Magister Administrationis - MAdmin / The primary objective of this study is to critically examine the extent to which the Drakenstein municipality has achieved the principles spelt out in legislation and policy documents in relation to the implementation of Integrated Development Planning (IDP). Central to this process is to determine the roles that each of the stakeholders plays In the design, implementation and monitoring of the IDP On investigating the IDP it became evident that there were various shortcomings in the process in which it was prepared. For example, there was a lack of participation with necessary stakeholders, and, as a result of inadequate knowledge on the subject, councillor discussion in general council meetings on issues pertaining to development and especially to the IDP process was inadequate. Also lacking was the necessary administrative capacity, and proper consultation with other spheres of government with regards to the IDP process. The IDP is a key development instrument for Drakenstein municipality and its people and it is essential that proper systems are in place to effectively address the need for development in the region. However, budgetary constraints curtail the capacity of the Municipality to address all its priorities in one given year. Important and significant gaps therefore exist between the IDP and departmental business plans. It is in these gaps where the private sector and community organisations can add to the capacity of the municipality in support of broad community development priorities. Therefore, to address the aforementioned, it was found that departments should institute business plans in order to translate strategic themes into tangible and measurable activities. The IDP should define synergies between the activities of the Council, NGOsjCBOs and the business community (especially the farming sector) where different players are encouraged to explore roles for their organisations towards a better life for all.

Thesis (PhD. (Social Work)) --University of Limpopo, 1989 / Refer to document

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / This thesis investigates the situated knowing-in-practice of locally-based community organisations, and studies how this practice knowledge is translated and contested in inter-organisational relations in the community services field of practices. Despite participation in government-led consultation processes, community organisations express frustration that the resulting policies and plans inadequately take account of the contributions from their practice knowledge. The funding of locally-based community organisations is gradually diminishing in real terms and in the competitive tendering environment, large nationally-based organisations often attract the new funding sources. The concern of locally-based community organisations is that the apparent lack of understanding of their distinctive practice knowing is threatening their capacity to improve the well-being of local people and their communities. In this study, I work with practitioners, service participants and management committee members to present an account of their knowing-in-practice, its character and conditions of efficacy; and then investigate what happens when this local practice knowledge is translated into results-based accountability (RBA) planning with diverse organisations and institutions. This thesis analyses three points of observation: knowing in a community of practitioners; knowing in a community organisation and knowing in the community services field of practices. In choosing these points of observation, the inquiry explores some of the relations and intra-actions from the single organisation to the institutional at a time when state government bureaucracy has mandated that community organisations implement RBA to articulate outcomes that can be measured by performance indicators. A feminist, performative, relational practice-based approach employs participatory action research to achieve an enabling research experience for the participants. It aims to intervene strategically to enhance recognition of the distinctive contributions of community organisations’ practice knowledge. This thesis reconfigures understandings of the roles, contributions and accountabilities of locally-based community organisations. Observations of situated practices together with the accounts of workers and service participants demonstrate how community organisations facilitate service participants’ struggles over social justice. A new topology for rethinking social justice as processual and practice-based is developed. It demonstrates how these struggles are a dynamic complex of iteratively-enfolded practices of respect and recognition, redistribution and distributive justice, representation and participation, belonging and inclusion. The focus on the practising of social justice in this thesis offers an alternative to the neo-liberal discourse that positions community organisations as sub-contractors accountable to government for delivering measurable outputs, outcomes and efficiencies in specified service provision contracts. The study shows how knowing-in-practice in locally-based community organisations contests the representational conception of knowledge inextricably entangled with accountability and performance measurement apparatus such as RBA. Further, it suggests that practitioner and service participant contributions are marginalised and diminished in RBA through the privileging of knowledge that takes an ‘expert’, quantifiable and calculative form. Thus crucially, harnessing local practice knowing requires re-imagining and enacting knowledge spaces that assemble and take seriously all relevant stakeholder perspectives, diverse knowledges and methods.

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / This thesis investigates the situated knowing-in-practice of locally-based community organisations, and studies how this practice knowledge is translated and contested in inter-organisational relations in the community services field of practices. Despite participation in government-led consultation processes, community organisations express frustration that the resulting policies and plans inadequately take account of the contributions from their practice knowledge. The funding of locally-based community organisations is gradually diminishing in real terms and in the competitive tendering environment, large nationally-based organisations often attract the new funding sources. The concern of locally-based community organisations is that the apparent lack of understanding of their distinctive practice knowing is threatening their capacity to improve the well-being of local people and their communities. In this study, I work with practitioners, service participants and management committee members to present an account of their knowing-in-practice, its character and conditions of efficacy; and then investigate what happens when this local practice knowledge is translated into results-based accountability (RBA) planning with diverse organisations and institutions. This thesis analyses three points of observation: knowing in a community of practitioners; knowing in a community organisation and knowing in the community services field of practices. In choosing these points of observation, the inquiry explores some of the relations and intra-actions from the single organisation to the institutional at a time when state government bureaucracy has mandated that community organisations implement RBA to articulate outcomes that can be measured by performance indicators. A feminist, performative, relational practice-based approach employs participatory action research to achieve an enabling research experience for the participants. It aims to intervene strategically to enhance recognition of the distinctive contributions of community organisations’ practice knowledge. This thesis reconfigures understandings of the roles, contributions and accountabilities of locally-based community organisations. Observations of situated practices together with the accounts of workers and service participants demonstrate how community organisations facilitate service participants’ struggles over social justice. A new topology for rethinking social justice as processual and practice-based is developed. It demonstrates how these struggles are a dynamic complex of iteratively-enfolded practices of respect and recognition, redistribution and distributive justice, representation and participation, belonging and inclusion. The focus on the practising of social justice in this thesis offers an alternative to the neo-liberal discourse that positions community organisations as sub-contractors accountable to government for delivering measurable outputs, outcomes and efficiencies in specified service provision contracts. The study shows how knowing-in-practice in locally-based community organisations contests the representational conception of knowledge inextricably entangled with accountability and performance measurement apparatus such as RBA. Further, it suggests that practitioner and service participant contributions are marginalised and diminished in RBA through the privileging of knowledge that takes an ‘expert’, quantifiable and calculative form. Thus crucially, harnessing local practice knowing requires re-imagining and enacting knowledge spaces that assemble and take seriously all relevant stakeholder perspectives, diverse knowledges and methods.

After being expelled from Bhutan in the 1980s and 1990s, more than 100,000 Bhutanese refugees were forced to reside in refugee camps in Nepal. Twenty years later, in 2006, a global resettlement programme was initiated to relocate them in eight different nations: the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Norway, Denmark, The Netherlands, and the UK. Since 2010, about 350 Bhutanese refugees have been resettled in Greater Manchester through the Gateway Protection Programme. This thesis is based on 14 months of ethnographic research with members of this community. This thesis analyses the complex relationship between forced migrants, social networks, and ruling, organisational entities, which facilitate refugee resettlement. This qualitative study looks at the structure, role and everyday utility of social networks amongst a small refugee community, and emphasizes that the creation of similarity and difference is an inherent part of community development. The research calls into question the assumptions of UK policy makers, service providers and academics alike, which hold that refugees are removed from their ‘original’ cultures through forced displacement, and thereafter strive to return to a state of ‘normalcy’ or ‘originality’, re-creating and re-inventing singular ‘traditions’, identities and communities. In response to these assumptions, policy makers and service providers in refugee camps and in the UK adopt a Community Development Approach (CDA). However, I argue that there is no fixed and bounded community amongst Bhutanese refugees, but that they actively reshape and adapt their interpretations, meanings and actions through their experiences of forced migration, and thus create novel communities out of old and new social networks. In the process, I juxtapose my informants’ emic understandings of community as samaj, with bureaucratized refugee community organisations (RCOs). This research shows that rather than a creating singular, formalized RCO to serve the ‘good of all’, the Bhutanese refugee community in Manchester is rife with divisions based on personal animosities and events stretching back to the refugee camps in Nepal. I conclude that RCOs may not be equipped to effectively deal with the divisive issues that arise due to refugee resettlement. The thesis is situated at the centre of anthropological investigations of forced migration, community, and policy, and uses interdisciplinary sources (such as policy documents, historical accounts) to highlight the complexities of forced migration and refugee resettlement. This critical research is also a response to the call to make qualitative, ethnographic research more relevant for policy makers and service provision, which is all the more important in this ‘century of the refugee’.

Thesis (PhD (School of Public Management and Planning))—-Stellenbosch University, 2008. / The aim of the study is to develop an appropriate Organisational Development (OD) approach to optimise the capacity of Community-Based Organisations (CBOs) and promote Community and Civil Society Development. The following research question is examined: In what ways can OD be a suitable approach to build the capacity of CBOs and thus have an impact on Community and Civil Society Development? The study is motivated by current development challenges in South Africa1 and the role civil society can play to represent citizens’ interests in relation to state and market2. As part of civil society, CBOs are generally recognised as pivotal stakeholders in the South African development context3, but are in reality marginalised and unable to assert themselves in the development sector. Furthermore Development Theory shows that theorists have in the recent past increasingly advocated for ‘democratisation of development’, enabling previously marginalised people to participate in development processes and therefore gain power over these. Although not widely practised reality yet, ‘People centred’ and ‘Participatory development’ as bottom-up and endogenous versions of development are being promoted as sustainable development paradigms. They emphasise the importance of building capacity of civil-society organisations4. OD as an approach to development and capacity building collaborates with the goals of a people centred development and the strengthening of civil society organisations, and is “in line with several participative approaches to development”5. It is, however, relevant to cultivate a “new development practitioner”, who is competent to facilitate capacity-building processes, which will meaningfully impact at the grassroots level6. The study is guided by a postmodern philosophy and stems from a phenomenological as well as transformative approach by applying a Goethean phenomenology, Action Research, Grounded Theory, Complexity Theory and various qualitative research methodologies, such as case study work with three CBOs; and semi-structured interviews with CBOs, community leaders, OD practitioners and academics. Furthermore the research includes a sociological examination of the current development context and paradigms, and their impact in post Apartheid South Africa. During the research, findings were engaged with by a discussion forum. The research findings included the discussion of themes, which emerged through the Grounded Theory approach: ∗ CBO capacity, by examining how capacity is interpreted at a CBO level in relation to inherent capacities; ∗ Leadership, and the role of pioneer leaders in CBOs; and ∗ Relationships, within CBOs as well as with their broader environment. These themes were understood as relevant when aiming to develop CBO capacity as well as engaging with the broader capacity development sector. Further, principles and approaches for OD at a CBO level are proposed, which are ultimately related through their view of organisations as complex social systems, their emphasis on learning, and the critical examination of power asymmetries. It is intended that this study contributes to development practice concerning CBO development within and beyond South Africa. Ultimately the study aims to influence current development paradigms and contribute to an enabling development context and the building of a strong and proactive civil society.

Parmi les pratiques d’intervention sociale qui se produisent quotidiennement dans les milieux institutionnel et associatif au Québec, une catégorie est particulièrement ciblée depuis quelques décennies, les jeunes ou la jeunesse. En s’inscrivant dans une démarche réflexive et exploratoire sur les fondements des pratiques d’intervention auprès des jeunes, le présent mémoire propose d’explorer le sens et la pertinence sociale de ces dernières à travers les perspectives des intervenants eux-mêmes. Pour ce faire, nous effectuons des études de cas selon une approche clinique et critique en sociologie. En allant chercher dans les témoignages d’un certain nombre d’intervenants des milieux institutionnel, communautaire et de l’employabilité leur connaissance expérientielle concernant la pratique d’intervention auprès des jeunes, nous dégageons des conceptions du social ou des sociologies implicites particulières. Se dégagent quatre idéaux-types - systémique, informationnel, normatif et clinique – qui visent respectivement l’émancipation, l’aide à l’insertion, la socialisation aux normes et le soutien humain. Notre analyse en termes de sociologie implicite explore la double question du sens selon les agents et de la fonction selon les processus engendrés. Elle permet d’articuler les conceptions que les agents sociaux se font de leur pratique avec son inscription dans le monde social. Ainsi, nous concluons que les pratiques d’intervention auprès des jeunes participent non seulement à la transformation sociale par l’ouverture d’espaces de liberté et de compréhension et par le soutien humain offert mais aussi à la normalisation et au contrôle par la constitution du marché du travail et/ou du monde adulte comme réalités auxquelles les jeunes doivent s’adapter. / Over the last several decades, one category of the population has been particularly targeted by social intervention in Quebec as elsewhere: youth. This thesis aims to examine the meaning and social relevance of intervention practices directed to youth, through a reflexive and exploratory study of their foundations as they are perceived and explained by practitioners themselves. The study involves a series of case studies carried out using an approach that blends clinical and critical sociology. By seeking out a number of practitioners’ interpretations of their practical experience, within institutional, community and employability milieux, we elicit their conceptions of the social, or the “implicit sociology”, that underlies their practices. Four ideal-typical conceptions are identified - systemic, informational, normative and clinical - which have as their objectives, respectively, emancipation, social inclusion, socialization and human support. The analysis in terms of “implicit sociology” explores the double question of meaning according to these social agents and of function according to the processes that are fostered by intervention. It allows for an articulation of the ways in which these social agents conceptualize their practices and how these practices are inscribed in the social world. We find that social intervention practices targeting youth engage not only in social transformation, through opening up spaces for freedom and understanding and through the offer of human support, but also, in “normalization” or social control, by constituting the labour market and the adult world as realities to which youth must adapt

This dissertation examines the participation of women and NGOs in a rural development and empowerment project in India. The World Bank initiated Rural Women’s Development and Empowerment Project was funded with the primary objective of working towards women’s economic and social empowerment through the formation of self-help groups. Within the framework of Gender and Development (GAD), women’s development and participation has to fulfil both practical and strategic gender needs in order for them to gain, share and exercise power. In women’s development, the economic cannot be understood apart from the social and the political. Transformative or genuine participation for women involves a process of partnership where one or more forms of power are attained through social capital and the participants are able to surmount structural barriers. Genuine participation can be achieved only through the processes of partnership and control, that is, through the building of equitable relationships among the primary beneficiaries themselves and between the primary beneficiaries and external agents. The incentives to participate and the pattern of participation are influenced by the material expectations and the social reality of women. (For complete abstract open document)

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Au Québec, comme ailleurs en Occident, de plus en plus de personnes sont confrontées à une expérience de souffrance et d’exclusion qui les renvoie à la marge de la société. Cette thèse permet de saisir comment des personnes qui ont vécu une importante situation d'exclusion, entre autres, en raison de leur problème de santé mentale, en arrivent à se reconnaître comme des citoyennes en s'engageant dans leur communauté. Elle amène aussi à comprendre par quel cheminement ou parcours elles sont passées pour en arriver à s'émanciper des limites et contraintes qui pesaient sur elles. Enfin, elle éclaire le rôle joué par la participation à l'intérieur de leur parcours. Menée dans une perspective interdisciplinaire, cette recherche s’alimente de plusieurs courants théoriques tels que la sociologie, la psychanalyse, la science politique et le travail social. La notion de parcours d’émancipation permet de « s’émanciper » du modèle biomédical dominant en santé mentale en présentant une vision sociopolitique intégrant les dimensions individuelle et collective du changement. Elle amène à comprendre la constitution du « sujet-acteur » aux plans personnel et politique, c’est-à-dire le sujet qui advient par le travail de l’individu sur lui-même lui permettant de faire rupture avec son histoire passée et de la reconfigurer de manière à lui donner un nouveau sens, et l’acteur qui vient concrétiser la manifestation du sujet en actes, donc, la façon dont il s’actualise. La recherche met en évidence l’apport des organismes communautaires en santé mentale à ces parcours d’émancipation en identifiant les valeurs qui les animent et les dispositifs mis en place pour soutenir la transformation des personnes dans l’ensemble des dimensions de leur être : rapport à la « maladie », à soi, aux autres et au monde. En s’inspirant de Winnicott, on constate qu’ils constituent des espaces potentiels ou transitionnels qui donnent un ancrage sécuritaire et profond et qui jouent le rôle de « passeur d’être » permettant au sujet de s’actualiser et de devenir autonome. Ils apportent aussi une importante contribution à la réalisation des valeurs démocratiques et offrent des occasions aux personnes de se manifester en tant que « sujets-citoyens ». / In Quebec, as elsewhere in the Western world, an increasing number of people are confronted to experiences of suffering and exclusion that confine them to the margins of society. This doctoral thesis aims at understanding how people who have lived through an important experience of exclusion – because of their mental health status among other reasons – can come to recognize themselves as full citizens by getting involved in their community. It also allows us to understand the course of action or journey they went through in order to become emancipated from the limits and constraints that weighed them down. Finally, this research underscores the role that participation can play in this journey. This thesis was undertaken in an interdisciplinary perspective, and borrows from various theoretical literatures, such as sociology, psychoanalysis, political science and social work. The concept of “emancipation journey” (parcours d’émancipation) that is central to our work allows us to distance ourselves from the biomedical model which remains dominant in mental health by putting forth a socio-political vision integrating the individual and collective dimensions of change. This concept helps us understand how “acting subjects” come to constitute on personal and political levels: both as “subjects” that arise when individuals break free from their past and work at giving it new sense, and as “actors” who materialize the manifestation of the subjects in actions, that is, the ways they self-actualize. This research underscores the contribution of community organizations working in the mental health arena to these journeys of emancipation by identifying their values and the content of devices developed to support the transformation of the persons in various dimensions of their being: relation to “illness”, to oneself, to others and to the world. Borrowing from Winnicott, we consider these organizations as potential or transitional spaces, in as much as they offer a secure and profound anchor and can be seen as “ferryman of beings” allowing the subject to self-actualize and to become autonomous. They also contribute to the realization of democratic values and offer opportunities for people presenting a mental health problem to engage as “subjects-citizens”.