One - Introductory overview

Summary

This book is part of the Rethinking Community Development series. As such, it offers diverse critical perspectives, both international and crossdisciplinary, on the challenge of how to make sense of contemporary forms of populism and also how community development responds to these. Like the first two books in this series, Politics, Power and Community Development (Meade et al, 2016) and Class, Inequality and Community Development (Shaw and Mayo, 2016), our contribution has a primary focus on the structural, social and political contexts within which community development functions. Understanding these contexts helps us to make sense of what is often known as a time of populist politics, albeit we focus more on right-wing forms of populism. Such politics is in turn linked to what can be construed as a contemporary crisis of liberal democracy (Grayling, 2017) and neoliberalism, or perhaps even hyper-capitalism itself (Beradi, 2009). Populism, Democracy and Community Development examines the pressures and shifts linked with populism, yet many chapters also probe the complexity of community development itself, reaching for possible responses from this professional and citizen project.

Our challenges in editing this book

There have been three key challenges in editing this book. The first, linked to the challenge of populism and the contemporary crisis of liberal democracy, is simply the fluidity of the issues we are exploring. Quite literally, as editors, we were reading news analyses and articles arriving daily in our inboxes, as well as the burgeoning body of literature on populism being produced within the academy. Since the three of us gathered at a 2017 Melbourne Forum to first discuss the phenomena and concerns that this book focuses on, until late 2019, we had to grapple with Trump's erratic policies; the saga of Brexit; Bolsonaro's attacks on civil society, the poor and the environment in Brazil; Erdogan's embrace of populist Islam in Turkey; and a populist right-wing polity in Australia, to give a few examples. There had been a sense that every paragraph, once written, could easily be out of date.

But when we submitted the typescript for review in November 2019 we were unaware of the profound contextual changes that would be facing us by March 2020.