African history of community development. The book concretizes the vision of several notable individuals including Steve Biko, Mahatma Gandhi, Es’kia Mphahlele and Neville Alexander, whose writings and actions contributed to community development practice.

Authors

Peter Westoby works, teaches, and researches on the borderlands between community development and other disciplines and fields of practice, from phenomenology, dialogue, depth psychology, peace and conflict, and forced migration. He has worked accompanying youth, community, and organization for 30 years, from places as far afield as South Africa, Uganda, Vanuatu, Papua New Guinea, Nepal, Philippines, Brazil, and Australia.

He is an associate professor in social science and community development at the School of Public Health & Social Work at Queensland University of Technology; a visiting professor at the Centre for Development Support, University of the Free State, South Africa; and a director with Community Praxis Cooperative.

Lucius Botes is a scholar in the fields of development studies, sociology of developing societies, development economics, and community development. He is a professor in development studies and the director of research development in the Faculty of Economic and Management Sciences, at North-West University (South Africa) and a director of the Karoo Development Foundation. His research and teaching work include the domains of development studies, participatory development, socio-economic research, affordable housing research, local economic development, sustainable livelihood analysis, municipal cost recovery, community protests and service-delivery pro tests, survey research, and methodologies.

His work predominantly covers South Africa, Namibia, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. He acts as a development and research consultant to international and national organizations, government departments and companies, and is a director/trustee of various NGOs.