Funding, Power and Community Development

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.

University of Houston

Cetin Gürer is Philipp-Schwartz-Fellow of the Humboldt Foundation, currently working at the Centre for Labour and Politics at the University of Bremen. He studied Sociology and Political Science at the University of Hamburg and holds a PhD from the University of Ankara. He works on questions of minority rights and representation, specifically on territorial and non-territorial autonomy and the Kurdish Movement. He is author of Democratic Autonomy as a Heterotopia of Citizenship published in Turkish by NotaBene/Ankara in 2015.

Ulrike Flader is lecturer in Anthropology and Cultural Research at the University of Bremen and founding member of DEMOS Research Centre for Peace, Democracy and Alternative Politics in Ankara. She holds a PhD from Manchester University and has worked in and on Turkey for many years. Her research centres on questions of citizenship, governmentality, political subjectivity, everyday resistance and social movements. Her most recent ethnographic work focuses on everyday resistance among the Kurdish population in Turkey.

Japhet Makongo is a development consultant based in Tanzania. He began his career as a field extension officer in the Department of Livestock and Agriculture. Between 1990 -1993 he worked on flood and irrigation projects, funded by the International Labour Organisation (ILO), then becoming a trainer in community and rural development at the Training for Community Development Centre in the Monduli district of the Arusha region in Tanzania. He has also worked for HakiElimu, a national advocacy organisation promoting equitable and quality education for all children in 2002. Chief Executive of Ubunifu Associates

Lin Bender is CEO of the Helen Macpherson Smith Trust in Victoria, Australia. She began her career as a photographer and graphic designer, before establishing a number of social enterprises. A series of senior management roles in the not-for-profit sector followed, across operations and marketing to strategic business development, as well as CEO positions.