Editorial Community development and the arts: reviving the democratic imagination

Abstract

The title of this special issue was chosen for two reasons. First, to re-affirm that community development has an intrinsic interest in the fostering of a democratic culture within and between communities, and between communities and state institutions. Second, we wish to explore the relationship between the politics of culture including policy analysis and policy formation, and cultural politics, those democratic and aesthetic practices that challenge mainstream democratic models (McGuigan, 1996). We are particularly interested in the potential of community development to catalyse and nourish this relationship. Of course neither of these intentions is free of context, and specific circumstances are crucial in determining the parameters of choice and possibility. This means that there are both re-assuring commonalities and instructive differences in the responses to the title, which are presented in this issue. Community development takes different forms in different contexts but, generally and historically speaking, it is concerned with the relationship between government and its citizens, charged variously with the responsibility for extending, strengthening or cultivating democracy. As an essentially contested concept, democracy has a range of meanings, and community development has been drawn upon to support competing and sometimes conflicting models. For us, democracy is not simply a set of managed institutions or relationships and certainly not a code word for neoliberal hegemony, but instead the concept needs to be reclaimed as an active social, political and cultural process through which change occurs by means of challenge and resistance as much as by consent. In this case, democracy is sustained not by the conformist citizen assumed in some versions of community development, but by the agency of the