Developing a community-development approach ... - Oxford Journals

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Developing a community-development approach through engaging resettling Southern Sudanese refugees within Australia Peter Westoby

Abstract This article presents an approach to community development when working with refugee groups within a resettlement context. The approach parallels an elicitive research initiative within the cities of Brisbane and Logan, Australia in response to Sudanese accusations of neo-colonial methods of ‘service delivery’ and from two challenges posited from an analysis of the literature. The dimensions of privileging emic perspectives (the insider perspectives of Sudanese refugees in contrast to etic or outsider professional perspectives), using a dialogical method (the creation of a safe space to make sense of the new settlement context), taking an elicitive stance (whereby the community development worker orients themselves towards facilitation and discovery) and focusing on the resources of culture, community and power are outlined.

Introduction This community development approach was developed in response to a particular problem identified within practice. The following comments in particular sparked this work: You professionals are part of the ‘axis of evil’. . . you are making our lives more difficult. . . Your approaches are neo-colonial and causing more conflict in our communities. . .

(Two criticisms made by Southern Sudanese refugee elders at a public meeting directed at the organization I worked for at the time). Community Development Journal Vol 43 No 4 October 2008 pp. 483 –495

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During the years leading up to the elders’ criticisms, I had endeavoured to work within a community-development orientation – one in which the focus was on community-development orthodoxies such as ‘bottom-up’ processes of social change, social justice, access, participation and cooperation (Aristotle, 1990; Craig and Lovel, 2005; Bowles, 2005; McGorry, 1995). Over this period the literature in relation to refugee work emphasized individual and family support through case management and therapeutic interventions, and this is reflected in a great deal of organizational and professional practice. This paper recounts how Southern Sudanese1 people themselves challenged the Western service delivery emphases of the organization I worked for and provided the opportunity to engage in ways much more reflective of community-development values and practices. This required significant reflection on the author’s part. There was a need to rethink practice, draw on new analyses and approach practice in new ways. A recurring theme within my approach to working with refugees has been to see the process of refugee settlement in Australia in community development terms. For example, the question of what constituted community for the people I was working with and how to work with them in a way that strengthened was constantly asked. Community here is taken to mean a network of relations that contribute to a sense of belonging and connection. The issue of how people in community can achieve a sense of agency and empowerment within the Australian policy context with its constant pull towards assimilation was considered. These questions were paralleled by the consideration of how the organization could be sure we worked in ways that would address and counter, and definitely not contribute to, institutional racism. The findings outlined in this article deepen the analyses, understandings and approaches, which informed community-development practice in this context. Returning to the elders’ accusations, any practitioner would be upset that they had clearly not met the first principle of community-development practice, which is to do no harm. My own response was to negotiate some organizational space to step back from the pressures of service provision and re-engage the Southern Sudanese community on their terms in a longer term approach of research, dialogue and potentially re-oriented community-development praxis. Within this process of stepping back, the organization provided the auspice to initiate a ‘Dialogue-In-Healing’ project that started to rethink a community-development orientation to 1 It should be noted that African communities are now the largest intake within Australia’s Humanitarian and Refugee Off-Shore Programme. Southern Sudanese refugees in particular represent the future largest anticipated intake of refugees via the Humanitarian Program into Australia over the next few years. The Off-Shore Programme needs to be contrasted with the On-Shore Programme. The latter is designed for asylum seekers whilst the former is for refugee and humanitarian entrants.

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engagement with settlement concerns. About one year into this project with the support of the organization, I left to begin my doctorate while retaining contact through a research partnership. Several Southern Sudanese elders who had participated in the ‘Dialogue-In-Healing’ project were very supportive of a more in-depth action-research and community-development work. An informal meeting was arranged that included other elders, the leaders of the Queensland Sudanese Community Association, the Sudanese Christian Fellowship and the Brisbane Chapter of the SPLM/A (Sudanese People’s Liberation Movement/Army2). This was a significant moment in their relation with services, of moving from being recipients of services to inviting service providers to engage with their concerns. This moment was the crux of restructuring practice towards community-development methods. Previously the professionals had been driving a process of engagement and defining needs but now the locus of control had shifted as the Sudanese leadership began to take some control. We were becoming participants in a process steered by some of the key Sudanese leaders. Two related complexities of working with refugee groups became apparent. Firstly, this was a shift in power relations, and it became difficult to maintain distance from the complexities of settlement, conflict and community relations. The professionals no longer knew what to do any better than the community members themselves. Secondly, the elder-based mainly male leadership had structured their relationships to the point where they felt bold enough to challenge the very welfare-oriented services on which they were dependent. As workers committed to developmental processes, it was important to honour that developmental process and begin a new dialogue based on a different kind of relationship. This was a significant shift from a ‘service relationship’ to a ‘developmental relationship’ with a mutual agreement to try and do something ‘together’. This critique of practice as neo-colonial and the invitation to engage on a new ‘developmental journey’, led to a more thorough engagement with the literature on refugee-related work. Two key challenges emerged and are outlined below in trying to map a partnership with the Sudanese community. It is important to say that whilst this paper is written in a linear way – that is, starting with two challenges from the literature and then presenting the empirical research – the theoretical and empirical were held in constant dialogue. For example, I am highlighting the following two challenges posited from literature as a result of firstly Sudanese constant critiques of 2 The SPLM/A was the southern Sudanese peoples’ vehicle in initially fighting the northern Khartoum controlled Sudan. Since the 2005 peace agreements, it is the vehicle for administering an Interim government in the south.

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Western therapeutically oriented interventions, and secondly their invitations to consider the social world as the primary ‘vehicle’ for recovery. Challenge #1: the problem of a dominant therapeutic orientation The sociologist Furedi (2004) argues that Western societies now live within a therapeutic culture. At the heart of his analysis is the assertion that within a therapeutically oriented culture there is a powerful assumption that once people (refugees in this case) are damaged they have an injury that can never be put quite right (Furedi, 2004, p. 111). A consequential lowering of expectations about human competency and agency and an increasing reliance on therapeutically oriented interventions amounts to a ‘diminution of the self, which accentuates human frailty and vulnerability’ (ibid, p. 114). Professional interventions are then legitimized on the basis of this assumed vulnerability. This model of human vulnerability and powerlessness, transmitted through therapeutic culture, coincides with a far wider tendency to dismiss the potential for people to exercise control over their lives. There is a decline in the belief of agency (Pupavac, 2002, 2004; Furedi, 2004, pp. 76– 78). For Furedi such discourses as at risk, social inclusion and special needs are indicators of this sense of diminished agency resulting from vulnerability and powerlessness. Anthropologists such as Kleinman (1995) and philosophers/psychiatrists such as Bracken (2002) argue that such a therapeutic culture orients many practitioners to medicalize distress. This is increasingly the case within refugee-oriented work. Medicalizing distress means that refugee pain or suffering is located either in the individual (refugees are labeled as traumatized and diagnosed with post-traumatic stress syndrome by some clinically and medically oriented therapists) or the social body (refugee populations are labeled as ‘at risk’ by some community-oriented practitioners). The medicalization of distress is indicative of the assumed vulnerability, which then legitimizes professionally determined service-oriented interventions (Kleinman, 1995; Bracken, 2002). Refugee suffering and pain becomes an issue linked to the ‘discreet events of violence and disruption’, rather than the causes of the event – issues to do with morality, social/ structural dynamics and power (Humphrey, 2002, 2005). Challenge #2: the need to rebuild a social world Both the literature and Sudanese refugees themselves highlight refugee recovery as primarily a social process (Summerfield, 1999; Bracken 2002). The case for recovery as a social process sits as a counterpoint to the therapeutic approach. Within post-war and humanitarian contexts this social process involved supporting refugees in rebuilding their physical (homes, schools), economic (jobs, livelihoods), social (relationships, networks) and


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moral worlds (justice, rights). In doing this and doing it collectively, people are able to recover from the suffering of war-related violence and disruption. People rebuild their lives, they mourn and grieve together, work, socialize and struggle together – their recovery is intimately connected to these social processes (Summerfield, 1999). If refugee recovery post-conflict is primarily a social process, achieving this posits an even greater problem when working within a resettlement context. The refugee experiences of forced migration and resettlement involve an even more significant disruption to a social world – one could even say complete rupture. Social relationships are fragmented and lost; kin, remaining extended family and other social networks crumble under the weight of dislocation. It is a new cultural-economic and political context and any ‘old’ social world is gone. Refugee war-related suffering is reinforced by migration-related loss (Brough et al., 2003; Hoffman, 2004). Other authors have described this as shock, fracture and bereavement (Silove, 1999; Schweitzer, Buckley and Rossi, 2002). For many, such loss underpins the vulnerability assumed within the therapeutic orientation: a refugee’s social world is posited to be either lost or so fragile that the appropriate interventions need to be therapeutic. In acknowledging this loss or disruption, and yet not wanting to assume vulnerability, the research question then became, if refugee recovery is a social process that is infused with refugee agency, then what does an approach to community development that supports, nurtures or facilitates refugee rebuilding of a new social world within the resettlement context look like? If a new social world is rebuilt for refugees, then the social process of healing and recovery can take place and there will be less need for therapeutically oriented interventions.

Research methodology To answer such a question the study used elicitive research (Lederach, 1995) as a way of incorporating both learning and action dimensions. The learning dimension focused on orthodox research processes of participant observation, interviews and data analysis. The action dimension involved workshops in which data were generated from a dialogical process between Southern Sudanese refugees and the researcher – a mutual journey of discovery (Lederach, 1995). The key guiding principles for such an elicitive methodology are derived from Lederach’s (1995) approach to conflict transformation work that parallels a community-development approach. They include: .

People in a setting are a key resource, they are not simply recipients;

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Indigenous knowledge (or endogenous knowledge in this case) is a pipeline to discovery, meaning and appropriate action; Participation of local people in the process of research and action is crucial; Building from available resources fosters self-sufficiency and sustainability ensuring that the research process contributes not simply to academic knowledge production but also community knowledge; and finally, Empowerment involves a process that fosters awareness-of-self in context and validates discovery, naming, release and creation through reflection and action (Lederach, 1995, pp. 25 –31).

In relation to participation observation, I was involved in many aspects of community life during 2002–2005. The research entailed visiting families in their homes, supporting the Sudanese community in planning events, attending funerals and marriages, being with the community at peace rallies and involvement in numerous community governance initiatives and community projects. Such projects included the ‘Dialogue-In-Healing’ project, a ‘Reducing Intergenerational Conflict’ project, a ‘Family-In-Cultural Transition’ initiative and a ‘Peace Initiative’ that engaged Sudanese, Indigenous and Polynesian young people. These activities and projects provided many opportunities to build relationships, observe and question. It was through talking and being at meetings that I learnt to understand much of the new social world of Southern Sudanese refugees in the localities of Brisbane and Logan. Whilst doing participant observation work twenty interviews were also conducted with Southern Sudanese refugees3 and nine with practitioners and policy makers working with Southern Sudanese refugees. As part of the ongoing action research and validation process, three facilitated workshops each attended by approximately twenty Sudanese were conducted on 3 The twenty Sudanese people interviewed were all from southern Sudan and most came from Niolitic tribes (near the Nile area of Sudan) although I purposefully included participants from diverse Niolitic tribes such as Dinka, Nuer, Shiluk and Luo. A couple of participants were from both the Nuba Mountains areas and the Bari tribe of the Zanda people. All the participants were Christian, although they participated in diverse denominations including Anglican, Uniting Church and Baptist or were nominal non-practicing Christians. The age group was mainly between thirty and fifty years of age, although several elders (who were over 50) and several youth leaders (who were under 30) were included. Overall this reflects a bias towards the elders and leaders within the whole community, and elders and leaders within the communities of women and young people. Most of them, although still struggling with their own personal and family issues related to settlement, had a deep commitment to community concerns and understood that many issues needed to be understood within a broader community and society context. Hence these participants were able and willing to participate and were motivated to build a new model of community development.


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consecutive Saturdays, each lasted four hours and included a celebration meal. There was some overlap of participants in the interviewing process, but the workshops often included a range of diverse new actors. Workshop themes emerged from initial analysis of the interview data and participant observation (related to resources of culture, community and power) and presented to participants for discussion, refinement, criticism and to discuss possible implications for Southern Sudanese community action. Interviews were recorded either by handwritten notes or tape recorder depending on the speed of the interviews and/or participant preferences and then transcribed. The first step towards data analysis was to code what Kirby and McKenna (1989, p. 135) call ‘bibbits’, which can be defined as ‘a passage from a transcript, a piece of conversation recorded on a scrap of paper that can stand on its own but, when necessary, can be relocated in its original context’. Such bibbits could be words, concepts, or themes (Minichiello et al., 1995, p. 252). Similar Bibbits were identified from the transcripts and located alongside one another. The data gathered from interview, workshops or observation were classified into categories or themes. Linked phrases were highlighted using different numbering systems. Next, bibbits with the same number were placed into one document, each being coded clearly to identify their origins. Analysis of this document generated particular concepts or categories that were central to the approach to community development being explicated in this study. A key stage of the data analysis process was to generate four papers from the interviews and participant observation processes. The first, ‘Southern Sudanese narratives of distress’ was written focusing on the social experiences of distress that had been articulated by participants and was circulated to a wide range of people, both Southern Sudanese refugees and service provider/professional practitioners, people who had participated in interviews and others who had not. Individual feedback was invited and I worked with one key Southern Sudanese leader to host a feedback evening. The other three papers articulated the initial themes for community development resources as propositions to be discussed. Each paper focused on each of the three spheres of culture, community and power reflecting both empirical analysis and directions provided by the literature. These papers were then used within workshops to refine ideas, validate analysis and elicit Southern Sudanese community action.

A method of engagement with resettling refugees: a community development approach Based on this research the key dimensions of a community-development approach that nurtures, supports and facilitates the rebuilding of a new

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social world within a resettlement context are: starting with emic perspectives, using a dialogical methodology, taking an elicitive stance and focusing on the resources of culture, community and power. Starting with emic perspectives Within this approach the starting place is to privilege the emic perspectives of refugees. Emic is an anthropological term used to describe an insider perspective as opposed to the etic or outsider perspective. To understand how refugees have experienced the loss of their social world, practitioners need to critically evaluate their own assumptions and listen carefully. This research project engaged in this process of listening and learnt afresh how Southern Sudanese refugee groups understood their loss. The starting with emic perspectives responds to Sudanese assertions such as: These agencies do not take the time to learn about culture. They understand refugees as refugees wherever they come from. But actually it is different. Services are not taking time to learn about such culturally and community sensitive work – there is no time to talk about the issues. So many workers do not even know the existing resources that enable us to know a culture better. We need to step out of simply referring clients on, and start addressing their real issues, using their real strengths. These agencies define problems the same for everyone – and therefore give uniform services, not responding to community-specific needs. (Participant comments).

Privileging emic perspectives requires a stepping back and a re-engagement with how Sudanese refugees define their own needs and losses. Any re-oriented community-development process needs to take the time to step back and re-engage with how particular refugee groups experience their loss. The research identified key losses within the domains of culture, community and power. For example, within the domain of culture there was a deep sense of cultural disorientation that led to increased intergenerational and family conflict, concerns about young people rapidly ‘assimilating’ into a national and global youth culture, and confusion about issues of violence. Within the domain of community there was a sense of social trauma (Kleinman, 1995). Such social trauma resulted from refugee loss of family, kin, tribal affiliations, stable eldership and leadership. This social trauma interacted and was compounded by concerns about a lack of welcome and hospitality and racism from some parties in the host society. Within the domain of power, Sudanese refugees felt that they lacked political


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resources and access to political community. Such a lack of resources and access disadvantaged them in overcoming the social distresses (Bourdieu et al., 1999) of poverty, unemployment, lack of access to education and difficulties of engagement with the settlement and welfare-service sector. These emic perspectives crystallized an understanding of the challenge of a disrupted social world. However, a key lesson was that, despite the disruption to cultural, community and political resources resultant from war, forced migration and now resettlement, there were still some resources available. Using Giddens (1985) structuration theory these resources were conceptualized as both affected and yet still existing and able to be engaged by agents. These resources are discussed in part four of this section. Using a dialogical methodology of intervention Whilst arguing for the privileging of emic perspectives the research also illuminated an important role for outsiders. Within the research Sudanese refugees often made statements such as: Our current culture is acting as a guide in ways that seems to create mistrust, constant criticism and power struggles. We feel lost and need some help in reorienting our culture (Sudanese Elder participant).

Such an elder’s comment highlights that in the confusing new context of resettlement there is a role for outside agents to supplement emic perspectives. Emic perspectives are disrupted by the experiences of cultural disorientation, social trauma and social distress potentially leading to refugee confusion. Therefore there is a need to engage in a negotiated dialogical process creating a safe space for Southern Sudanese refugee actors to ‘make sense of’ their settlement location. Such a space was created in the dialogical workshops and used to discuss Sudanese refugee distress and confusion about their own disrupted resources and to understand the new socio-cultural-political context within which they are resettling. A lack of dialogical engagement can result in either/or scenarios of ossifying endogenous cultural, social and political resources, or conversely, completely assimilating into exogenous ones. Both responses are likely to reinforce cycles and sequences of cultural disorientation, social trauma and social distress. Dialogue creates a space, a new platform for avoiding these either/or scenarios, a platform that takes seriously the need to rebuild a new social world. As a worker, entering into a dialogical relationship and creating dialogical platforms is a challenging process. There is often a relationship of us/them in which the Sudanese refugees see workers as part of the ‘them’ – part of the new ‘foreign’ system, often employed within the

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service-system nexus of professional intervention. The core methodologies of community development work – particularly of building relationships with refugees prior to initiating group dialogue – are critical. The research processes of participant observation and interviewing were central to the trust-building processes. It is very difficult to engage in the approach outlined here without this foundation of a trusting relationship built out of time taken to listen, learn and prove one’s solidarity. Taking an elicitive stance Within this re-oriented community-development approach the worker takes an elicitive stance oriented towards facilitation and discovery, a stance theoretically underpinned by the work of Lederach (1995) who works in the field of cross-cultural conflict transformation. The assumption behind the approach in this situation is that there is a conflict between the social world left behind as a result of forced migration and the new social world of resettlement. An elicitive stance of facilitation sees the primary mode of work as a mutual ‘journey of discovery’ between the communitydevelopment practitioner and refugee groups. The end point of rebuilding a social world is a new social world – new because it is neither what was left behind (refugee groups cannot replicate the past; youth and women might not want it to look the same), nor is it simply an assimilation into a new society. Refugees bring disrupted cultural, communal and political resources and these impact on community, transforming the host society in the long term. Hence it is a discovery process – in which the cultural, communal and political resources available to Southern Sudanese refugees, albeit disrupted ones, are reconstituted, re-invented, re-oriented, recycled, repatterned and restructured in the new context. It is also elicitive in that new models of cultural practice, interpersonal and communal participation, political mobilization and contestation have to be developed. The role of the worker is as catalyst for the thoughtful rebuilding of a new social world that has avoided the either/ or pitfalls of ossification/reaction or assimilation. Within this research project, ‘new’ models of child protection and family violence prevention, dispute resolution/mediation and ‘counseling’ were developed that integrated aspects of ‘old’ Sudanese cultural practices with new Australian practices. Focusing on the sites and resources of culture, community and power In this the final part of the paper, themes that signpost how these resources can be used to rebuild a new social world are outlined. These themes orient practitioners concerned with recovery socially rather than therapeutically.


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Table 1 Cultural resources and community development

† Culture and rebuilding a social world: Community development can support cultural practices such as funeral rites, mourning, dancing and singing, that contribute to the rebuilding of a social body as a community-in-exile. † Culture and identity formation: Identifies how community development can support cultural practice that is utilized to construct collective identity and also engage dialogically with shifting cultural identities. † Culture as a re-oriented guide: Explores how community-development practice can engage with actors around culture as a re-oriented guide to live in the new social context. † Culture practice and recycling: Examines how community development needs to engage dialogically with the negotiated processes of how to use parts of old cultural practice in domains of life such as disciplining children and community conflict resolution mechanisms, within the new society to construct new cultural practices.

Table 2 Community and community development

† Community through enabling bonding social capital: Identifies how community development supports refugees to create social capital through activities and actions with one another – that is, within (intra) the cultural community. † Community through enabling bridging social capital: Explores how to support refugee groups in their interactions with ‘others’ (inter) (other cultural groups, including groups from the dominant cultural communities). † Community through cultivating an ethos modeled and guided by effective and ethical leadership: The emergence of new leadership and governance is posited as a key part of the community development process. † Community through engaging in conflict negotiation processes: Considers the role of community conflict negotiation within newly arrived refugee groups positing that an increased ability to negotiate conflict (inter/intra tribal, communal, generational, gender) in the new settling context is central to community development. † Community through experiencing the communalization of distress: Community development as processes that support and nurture the sociality of refugees and people from the host society to ‘move closer’ to one another. This moving closer facilitates the socialization of suffering through ‘sharing pain’.

Table 3 Power and social healing

† Power as a resource for community development through building community infrastructure: Considers how Southern Sudanese refugees organized collectively in building formal infrastructures and a key part of the process. † Power as a resource for community development through struggle within the field of the settlement and welfare industries. Examines the ways in which Southern Sudanese actors attempt to influence, confront and resist the systems and structures that impact on their lives within the fields of settlement and welfare. † Power as a resource for community development through activating citizenship rights: Explores the discursive construct of citizenship for Southern Sudanese refugees, and then how Sudanese refugees can activate citizenship rights not only for the purposes of ‘belonging’, but also for the purposes of gaining social and economic rights (for housing, health, education and employment).

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Whilst drawn from the research they can provide some generalized signposts for use in other contexts. Analysis of the data regarding culture highlighted the key themes or practices that are shown in Table 1: Analysis of other data highlighted five key themes of how community can be a resource in community development (Table 2): Finally, analysis also highlighted three themes of how power can be a resource for community development (Table 3):

Conclusion Applying any community development approach in increasingly complex social settings (often described in ways such as liquid modernity, risk society, the ‘project of globalization’) is difficult. The approach outlined in this article requires constant reflexivity in which workers take into account concerns of philosophy, analysis, method and techniques. The approach outlined emerges out of such a reflexive urge – a stepping back, a pausing and then a purposeful engagement in which the emic perspectives, a dialogical method, an elicitive stance, and the cultural, communal and political resources available are highlighted. The goal of this approach is to rebuild a new social world that optimizes refugee recovery within a resettlement context. Peter Westoby is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at University of Queensland School of Social Work and Applied Human Services and the Australian Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies (ACPACS), St Lucia, Brisbane, QLD 4072. Address for correspondence: email: [email protected]

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