Economic Theory and Community Development: Why Putting Community First Is Essential to Our Survival

Agreeing with Klaus Schwab and Thierry Malleret that building a sustainable post-pandemic era calls for wealth redistribution from the rich to the poor (Covid-19: The Great Reset, 2020), the present volume takes a close look at some previous attempts to create win-win societies that provide dignified livelihoods for everyone and inflict humiliating exclusion on no one. It examines India’s Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee and Sweden’s post–World War II social democracy and welfare state, regarded at the time as the cutting edge of social progress. In greater detail, it examines the analysis, diagnosis and prescriptions of the founders of South Africa`s Community Work Programme; that programme`s frustration due to the fiscal crisis of the state; and its solid achievements on the ground, showing forms of community development that must be possible because they happened.

At an ontological level (unlike Schwab and Malleret) this book follows Roy Bhaskar`s suggestion to regard deep social structures as social science analogues of the forces that produce the observed data of the natural sciences. Social structures (following Tony Lawson) are material positions, each defined by the rights and obligations of the person holding that position.

This book endorses several kinds of morals talk and ethics talk, starting with respecting (with exceptions) what exists and is understood at a given time and place. It endorses a care ethic. Humankind’s existential crisis, as Greta Thunberg reminds us, is about nature. But we cannot save nature and ourselves without rethinking our thinking and upgrading our ethics. This is realism; it underpins unbounded organization, a new approach to community development growing out of practical, on-the-ground experiences in Africa and Latin America. Putting ethics first, putting community first, an unbounded realist approach is open to moving parameters that orthodox economic theory has tried to set in stone.