ABSTRACT
Finally, the section ends with a set of chapters that ask perhaps the most fundamental questions of all, and they are: how much can we improve things at the community scale?; and are these the most productive forms of intervention we can make to try to transform and improve life in American communities? These questions were asked in Chapter 1’s introduction, and will be touched upon again in Chapter 39’s conclusion. But these three chapters provide a much more thorough analysis of the issues involved. The sub-section starts with Stoecker’s famous essay that challenges the whole institutional framework of the CDC (Chapter 36). He argues that by internalizing the fundamentally antagonistic relations between community and capital, CDCs have forever compromised themselves and their ability to either improve conditions for the
communities they work in, and are part of, or mobilize that community to demand the kind of larger-scale changes needed to fundamentally improve lives for poor communities throughout the United States. Fraser et al.’s Chapter 37 takes a slightly different approach, and analyzes the limits of community interventions in the contemporary political economy. To Fraser and his colleagues, the issue isn’t necessarily the institutional structure of the community organization, but rather the transformation of the larger political economy that we have witnessed since the 1980s and how that greatly constrains the ability of communityscale interventions to affect change. The section ends with the chapter from Kubisch et al. who are a bit more optimistic than either Stoecker or Fraser and his colleagues. They recognize the problems inherent in community building efforts (and communityfocused interventions more generally), but also try to find ways beyond these limits. It is for this reason that we end the section on theories and debates with this chapter. For while we share the legitimate concerns of Stoecker and Fraser, et al., and we have more than a little ambivalence about the potential and limits of community development, we also think it’s important to find ways to analyze and practice community development that recognize and try to mitigate its limitations and contradictions.
