Peter Westoby

• Bachelor of Arts; Masters of Social Administration/Community Development; PhD Political Science
• Honorary Associate Professor (Associate) at Deakin University

Written with a reflective posture, guided by concepts from the critical tradition of community development – Participatory Development Practice (PDP), and aligned with Freire’s Popular Education, the article offers insights into research undertaken with Australian community-based practitioners and citizens in neighbourhood centre and Landcare conte...

This article is both a story of community development (CD) practice within the paediatric palliative care and bereavement space – and a portrayal of phenomenological reflective practice in the social field. The story and portrayal are about a tradition of work – understood as participatory CD – amplified, made more visible and alive by a phenomenol...

I’ve said it before, but it’s worth repeating – I often find myself a tad bored reading community development (CD) writings these days. Rarely does something I read spring out, alive, beckoning, seducing, having me wanting more. Well, Cormac Russell’s Rekindling Democracy did. So much so, that I initially bought an electronic version, then realized...

Authored by academics who have long been immersed in this community of practice, the book is a necessary read for all those interested in inclusive development and social cohesion.' Adam Habib, Vice-Chancellor and Principal of the University of the Witwatersrand 'The authors demonstrate that creating transformative knowledge and practice, unfettere...

The Jewish philosopher Martin Buber talked about, living under the shadow of Auschwitz, that humanity lived with the 'eclipse of God'. I now wonder if we have moved beyond this 'eclipse of God' to a time of the 'eclipse of relationality'. This article argues that the eclipse of relationality is enabled through a predominant worldview in which the w...

Climate change requires a rapid change in the way energy is created worldwide because there will be no jobs on a dead planet. However, this transition to cleaner energy sources will also lead to job losses. In shaping such policy that shifts away from a fossil fuel economy, the ethics of the procedural and distributional impacts must be assessed. T...

Communities are a continuing focus of public policy and citizen action worldwide. The purposes and functions of work with communities of place, interest and identity vary between and within contexts and change over time. Nevertheless, community development – as both an occupation and a democratic practice concerned with the demands and aspirations...

This book forms part of a larger research project at the University of the Free State (UFS) in South Africa that is investigating the consequences of mining for local communities and mining towns. The book analyses the current situation in Emalahleni and considers the likelihood of a just transition across a range of fields. The case study of the m...

This article explores how an organisation – Jabiru – integrates a learning ‘community’ philosophy into its work with children, particularly within what is understood within Australia as School-aged Care (SAC). Distinguished from other organisations, Jabiru understands community is an intentional practice that provides what we find to be a unique th...

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the issues that the book discusses, as well as the challenges in editing it. The book offers diverse critical perspectives, both international and cross-disciplinary, on the challenge of how to make sense of contemporary forms of populism and also how community development responds to these. It part...

This book is part of the Rethinking Community Development series. As such, it offers diverse critical perspectives, both international and crossdisciplinary, on the challenge of how to make sense of contemporary forms of populism and also how community development responds to these. Like the first two books in this series, Politics, Power and Commu...

Using international perspectives and case studies, this book discusses the relationships between community development and populism in the context of today's widespread crisis of democracy. It investigates the development, meanings and manifestations of contemporary forms of populism and explores the synergies and contradictions between the values...

Who are the great activists, thinkers and writers who can inspire us in our community development work? Environmentalists, poets, philosophers, civil rights activists, trade unionists – all can help us question the assumptions that underlie our international development practice. This book invites students and professionals of community development...

The contours of this article, written as a dialogue between two authors, one in Australia (Westoby) and one in South Africa (Harris), outline a Derridean deconstruction of community development 'yet-to-come' during and post coronavirus disease 2019. Reflecting on our two countries' experiences, drawing on theorists such as Zuboff (surveillance capi...

Having immersed myself in community development (CD) scholarship for the past fifteen years or so, dare I say I often find myself bored. That kind of boredom where you pick up a piece of writing with some sense of anticipation, yet quickly become downhearted as the writing becomes bogged down in talk of principles, values, ideas, concepts – basical...

This article reports upon the efforts of three social work/social science academics in partnership with social and community practitioners, at radicalising community development (CD) within social work. The project was motivated by painful political events and processes unfolding around the world in 2017 and led to the design of a participatory act...

This chapter provides a concise overview of the life and career of Jacques Derrida, exploring how his substantive philosophical writing could be relevant to a community development ‘yet-to-come’ and specifically for a renewed praxis. Derrida was a leading intellectual of what is commonly known as deconstruction, and while never explicitly writing t...

Introduction This chapter concludes the book with philosophical reflections on the nature of ‘community’ as an ethical space and ‘community development’ as an ethical practice. While it may be more usual to begin a text with an abstract philosophical framework within which subsequent practice-oriented chapters are placed or judged, in this book we...

This article analyses the ways community development in Australia has succumbed to neoliberal forces resulting in conservative or reformist practice. Ledwith (Community Development in Action: Putting Freire into Practice, 2015, Policy Press, UK.) argues that popular education theory is a useful vehicle through which community development can recove...

This article examines the rich lived experience of members of a 20-year-old workers’ cooperative in Brisbane, Australia – primarily made up of members who have intellectual disabilities – and reveals the need for significant social support to ensure people can access meaningful work. Drawing on the findings of our case-study research conducted with...

Drawing on the conceptual work of “Bifo” Beradi’s colonising the soul, and Rose’s governing the soul, this chapter examines the possibilities of academic resistance to neoliberalism. Using narrative practice and biographical double-listening, the authors explore what is understood as the first and second stories. The first story captures rich descr...

More at: www.routledge.com/9781472469014 This handbook sets a new research agenda in community development. The contributors redefine existing areas within the context of interdisciplinary research, highlight emerging areas for community development related research, and provide researchers and post-graduate students with ideas and encouragement fo...

The Jewish philosopher Martin Buber talked about, living under the shadow of Auschwitz, that humanity lived with the ‘eclipse of God’. I now wonder if we have moved beyond this ‘eclipse of God’, or as Nietzsche would say, ‘the death of god’, to a time of the ‘eclipse of life’. We live in a time where political life has usurped the social and ecolo...

This article reflects on working in New Zealand and South Africa in february and march 2017, particularly in relation to community development, dialogue, phenomenology, and climate change.

Implementation of large-scale wind, solar and hydro projects in South African communities is intended to contribute to local economic development. Government policy, through the Renewable Energy Independent Power Producer Procurement Prog-ramme (REIPPPP), obliges energy companies to share revenue and ownership with local communities, thus providing...

This article analyses the sustainability school (SS) program of the National Association of Professional Environmentalists (NAPE), Uganda. The focus is on how the social network, enabled by the SS program, fosters social and transformative learning. The significance of this approach to community-based education for social change, including in the c...

Carbon markets have emerged globally as a central feature in market based strategies to address the climate crisis. Global trade in carbon is based on the premise that it is possible to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions and stabilise the earth's climate, while at the same time generating new forms of capital accumulation. Amongst carbon market...

Conceptually located within the literature on privatisation of forestry, and environmental initiatives more broadly, this article examines how companies such as Green Resources in Uganda are achieving legitimacy, or failing to do so, in communities, thereby threatening what is understood as their Social License to Operate. Green Resources makes str...

Creating Us: Community Work with Soul challenges community workers to bring a renewed focus on: the quality of the work as opposed to quantity; the experience of the work, and a receptivity to the experience, rather than activities within the work; and a certain kind of being within the work, as opposed to an over-focus on the doing of the work. I...

At a time when inequalities are growing globally, when the pace of socio-economic transitions is rapid, and when traditional ties of community are under threat of dissolving, 'soul' offers a new way of thinking imaginatively about how people might respond both individually and collectively in social change work. In exploring ideas such as soul, sou...

Article from text of annual social justice lecture at James Cook University.

In this article we take the case study of Green Resources, a Norwegian private company engaged in plantation forestry for the production of timber and the sale of carbon credits in two Central Forest Reserves in Uganda. Drawing on fieldwork conducted during 2012 and 2013 we examine the deployment of community development by the company within the c...

This chapter explores the practice framework guiding the practice of workers at Jabiru Community College, a community-based school in Brisbane, Australia. The chapter articulates the findings from a dialogical inquiry begun by the three authors with input from workers and youth. Seven dimensions of the framework being used by workers are described....

This article takes as its focus the contribution of community development to disaster recovery. It examines the experiences of community development officers employed in response to a series of devastating natural disasters within the state of Queensland, Australia. Utilizing the lens of the “dilemmatic space,” the article reveals three practice di...

During the past few years within South Africa there has been a proliferation of state-led community development initiatives tasked to form community-based cooperatives. It is into such a context that research was conducted during 2011–13 into how South African community development workers understand and conduct their professional practice in relat...

This article examines the expansion of the global carbon economy, including a critical evaluation of its local level impacts. The authors describe the growing international support for carbon markets amongst governments, international institutions and financial investors as a response to human-induced climate change. By putting a price on carbon, p...

Based on 25 years of community development practice, six of which have been lived in South Africa, Peter Westoby's ground-breaking monograph moves away from dominant normative accounts of community development to provide an appreciative and critical analysis of concrete examples of community development theory and practice. By examining community d...

Both dialogue studies and the field of community development are reasonably well developed ‘communities of practice’, however, there has been little direct interplay between the two whereby a theory of dialogue for community development is articulated. This article then attempts to break new ground, setting up a ‘dialogue’, so to speak, between dia...

This chapter explores the practice framework guiding the practice of workers at Jabiru Community College, a community-based school in Brisbane, Australia. The chapter articulates the findings from a dialogical inquiry begun by the three authors with input from workers and youth. Seven dimensions of the framework being used by workers are described.

This book proposes that community development has been increasingly influenced and co-opted by a modernist, soulless, rational philosophy - reducing it to a shallow technique for 'solving community problems'. In contrast, this dialogical approach re-maps the ground of community development practice within a frame of ideas such as dialogue, hospital...

This article represents an edited conversation between two practitioners exploring both an ecological-organic approach to community development practice, and the idea of practice as a ‘responsive dance’. The practice ideas have emerged from a dialogical inquiry between the two authors conducted during 2011/2012, augmented by consideration of variou...