One - Ethics, equity and community development: mapping the terrain

Summary

Introduction

Rationale for the book

This book is part of the Rethinking Community Developmentseries. As such, it offers a range of critical perspectives, both cross-disciplinary and international, on the place and meaning of ethics and the nature of ethical practice in community development work. The first two books in the series, Politics, power and community development (Meade et al, 2016) and Class, inequality and community development(Shaw and Mayo, 2016), had a primary focus on the structural context in which community development operates. Ethics, equity and community developmenttakes account of context, but its focal point is the ‘micro-ethics’ of daily practice, often neglected in the literature which focuses on the broader political climate and how to develop equitable social policy to tackle disadvantage and inequity. In this book we are concerned with the ethical agency of the people practising community development, and the dilemmas and difficulties they face in their everyday work as they strive towards ethical practice and equitable outcomes. We are also interested in how micro-level or ‘everyday ethics’ interacts with the macro-level ethics of social and institutional policies in the community development field (see Banks, 2016 for the concept of ‘everyday ethics’; Truog et al, 2015, for ‘micro- and macro-ethics’).

Example of everyday ethics

To illustrate what is meant by ‘everyday ethics’, I will give an example from Chapter Five of the book. Here we are given an account of an ethically challenging situation faced by practitioners working for an NGO in India with a focus on participatory practice. In evaluating the effectiveness of interventions aiming to empower sex worker collectives, some of the sex workers felt the collective had made major achievements in ending false arrests and harassment by the police. They felt this indicated that the collective should be categorised as ‘vibrant’, which indicated sustainability and a high level of functioning. However, the NGO workers and some other members of the collective questioned this claim, as the reduction in false arrests had been achieved through threatening to inform the families of police officers who were clients of the sex workers. This was not regarded as a sustainable outcome (one of the criteria of ‘vibrancy’) by the NGO staff, nor was it ethically acceptable to use threats to achieve goals, according to mainstream standards of morality.