In the context of intensifying processes of globalization and new
pressures on localities, the Community Sustainability Project will
maintain long-term collaborative research relationships with a number
of communities from around the globe.
These locales—ranging from
Melbourne in Australia to Sarajevo in Bosnia and Herzegovina—have
been selected for their diversity and for the fact that the researchers
involved with the project have already begun to establish ongoing relationships
with the communities.
The selected localities range from those in emerging
states (East Timor and Papua New Guinea) to those located in long-established
cities—medieval places such as Rhodes and Sarajevo to postcolonial
metropolises such as Honolulu and Melbourne.
The communities that have
been chosen range from those with strong continuing community ties
of face-to-face relations (tribal and traditional relations) to those
which are more comprehensively integrated into global networks of production,
exchange and communication (modern and postmodern relations). It is
crucial for the project that different forms of community and cultural
practices of sustainability are selected for comparative purposes.
Given the diversity of communities being investigated we have chosen
to use a range of research ‘tools’
that are intended to reach a balance between subjective
and objective measures of community sustainability.
The
researchers and
participants in this study will use a combination of action-research
techniques
along with established evaluation modes. Each group of
researchers works to develop a social profile of each community
through ongoing
face-to-face relationships.
This is overlayed by less subjective,
structural assessments—questionnaires, interviews and statistical information—systematized
for comparative purposes. Such information is considered in reference
to the detailed community ‘mapping’, whereby a community’s
idea of space is set against geographical or municipal boundaries.
This is in turn related to the wider question of community sustainability.
This has particular importance in communities under strain such as
in rural areas experiencing job losses in Australia, those emerging
from major ecological disasters, such as in Bhubhaneswar, Orissa, or
from significant periods of conflict such as Sarajevo in Bosnia and
Herzegovina or Pristina in Kosovo.
The Overall Project
The significance of this project lies in addressing significant theoretical
and empirical gaps in current work on community sustainability. In
this context, sustainability is conceived in terms that include not
just practices tied to development, but forms of wellbeing and social
bonds, community-building, social support, and built-environment renewal.
In short, the concern with sustainability here entails undertaking
an analysis of how communities are sustained through time, how they
cohere and change.
From another angle, this project proposes to present a detailed and
nuanced account of community sustainability detached from instrumental
concerns with economic development. While concerns about economic sustainability
are imperative to the overall question of community sustainability,
this project suggests that over-emphasizing the economic to the exclusion
of other considerations fails to account for the real complexity of
interactions and effects produced by cultural practices on sustainability
within structures of localization and globalization.
This project will
demonstrate what kinds of positive cultural practices are being undertaken
in communities, and explore ways these can be enhanced for future community
sustainability.
Making a Difference
This research project’s greatest aim is to make a difference
in the world today.
We aim to achieve the following: - To broaden the categories
of ‘community’ and ‘community sustainability’ and
refine their determining characteristics by exploring how cultural
practices intersect with and contribute to the sustainability or
otherwise of different ways of life.
- To facilitate the development of an ongoing information-sharing
network on issues of sustainability, a network shared by differently-situated
communities around the globe and publicly represented by this website.
- To combine theoretical analysis with community feedback and grassroots
initiatives to construct a new methodology for enhancing sustainable
communities.
- To thereby positively affect the understandings of policy-makers
and their designated bodies—as well as influence their reactions
to, and provision of, services in response to community
needs.
- To empower communities to define their own determinants and practices
of sustainability. This is of special importance to communities
under strain.
We thus work with the following principles:- That the research
needs to be engaged and committed to making a difference.
- That engaged research also entails objectively stepping back. Passion
needs to be carefully qualified by the reflexive dimension
of objective distance.
- That the research involves a mutual and slowly negotiated relationship
between researchers and local communities, with all participants
involved as partners in a dialogue of exchange and learning.
- That the research-relationship entails a long-term commitment to
each community and locality in the project. In other
words, the Community Sustainability Project is not a series of discrete
research investigations.
Rather it is an enduring interconnected project. Though
it will regularly report on its activities, it is a project without
end.
- That the project has a duty of care to the people with whom we
work to protect privacy and security where appropriate, to negotiate
the boundaries of knowledge, to properly acknowledge sources where
public, and to return the outcomes of our work to the community in
a reciprocal relationship of mutual learning.
- That the public material gained from the research will remain publicly
accessible for all communities and researchers, apart from material
that we are ethically prohibited from making public. Culturally or
politically sensitive material will remain confidential between individual
researchers and the people with whom they are working collaboratively.
Otherwise, this is an open-source project. All material, including
images and stories, are copyright for the purposes of commercial
use. For other users we ask only that they formally register their
interest and the context in which the material will be used, and
fully acknowledge the source of the material.
Community Sustainability in Global Context
This research project investigates in part how communities are negotiating
the challenges presented by globalization. The project thus responds
to a growing consensus among commentators and policy-makers in Australia,
Europe, the United States and elsewhere that the challenges posed by
globalization are best met through community-based strategies.
Such
commentators claim that local community, as opposed to the nation-state
for example, is the optimal unit of social, political and cultural
integration and organization.
By drawing on the informal social bonds
of community it is claimed that a host of seemingly intractable social
ills—ranging from poor mental and physical health, unemployment,
crime rates, low civic participation, academic under-performance, and
economic inefficiency—can be more effectively managed.
Community-centred
approaches, which utilize informal, affective social bonds,
are claimed to be more effective means of organizing and motivating
people compared
with those that seek to alter individual behaviour through
monetary incentives and material rewards. Such commentators speak
of lessening
the ‘policing role’ of the state through strengthening
the ‘moral voice’ of community.
The turn to community-centred approaches to negotiating
the challenges of globalization is a logical outcome of what has been
described as the ‘downwards pressure’ of globalization.
The same forces that are driving globalization are thus said to favour
localized forms of organization, characterized by devolved structures
of power.
However, such an account does not go far enough in that it fails to
identify what precisely is specific to the present era of globalization
as opposed to earlier stages of globalization—namely, what are
the historically particular social forms through which relationships
between localities are now structured.
Our contention is that what
is distinctive about the present era of globalization is the way in
which more abstract forms of social integration now dominate and structure
abstract local-global relations. This has the effect that many of the
taken-for-granted aspects of community—the idea of a life lived
in common with others within a more or less stable narrative—have
been comprehensively disrupted.
It is within this context that questions about the sustainability
of community within contemporary globalization come to the fore. Community
is increasingly called upon as the means by which to negotiate the
challenges of globalization while, at the same time, being reconstituted
by its processes. The aim of this project is to understand how the
complex and contradictory pressures wrought by processes of globalization
and localization are confronted. The concept of ‘community sustainability’ provides
a frame for these investigations.
Chris Scanlon and Paul James |
