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What can community development learn from frontline community resistance to extractivism and the fossil fuel industry? In the global North, environmental governance often operates within the dominant mode of neoliberal 'environmentality' (Luke. 1999. Environmentality as green governmentality, in E. Darier ed, Discourses of the Environment , Blackwell, Oxford), conceptualizing environmental action in individualized and depoliticized ways. This is compounded by the discursive hegemony of the educated middle-classes, which frames environmental issues in ways that render invisible the concerns of marginalized communities and workers. In this paper, I present an activist ethnography and case study of Love Leitrim, a community group that played a crucial role in the successful Irish movement to resist fracking. I suggest that local environmental justice struggles point to the possibility of a 'liberation environmentality' (Fletcher. Environmentality unbound: multiple governmentalities in environmental politics, Geoforum , 2017;85, 311–315); which challenges capitalist modes of environmental governance that facilitate the exploitation of the environment for capital accumulation. The paper identifies how a combination of (i) relational local organizing; (ii) trans-local networking with other frontline communities and (iii) creative political engagement enabled campaigners to organize collectively around the environment, navigate power asymmetries and secure political change across spatial scales. I conclude by suggesting that Love Leitrim's frontline community struggle offers important insights for community development workers who wish to address the environment as a political issue and play a role in bringing about a just transition for marginalized communities and workers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the occurrence and nature of barriers to social inclusion in distinct geographical settings. Utilising a unique administrative dataset from Ireland's dominant social inclusion programme, this study examines how location impacts the occurrence of these barriersat a small-area level. Ireland's high growth rates have raised concerns about uneven effects, making it an interesting case study for 'left behind' places. The findings reveal that barriers associated with social inclusion, related to economic participation, are more prevalent in ' independent urban towns ' compared to both more urban and more rural areas, over and above area-level deprivation. This implies that existing policies, which traditionally employs a simplistic urban/rural dichotomy, lacks effective targeting, and would benefit from adopting a more precise spatial perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This policy review deals with the current context for community development practice in the Republic of Ireland. It details social partnership as the new model of governance, which requires broad societal participation in decision‐making, and it reflects on some of the practical operational problems encountered with the partnership approach. The White Paper, ‘A Framework for Supporting Voluntary Activity and for Developing the Relationship between the State and the Community and Voluntary Sector’, that was published in 2000 is considered with respect to the objectives of community development agencies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

At a time of rising stress for communities, families, and individuals coupled with a growing disillusionment with government, the concept of ‘active citizenship’ has arrived as a salve to many of the social ills of our time. Emphasizing citizen's own responsibilities, and espousing values of solidarity, community, and neighbourliness, active citizenship embodies all that is good, rendering it somewhat immune from criticism. While agreeing that community values of solidarity and neighbourliness are indeed critical, this paper takes issue with what it argues is a significant re-visioning of the three core concepts embodied within active citizenship – citizenship, social capital, and community development – and argues that active citizenship, as it is currently promoted by state and select civil society organizations alike, substitutes self-help for redistribution and self-reliance for state accountability, in the process depoliticizing the principles and practice of community development and denying community actors a voice in their own development. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper explores a number of issues concerning the community development experience in Ireland by reference to concepts of the State and to issues of State development. It will explore the emergence of a new kind of civil society within Ireland in the 1990s, and the role played by community development in this process. It will argue that the development of civil society in the 1980s and 1990s, widely represented as an example of ‘rolling back the State’, was in fact quite the opposite. It will propose that the State's concern to expand its frontiers and to widen the terms of its engagement with previously more or less disconnected sectors or groups was the main agenda in local development. The paper looks at the ways in which concepts, such as partnership and participation have been institutionalized and embedded in the Irish State project. It will show how, in entering partnership with Civil Society in Ireland, the Irish State effectively extended its legitimacy in situations where legitimacy was strained. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Over the last two decades, Ireland has emerged as a paradigmatic case of partnership governance. Underpinned by state-facilitated national agreements that sought to maximize economic and social development, 'partnership' was also held to include the development of progressive social policies. The 'community and voluntary sector' has been both the site and purported vehicle for these progressive policies. In this context, community development emerged as a discourse of social action that was both popular with what Donnelly-Cox and Jaffro (1999) have in the Irish context called 'second generation community development', i.e. the emergence of self-activated local community groups informed by a social justice ethos, and to the Irish state as a route to social inclusion for an array of marginalized social groups. Since the early 1990s, these groups have been the recipients of significantly increased state funding. This resource has had a dramatic effect on the structure and nature of community development. In this paper, we outline and assess the model of community development that has emerged in Ireland during this period. Based on empirical data arising from a nationwide survey of community workers, we profile the extent of state funding; the consequent employment profile of community development workers and the impact on volunteerism; and the nature and consequence of community development's emerging relationship with the Irish state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years there has been a renewal of interest in community development and partnership approaches in the delivery of health and social services in Northern Ireland. The general thrust of these approaches is that local communities can be organized to address health and social needs and to work with government agencies, voluntary bodies and local authorities in delivering services and local solutions to problems. Since the Ottawa Charter was launched in 1986, government in Northern Ireland has stressed that community development should no longer simply be added on to key aspects of Health and Social Services, but should instead be at the core of their work. There is increasing consensus that traditional approaches to improving health and well-being, which have focused on the individual, are paternalistic and have failed to tackle inequalities effectively. Partnerships within a community development setting have been heralded as a means to facilitate participation and empowerment. This paper outlines the policy background to community development approaches in health promotion and delivery in Northern Ireland. Drawing on evidence from a case study of a community health project it highlights the benefits and difficulties with this approach. The findings suggest that partnerships can positively influence a community's health status, but in order to be effective they require effective planning and long-term commitment from both the state and the local community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Issues of state sponsorship of community development in the north of Ireland need to be ‘situated’ within the history of the state in conflict. This paper analyses the emergence of the community women's sector in the north within this context. The argument is made that the definition of women's roles in any modern conflict is a powerful ideological and political resource in the conflict, and in international responses to it. Funding for community development in the north has promoted the British state's ‘conflict management’ approach. Within this, the construction of women as ‘apart from the war’ is a political manoeuvre that benefits some women some of the time but does not aid the resolution of the conflict. It also obscures women's political agency. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper considers how well two rural traditions of Irish community development, one based on community councils the other on community cooperatives, conform to models of radical and pragmatic populist‐type collective action. Two simple models of radical and pragmatic populist‐type collective action are first outlined. We then explore the initial appearance of our two traditions, their ideologies, their organizational cultures, the sort of tactics they have relied on and how well they have fared in realizing their concrete aims. Each of our traditions is shown to gravitate more to pragmatic populist‐type collective action, though this is not unequivocally so across the board. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Urban space has the potential to shape people's experience and understanding of the city and of the culture of a place. In some respects, murals and allied forms of wall art occupy the intersection of street art and public art; engaging, and sometimes, transforming the urban space in which they exist and those who use it. While murals are often conceived as a more ‘permanent’ form of painted art there has been a trend in recent years towards more deliberately transient forms of wall art such as washed-wall murals and reverse graffiti. These varying forms of public wall art are embedded within the fabric of the urban space and history. This paper will explore the intersection of public space, public art and public memory in a mural project in the Irish city of Cork. Focussing on the washed-wall murals of Cork's historic Shandon district, we explore the sympathetic and synergetic relationship of this wall art with the heritage architecture of the built environment and of the murals as an expression of and for the local community, past and present. Through the Shandon Big Wash Up murals we reflect on the function of participatory public art as an explicit act of urban citizenship which works to support community-led re-enchantment in the city through a reconnection with its past. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article focuses on the significant growth of community development in Ireland. It provides an overview on the history of community development in the country, wherein the principle of self-reliance and local initiative is advocated to bring a better condition in life. It describes the current contexts for the country's community development in which the commitment to a more open and accountable government is developed, as well as the current issues and trends of community development that include the program approach to support development, the term of the program and the growth in the number of community development managers. The challenges that community development is facing, which include management of political priorities and maintaining a social change analysis are also discussed.

The main characteristics of the institutional context of policy making in Ireland are examined and their more latent consequences for community development delineated. The emphasis on partnership at all levels, on nation and, ironically, on community, is shown to contribute more to the legitimation of the state than to the cause of community development. This has created difficulties in responding adequately to new policy issues such as redistribution and immigration. The case of Ireland is seen as merely an extreme example of the more widespread failure to discriminate adequately between the nature and appropriate functions of the community, the public sphere and the state. The development of the public sphere is stymied with the result that communities cannot democratically articulate their differences or develop a sense of agency and skills in self‐organization. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this article, the author discusses the community developments and social partnership or corporatism in Ireland. He is critical to the relationship between democracy, the state as well as the danger of community development if taken seriously by the states as a solution to the problem towards economic and social change. He refers to the current context of corporatism as a problematic notion that altered the power between the civil society and state.

This article attempts to analyse some of the experiences of the Irish community and voluntary sector's participation in social partnership. The article explores the politics of social partnership and discusses the implications of participation in social partnership for the potential strategies and choices for the community and voluntary sector. It looks at the outcomes of that participation from the perspective of both its impact on income and other inequalities and its impact on the community and voluntary sector and its relationship with the state, other actors and internal relationships within the sector. Alternatives to social partnership are explored and the article concludes that, while limited, there are specific gains and reasons to ‘stay inside’. At the same time, we should be firmly focused on the ‘outside’ and on alternative alliances, tactics, visions and ideologies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]