Community development – A disabling or an empowering profession?

This article looks at John McKnight’s assertion that community development professionals disable community self help. I shall look back to the period when McKnight was doing his research in the mid‑1970s and more recently when the ABCD movement he co-founded took off in Scotland. I shall explore the methods policy makers and practitioners adopted in Scotland to ensure local communities were partners in change. My thesis is that McKnight’s assertion, then and since, that professional community development work disables disadvantaged communities is simply wrong. Such practitioners enabled disadvantaged people to have more agency over their lives. Scotland is an interesting case study notwithstanding its scale compared with the USA. It was here that we established IACD (the International Association for Community Development) in 1999 as the global multi-disciplinary professional body—an indication of the strength of the profession there.