124 – Communities and Development

[00:00:00] Lucie: Hi and welcome to the IDEMS podcast. My name is Lucie Hazelgrove Planel, I’m a social impact scientist and I’m here today with David Stern, one of the founding directors of IDEMS. Hi David.

[00:00:16] David: Hi Lucie. I’m keen to follow up on an idea which really was in one of our recent episodes where development, however we conceive it, often relates to community. When you’re thinking about international development, the question of whether you’re working with individuals or with communities or at a national effort, these ideas of scale are very important.

And quite often in low resource environments, communities are very important levels to work at. And they have structure. And they are playing a key role in ensuring the well being of everybody in the community.

[00:00:58] Lucie: Yeah. And there’s leaders, there’s actually a direction within the community, well, as you said, there’s structures, basically.

[00:01:06] David: Yes, exactly. And in international development, there’s a lot of work around the importance of working with communities, the value that this brings over just working with individuals and so on, in many contexts. And when we think of that and we think about similar challenges in higher resource environments, we were talking about food banks and we were saying, well, actually, one of the problems is that those communities don’t exist in the same way anymore, necessarily. In some cases people do belong to a community, but in many cases, the individualism sort of has led to the fact that people are more isolated.

And so you don’t have those community structures, the strong community structures, to necessarily work with. And that’s, I think, a really interesting point about, well, is it something where this is a positive, that because in high resource environments the needs of individuals can be taken care of by society? You don’t need these communities and therefore you can form whatever groups or communities you want.

[00:02:22] Lucie: When you talk about society, sorry, do you mean like governments and social systems like that?

[00:02:26] David: I mean, social systems, I think, which includes, of course, the governments, you know, the governmental services. And so it’s the fact that every individual is part of a whole where they should have access to things which meet their basic needs. And this is sort of social service in different ways in the UK and elsewhere in many high resource environments, this exists at a societal level. So you don’t have communities necessarily in the same way that we would have had in the past and that exists still in many other contexts.

So I guess my question is, if we’re thinking about some of these problems that we have even in high resource environments, you brought the example of food banks quite strongly, you know, could communities be part of the solution to that, strengthening local communities so that people are part of something and they don’t slip through the cracks in the same way?

That strengthening of a local community is something which could be used as a vehicle to then support, provide local support in different ways as it’s needed. Is that something we should be working more on or is it something where once society is reaching a certain level that concept of the physical community is maybe, a lot of people have digital communities.

[00:03:58] Lucie: Yeah, I was thinking of that too. Well, let’s stay with the physical communities to start with. So I was thinking like in the UK when you have a sort of a community centre or like a leisure centre, you know, it’s a very different sort of community to a church group, or like a village community in somewhere like Mali, where we work in rural Mali, which has, you know, there it has the structures, it has the leaders, it has different people with their different roles, everyone knows where they fit within the community, if they fit in into it at all, so they can sort of know how to manage it.

When it’s a community centre, that’s, you know, a building and it’s managed by different people, it’s, I think, like, at least in my head, I’m sort of thinking of it as often created by others in the sense that it’s perhaps not members of the community who are managing that community centre.

[00:04:49] David: I think that’s an interesting point. I think that historically, of course, these communities, you mentioned around churches, around physical buildings, these existed and they existed within the community. Whereas now a lot of that has been commercialised in ways where that commercialisation has meant that those local structures that existed don’t exist in the same way because people are looking for experiences which are less necessarily focused on the community itself and more focused on the experiences that they would get.

And then it’s a commercial exchange for the experience. So that commercialisation of some of those experiences has meant that the structures that you described with natural local leadership emerging, this doesn’t exist in the same way that it may be, or it doesn’t have the same importance that maybe it used to have.

And this is something where is that a good thing, is that a bad thing? I’m not necessarily pushing one way or the other. I do believe that although there’s benefits that come, you know, it is a privilege that we as a society don’t need community in the same way that it was needed as a safety net before. And so there is a sense of privilege which has led to this. Because community and its formal structures are inherently holding back certain individuals in a certain way.

Not maliciously, necessarily, but just because that’s the nature of those formal structures. Whereas, when you have a more individualist sort of approach, everybody can pursue their…

[00:06:44] Lucie: Their own self interested needs.

[00:06:46] David: Exactly. Self interested… places this is a negative way. But their individuality.

[00:06:52] Lucie: Yes, it can be from their own expression of who they are, as well as to, you know, following up on their own academic interests or something, or academic or professional.

You just mentioned that community can hold individuals back though, do you want to give an example?

[00:07:07] David: Well, rather than being explicit, I want to just be a little bit mathematical here. If you take a community and it has formal leadership structures, then there are inherently fewer leaders in the community than there are people with the potential to lead.

[00:07:25] Lucie: Okay.

[00:07:26] David: I would argue that, you know, there are more people who have the potential to lead in the community than those who can have those full leadership roles. Because the nature of being able to have a coherent community is that leadership is given or taken by individuals within it, which means that there are others who have the potential to lead who aren’t necessarily growing into that role. Now, very explicitly, I would give examples where the needs of the community have to come before individual needs, because that’s the nature of a community group.

So that means that individual needs, sometimes by certain people, have to be put aside in favour of the needs of the community, because that’s part of what makes the community function, makes community work. But by definition, those individuals who are giving to the community, they are maybe being held back by what they’re giving.

And let me give a very explicit example of this because I come in from an academic perspective. Let’s say you have somebody who is brilliant in a community and who’s adding a lot of value. But they have the potential to go and be brilliant internationally, somewhere else. This is this really interesting issue around brain drain.

Now, they can go out and be brilliant elsewhere and maybe send remittances back, still support the community. But they’re not part of the community on a regular basis. I’ve seen this quite a lot with sort of excellent academics coming from their home communities where they continue to have this dual life in the international world where they are contributing to a wider community and back at home where they’re still contributing to their community. But their contribution to the community is now very different and their place within that community has changed and it’s totally different than if they were there as part of the community on a daily basis.

[00:09:40] Lucie: In terms of their understanding of the community, of its needs, of small changes and how it can be run perhaps even.

[00:09:47] David: Yeah, all types of subtleties about, you know very often they’re then seen as more, a source of income because of the remittances than a part of the community in the way they would have been if they had stayed within it.

Now, I’m not saying they’re wrong to have left and I’m not saying they should have stayed at all. And I’m not saying that those who stayed and didn’t leave and didn’t achieve their potential are wrong either. I’m just saying that strong communities require compromise.

You can compromise your position in the community by taking on a different role. You can compromise your opportunities as an individual. But the whole point of a strong community, and its beauty, is the compromise that you need to make, versus the community’s needs, your own needs, when you serve one, when you serve the other, the priorities. There’s no easy solutions here.

That’s what makes communities so powerful, and also so challenging, because they’re complex. Inherently, any community is complex. And this is again this question of sort of the importance of the individual within or versus community. The fact that many communities in low resource environment invested in children with talent to send them out to create opportunity and so on. And that was part of the community process.

This is an active strategy if you want for communities to grow and to strengthen and it’s worked very successfully. But it also puts pressure on those who go out. And it’s sort of beautiful, it’s complex, it requires compromise. If you don’t recognise the compromise, if you either idealise it in certain ways, then you’re not understanding the nature of a community, which is a nature of compromise.

[00:11:46] Lucie: Yeah, I’m finding that funny I guess, yeah, we used compromise as being something which isn’t necessarily pleasant to live with, which is very true of communities, in small communities especially. I’m finding that funny. It’s better to laugh about it.

[00:12:07] David: Well, and this is the thing, I mean, if, as you say, in a desire of sort of individual independence and so on, communities are a barrier because they require compromise. But compromise is not that. And I think recognising the benefits of compromise, you know. And I’m not saying they always outweigh, it’s complex. That’s okay.

[00:12:38] Lucie: And thinking in terms of places where there aren’t communities anymore, in the same way, it reminded me of, I had read recently that I think in Mexico City where there’s huge areas, well disadvantaged areas, let’s say. And I think the Mayor there has in the last few years been setting up community centres because there’s been a complete lack of that sort of infrastructure, both for them to have activities available to them, or just like normal things for life, like washing machines, but also to have, you know, like playgrounds.

Those sorts of, I guess they are community areas, aren’t they? I mean, you know, in the UK too, playgrounds are…

[00:13:15] David: Playground, park.

[00:13:16] Lucie: …yeah, a huge, a huge community space where people meet, where kids especially play, or I was gonna say teenagers. I’m not sure if they play though.

[00:13:28] David: But even if you think about things like the UK where parks are such an important part of our sort of social life, common activities is something which builds a community.

[00:13:41] Lucie: Yeah.

[00:13:42] David: And quite often, you know, these spaces, they get a sense of community when the common activities are created. And they can be created spontaneously by small groups. You know, they can be inclusive, they can be exclusive. Just looking at sports and sort of team sports and how those get organised, rather a large scale in these common spaces. These are examples of communities sort of coming together.

Now how those communities what their goal is, what their aim is, this is all part of what changes over time. And the sense of community, the sense of belonging to something, even many streets have a sort of sense of community, but it’s less than it maybe was in the past. These are things which we don’t need to necessarily formalise them into community centers, although they can help, and they can build different sense of communities, the point is you don’t have to just belong to one community.

You can’t belong to all communities. Because it requires the compromise, it requires an investment of time of effort of energy of resource, whatever that may mean.

[00:14:50] Lucie: Yeah.

[00:14:51] David: And I don’t know about the importance of community in solving some of our challenges within high resource environment. But I think I have so much admiration for societies that have retained strong sense of communities, and the fact that certain levels of community have responsibility for the well being of their members. This is a difference between a community which forms around a sort of team sport where the well being of the members is maybe secondary to the aim as an aim of the community, to communities which are really about and primarily about the well being of the members of the community.

[00:15:39] Lucie: Exactly. I was just thinking in terms of using your example of a sporting community, if a member then can’t take part in that sport anymore, then they’re not so much part of that community anymore, unless they already had those links.

[00:15:53] David: But they might do, they might find another role within it. They might then do catering or something, because they want to. What’s interesting is communities do form, real communities do form around this.

[00:16:05] Lucie: And just a final question, do you think that there’s a difference between these sorts of created communities around senses of interest in person to when they’re online?

[00:16:16] David: I don’t know. This is a really interesting one. I think there is a lot of work which has happened about the value of online communities and the fact that this enables you to go beyond geographic locations and so to find communities around your more specific interests.

So the simple answer, of course, is I don’t know. But the more detailed answer is that I think that online communities or digital communities in different forms are here to stay and they can be positive. That doesn’t mean they will be positive. In certain cases, they can find ways to support individuals who are not finding their place in a physical local community, and I think that’s really important, and I think there’s certainly great value to be had.

I would claim, though, that a good physical local community is not incompatible with digital communities, with positive digital communities as well. There’s room to be part of multiple types of communities, some small, some large. I like, I don’t mind compromise. You know, I don’t mind the challenges that come with that.

I think thinking of communities as including compromise, is actually healthy. And part of what I think is the problem with the digital communities, which I feel are maybe less healthy, is that people don’t see the need to compromise. They see them as somewhere where they don’t need to compromise. And that’s sort of part of what the problem is.

Whereas I feel that healthy communities are built on compromise because otherwise you’re not part of something which is you know, broader. So I would argue a healthy community has a healthy amount of compromise. What that means, what that looks like, I don’t know.

[00:18:14] Lucie: And how do you encourage people who are used to not compromising, how do you encourage them to compromise in order to be part of that healthy community?

[00:18:21] David: This is where I think there is a real possibility and an opportunity to put community more centrally in our lives in a way that it hasn’t been. And thinking about how we encourage community and we build communities of different forms in healthy ways. I think there is work on this, but I think there could be more.

[00:18:45] Lucie: Definitely, yeah. No, I find it really interesting, like thinking of it explicitly as sort of social technologies or social innovation.

[00:18:54] David: Yeah.

[00:18:55] Lucie: Very interesting.

[00:18:56] David: Absolutely. Yeah.

I’m sure we could carry on for ages on this, but I think that we’ve reached a natural point where I think we’ve brought the digital back in, recognised that communities, they involve compromise, and they can be beneficial, but they aren’t necessarily beneficial. And it’s complex.

[00:19:20] Lucie: Thank you very much, David. Been interesting.

[00:19:24] David: No, thank you.