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Community Development in Dublin NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF IRELAND MAYNOOTH COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT IN DUBLIN POLITICAL SUBJECTIVITY AND STATE COOPTION Alessandro Zagato* 2/1/2012 PhD Dissertation Supervisor: Professor Mary P. Corcoran * ISSP Doctoral Fellow, Department of Sociology, National Institute for Regional and Spatial Analysis, National University of Ireland Maynooth. 1 Contents SUMMARY OF THE CONTENT ......................................................................................................... 5 1. INTRODUCTION .............................................................................................................................. 6 1.1 New forms of politics and Marxism’s epochal crisis .............................................................. 8 1.2 Post-party politics ................................................................................................................. 13 1.3 Primacy of politics over organisation/institution .................................................................. 15 1.4 Chapters’ outline ................................................................................................................... 18 2. STATE, POLITICS AND THE DEPOLITICISATION OF COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT .... 25 2.1 Deconstructing the notion of CD ................................................................................................ 28 2.1.1 The problematic concept of ‘community’ as source of misunderstanding regards the positioning of CD in relation to politics and the state .................................................................. 31 2.2 Politics and the state: an ontological distinction ......................................................................... 33 2.2.1 The constitution of the state and the state's constitution of its objects ................................ 36 2.2.2 A politics of emancipation/resistance at a distance from the state ...................................... 44 3. THE POLITICS OF CD. A HISTORICAL BACKGROUND ......................................................... 55 3.1 Re-orientation of republican/socialist politics towards ordinary people’s concerns ................... 58 3.2 The community acts: the Citizen's Grievance Bureau and the Dublin Housing Action Committee (DHAC) .......................................................................................................................... 62 3.3 The formation of community action groups in the 1970s ........................................................... 68 3.4 State responses to people’s independent organisations. .............................................................. 73 3.5 Poverty I and the co-optation of CD ........................................................................................... 78 3.6 The Gregory deal as part of the turn towards state politics ......................................................... 81 4 METHODOLOGY ............................................................................................................................ 96 4.1 Research, objectification and my subjective experience of Dublin inner city ............................ 98 4.2 Ethnographic observation and its role in researching underprivileged populations ................... 99 4.3 Personal beliefs/ideology and the politics of research .............................................................. 102 4.4 Qualitative, quantitative research and the concept of “method assemblage” ............................ 105 2 4.5 Research ‘objects’ as dispositifs ............................................................................................... 108 4.6 In-depth interviews ................................................................................................................... 110 4.7 Possibility as a methodological category .................................................................................. 114 5 CD’S RELATION WITH THE STATE. THE PROBLEM OF BUREAUCRATISATION .......... 118 5.1 The funding issue. Do CD projects tend to bureaucratise because they are funded? ................ 121 5.1.1 The example of Chiapas ..................................................................................................... 123 5.1.2 Finessing and community work .......................................................................................... 128 5.2 Bureaucratisation as the triumph of “expert knowledge”. The case of Community Response (CR). ............................................................................................................................................... 129 5.2.1 Knowledge/expertise as power-over .................................................................................. 131 5.2.2 ‘Power-over’ and ‘power- to’ in CD ................................................................................. 133 5.2.3 Service delivery, participation and self-activation. Some clarifications ............................ 136 5.3 CD’s institutional tendency ....................................................................................................... 140 5.3.1 CD institutions operating in a ‘grey zone’ ......................................................................... 141 5.3.2 CD institutions as counter-institutions .............................................................................. 143 5.3.3 Community institutions as politicising machines ............................................................... 145 5.3.4 Counter-institutions and bureaucratization ....................................................................... 146 5.3.5 CD institutions as struggle for the right to the city, against displacement ........................ 149 5.3.6 Sean McDermott swimming pool ....................................................................................... 152 5.4 Conclusions. Towards a new institutionality beyond public and private? ................................ 156 6. CD AS A PLATFORM FOR INDEPENDENT POLITICS ........................................................... 159 6.1. CD as ‘organic’ politics ........................................................................................................... 161 6.2 Mutual Support Groups: Community Response’s attempts to reintroduce an organic approach to CD ............................................................................................................................................... 168 6.2.1Mutual support groups ........................................................................................................ 169 6.2.2 Public consultation meetings ............................................................................................. 172 6.3 Community First political sequence – outcome of CR’s organic approach. ............................ 174 6.3.1.Reconstruction of the “Community First” political sequence ........................................... 175 3 6.3.2 Analysis of the CF sequence (part 1): ‘eventfulness’ and subjective conditions ............... 180 6.3.3 Rupture with representation ............................................................................................... 183 6.3.4 Mechanisms of depoliticisation .......................................................................................... 185 7. CD AND YOUTH. THE PRESENT AND THE FUTURE OF CD ............................................... 191 7.1 The youth issue (i.e. the problem of leadership) ....................................................................... 194 7.2 CD’s relation to youth ............................................................................................................... 199 7.2.1 Youth Clubs ........................................................................................................................ 199 7.2.2 Background to CPF ........................................................................................................... 203 7.2.3 Roots of community policing in Ireland ............................................................................. 205 7.3 CPF, the anti-social behaviour ideology and youth criminalisation ......................................... 208 7.3.1 Stigma (the notion of ‘scum’) ............................................................................................. 211 7.4 Spontaneous juvenile insubordination in Ireland and Europe. Possibilities outside the anti-social behaviour rhetoric. .......................................................................................................................... 214 7.4.1 Depoliticised organisations ............................................................................................... 220 7.5 Conclusions (alliance youth adults) .......................................................................................... 221 8. CONCLUSIONS ............................................................................................................................. 225 8.1 The nature of the state and the cutbacks ................................................................................... 226 8.2 Two discourses and two responses to the crisis of CD ............................................................. 231 8.3 Political recommendations versus policy recommendations .................................................... 236 LIST OF INTERVIEWS ..................................................................................................................... 246 LIST OF MAIN EVENTS AND INITIATIVES I ATTENDED AS OBSERVER/ETHNOGRAPHER
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