ABCD: Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater
Prof. Deon Pretorius
Rising popularity
The Asset-Based Community Development (ABCD) approach to local development is becoming very popular in South Africa. There are obvious and good reasons for this popularity. However, while appreciating it as an approach to development of communities that is based on the strengths and potentials of communities, one should also be aware that on its own it is not adequate or sufficient to address the complex challenges of a society like South Africa.
There is no doubt that ABCD is valuable in terms of its emphasis on the resources, skills, and experience available in a community to organize and taking developmental action. It is certainly important to use the community’s own assets and resources as a (but not the only) basis for development and it is important to empower the people of the community by encouraging them to utilize what they already possess.
However, this is not enough to meet the development challenges of a country like South Africa that manifest on many levels. Some of these challenges are local and others are on a macro societal, systemic, and institutional level. There are certain features of our education and economic systems and institutions that cannot be addressed by local resilience. ABCD cannot and does not address all the challenges on all levels, but it is valuable for its focus on the local. Thus, I do not argue against ABCD; but propose that we take note of the inadequacies and then complement it with aspects to make it more appropriate for our purposes.
Limitations of ABCD
This is even acknowledged by Kretzman, co-founder of ABCD, when he says that ABCD is necessary but not sufficient. However, he confines this statement to insufficiency to address large-scale / macro / systemic issues. Based on my experience of more than two decades of development work in South Africa I argue that one need to go further than local self-help.
Here are a few points that need to be explored before you adopt an ABCD approach as the single and only approach to local development:
- Although there are arguments against a needs-based approach one should not deny the significance of needs that cannot be met by way of a do-it-yourself, self-sufficiency, accountability approach.
- An ABCD approach is quiet about human rights.
- While we tend to over-emphasise power and politics one can also not be quiet about the dynamics of power and politics in society.
- While localization is vital and critical it is also not possible to solve and address all local development challenges on the local level.
- My biggest concern is that the ABCD approach is quiet about the systemic and institutional obstacles in the way of citizens opportunity to access assets. It cannot and does not address issues like structural inequality and dysfunctional institutions
The challenge is to acknowledge these as potential weaknesses and shortcomings and to work out how to counteract these and thereby arrive a more balanced approach.