Two - The challenges of populism

Summary

Introduction

Community development can be described as a process in which communities take collective action to gain control over their resources and futures. It aspires to establish processes and structures which are ‘democratic, participatory, empowering and inclusive’ (Meade et al, 2016: 3). The ways in which community development practitioners work to empower communities are framed by social, economic and political contexts. This chapter discusses the contextual landscape of populism. It offers some introductory thoughts on the problematic intersections between community development, democracy and populism. Setting out ways of thinking about these intersections has been a daunting task. Each phenomenon is multifaceted. Moreover, currently there is no corpus of research that deals with the ways in which populist political culture affects community development processes, or the extent to which populism has been embraced or rejected at the level of specific communities. Yet it is possible to identify major themes in both populism and community development and to draw out points of overlap and divergence. After analysing convergences and disjunctions the chapter discusses the ways in which the beliefs and practices of populism challenge community development. The chapter concludes with a brief discussion of community development responses to populism.

Populism as political culture

Populism is now a global phenomenon. Populist leaders, parties and movements have significant control or influence on political regimes, governments and public policies in countries as diverse as the Philippines, Germany, the US, Brazil, India and Hungary. While there is a huge literature on populism, conceptual descriptors of populism vary. A simple starting point is to conceptualise populism as a form of politics based around specific beliefs. The term ‘populism’ is used to describe a political logic (Laclau, 2005; Judis, 2016; Mudde and Kaltwasser, 2017); a political style (Moffitt, 2016); and a political strategy (Muller, 2016; Eatwell and Goodwin, 2018). But it is also understood as an ideological world view (Wodak, 2015) and a (thincentred) ideology (Mudde and Kaltwasser, 2017). The generally accepted position in the literature is that populism per se is not linked to any particular ideological stance (Laclau, 2005; Mudde and Kaltwasser, 2017).