145 – Problematising what it means to ‘help communities’

[00:00:00] Lucie: Hi, and welcome to the IDEMS podcast. My name’s Lucie Hazelgrove Planel. I’m a Social Impact Scientist and anthropologist, and I’m here today with Kate Fleming, one of the directors of IDEMS. 

Hi Kate. 

[00:00:18] Kate: Hey Lucie. 

[00:00:20] Lucie: So you asked me a couple of weeks ago now, I think, I think you asked me what my dreams were and I found that very difficult to answer, because it’s not language that I would use. But then I still realized, what really interests me and what really motivates me is helping communities do what they want to do.

And so I think the day after our call, I emailed you quickly to say that, and then you emailed back. Saying, yeah, but…

[00:00:42] Kate: I did not say yeah, but, I just challenged, I just said who gets to decide what a community wants? I think that was my general question, which obviously opens up a lot. 

[00:01:03] Lucie: Yes. 

[00:01:12] Kate: You end up with a lot to unpack. So not to put it back on you, but out of that question, what came to mind for you? What did that get you thinking about? 

[00:01:14] Lucie: Yeah, with the difficulties in general of that whole phrase again, it’s so easy to say, but in practice it’s just rife with difficulties. So for, an example, when I did my PhD research in that community in Vanuatu you had an official chief for the whole island who I think was government created potentially in the past, who was not recognized by all of the local chiefs who said that no, he wasn’t a proper chief, you could ignore what he said. 

And then you had other community representatives who often weren’t elected. They were sort sometimes chosen by an NGO to be, for example, the disaster management person. So you have those sorts of official people, but then again, if you’re doing a project, for example, just with women or just with children, then who’s going to be your main contact? 

And I’m talking even as a main contact because it’s quite often easy in communication to have a main contact. But I know you are really interested. In collaborative decision making or… 

[00:02:14] Kate: So just even in that opening, I think there’s a lot to unpack because I would say a core assumption of what you were saying is that communities are geographic. 

[00:02:23] Lucie: Yes. 

[00:02:25] Kate: So they are places where I wouldn’t necessarily assume that. I would think that community, particularly in the digital age, some of the most important communities for people are their online communities. 

[00:02:35] Lucie: Yeah. 

[00:02:36] Kate: And while I think there’s a lot of pushback and for good reason about toxic online communities, for many people, those online communities have been lifesaving, they’re things that they couldn’t find in their offline communities. I think historically that’s a big issue. If you are a marginalized or sort of underrepresented member of your physical community, you might not feel like you belong in your, I use quotes around community. 

But the internet came along and suddenly you could find other people who were similar to you in some way, and so you form this other community. And so I guess even in that, there are different kinds of communities, but it also brings up the point that people have feet in different communities, that you might not wanna move away from your local community, it’s still important to you, it’s still where you live, but you have other parts of yourself that are better represented in other communities. 

And so when you even think about giving a community what it wants, because we do often think geographically, then it starts to get very complex and layered. And this even gets, you can start to break it down just by, in an impact sense, you often do target children or women or, what is that category? 

[00:04:02] Lucie: I completely agree. And I do have the tendency to always think about physical communities, that are bounded in space. But then you’ve also mentioned another important thing in terms of exclusion, by the very fact of some people having multiple communities often, but also not feeling perhaps fully part of whichever community we’re talking about. You are always going to be excluding some people, whether it’s in the decision of who, who will be impacted or who will be part of something or whether it’s in the decision of what is this thing that they want to do.

[00:04:36] Kate: Could I throw another curve ball at you, which I think is a really hard issue when you are introducing tech and a system that’s going to come with some things baked in, as much as there’s adaptation and localization, there is some core evidence based program, usually we’re working with something like that.

So, what are the boundaries of local culture? What if the local culture says women have no rights, women shouldn’t be participating in this? What is our responsibility? There’s an element of imposing, but also I would argue, I’m not troubled by that. Like how do we navigate that? Because if you give a community what it wants, but the people who hold power in that community have historically just completely marginalized members of their community and women are just an easy example.

[00:05:37] Lucie: Yeah. 

[00:05:38] Kate: And one that I think we’re both familiar with. I don’t support that and I’m not interested in bringing tech into the community, even if it’s a tool that’s further supporting what I think are quite problematic choices and are disenfranchising members of the community. 

[00:06:00] Lucie: But that’s a really interesting point in the sense of, I think, in a lot of communities where people have mobile phones, but it’s not like one per person, it’s more like one per family or something, the person who will have access to the phone will perhaps not be the person with the most power in the family. And so even building tech is one thing, but then making it accessible, physically accessible to everybody is perhaps another.

And coming back to your question about what happens if they don’t want to do something that you want to do? Which I think I was aware of when I said that first phrase, and I think I tried to put a caveat in it saying something like, as long as I agree with it, but then who am I to…? You know, there’s a certain thing of who am I to dictate what, it is not dictating, it’s saying what I want to work on. I think there’s a difference there. 

[00:06:51] Kate: Okay, so it might be that part of what saves us is that we’re usually working with experts and communities where there is evidence for what has impact. And usually, honestly, the things that drive the best impact are inclusive. They are figuring out ways to bring everyone in and up and along that that benefits everybody. 

And so we usually are not, I don’t think we’ve ever had the experience where we’re working with something that is going to, if there’s interest in the community, and if there is an ability to bring something in with the buy-in and consideration and involvement of a community, I don’t think those things usually are designed in ways where they reinforce negative systems. And it almost always is that impact is tied to inclusion, it’s tied to representation, it’s tied to taking into account the most vulnerable, the underrepresented people, because those are usually where the worst pain is being felt.

[00:08:12] Lucie: No, that’s a good point. And if we are thinking about tech too, then that’s when, I think especially within IDEMS, we think about not just having a virtual sort of tech world, but is it phygital, is it called, where, it’s using tech to help existing physical interactions. 

[00:08:29] Kate: I think of sociotechnical as that, where it’s like tech in service of positive social, offline behaviors. 

[00:08:38] Lucie: And so, in both cases, whether you’re just trying to create a sort of tech virtual world or a sort of phygital world, then you’re gonna be developing it usually with people. And so there will be interest already also within that community, again, we’re not defining community. So it’s our interests, but it is also their interests. And that sort of happens through a dialogue and a discussion, which I think it’s normal that there, there would always be some voices which are counter things, because nobody is ever a hundred percent in agreement about everything.

[00:09:13] Kate: I also think underlying this is, one of the assumptions we need to have if everyone holds multiple communities and we have multiple parts of ourselves, we’re never looking for one intervention or tech impact thing to be one size fits all, or to be the community tool. That’s not the idea of it. It’s that you want layered ways for people to engage. 

In a community you want something probably that’s aggressively commercial. Like you want that thing that is really focused on just serving businesses and serving people who are really like the highest, you know, producing whatever that category of individual is, that’s not representative of people at the margins or people who are vulnerable. You want something to benefit those people, that’s helpful. 

But you want to have kind of infrastructure, institutions, systems that account for all parts, where you’re not getting so out of balance that the community is aggressively skewed. Again, community in some quote, but the idea of community aggressively skews in favor of some idea of what best serves the community, which I think is what happens a lot, particularly with tech right now, is economic incentives are set up as the this is what we all agree we should be working toward. And we do all agree that those are important. 

[00:10:48] Lucie: To be honest, that’s happening, even outside of tech. And I’m thinking there in smallholder agriculture in Kenya, I think what, perhaps less in Kenya now, but where government and big industries are literally, well, supporting smallholder farmers in using chemical pesticides by giving grants and basically creating dependency, and shutting out the whole market for everything else.

So it’s not only tech. And it’s a good point though that you need those multiple layers. 

[00:11:18] Kate: That’s a good example of where that’s faux community. It’s like astroturfing community, whatever that’s called, where you fake, you create incentives within a community, but they’re not actually generated by community, they’re generated by outside interests. And then there’s this ginned up sense that this is what the community wants. Because certain people do end up wanting it because there’s value in it for them. 

But what that says is there’s an absence, there was an absence of opportunity, or understanding, or community generated best practices. And in that absence, outside interest with their own, in this case, trying to sell more fertilizer… 

[00:12:02] Lucie: Again, so what happens if, you know, what the community wants is wrong, in the sense of it will create a cycle of dependency or something, then what?

[00:12:12] Kate: I think this is where we are in lots of places, where you think about Uber or something. Okay, everyone recognizes that Uber is this big global company and it’s broken down a lot of things that are positive, but it’s really hard now to see breaking that and introducing community level ride sharing or on demand rides. 

First you have to get the infrastructure. Then you’ve gotta get, the drivers who recognize that there’s opportunity there. Then you have to find the passengers who are willing to do it. And everyone has to probably make some compromises or do things a little bit differently in that transition to whatever the new thing is.

And I think this is, one of the challenges of a lot of community things is, and again, I’ll just use community loosely there, but often it does align around geography, is you get some true believers who are willing to buy in, but then everyone else, the inconvenience, the messy period for the transition into the new thing, are you willing to do that work? 

And I think that’s when you’re describing the pesticide example, I thought I was thinking fertilizer, but it’s pesticide. Because the old system wasn’t quite working, you have these forces that can come in and exploit that gap. And then they get quite entrenched. And then it gets even harder because everyone knows the old system wasn’t working. There’s this new thing that’s working better, and actually is pretty efficient and it’s giving us money and it’s doing this stuff. 

It takes like really aligned forces and vision and all kinds of things, I would argue to re whatever, like re give power to the community, recreate whatever the community institutions, structures and systems and all that. It’s hard.

[00:14:11] Lucie: This was also another of my sort of questions, what does it mean to help communities do these things? What are the limits of helping? Like in my role as research method support, we are support, which is quite rare usually. Usually you’re just a researcher and you do what you want basically, as long as the funding permits, and the university permits.

Whereas in our role, we’re very much there to like question people and to offer advice and offer suggestions. But again, they don’t need to take up anything that we say. So yeah, but the word helping is different to supporting. What you were just talking about in terms of the example of Uber, you’re suggesting recreating a whole new system, which is a lot of work. 

[00:14:54] Kate: Yeah. And I don’t think, when you think about that that way, it seems possible. But I think what we see in a lot of the work that we do is you don’t come in by taking on Uber. It’s not where you start, you’re like, you start with the things that are unsolved problems. 

So a parenting application, that’s an unsolved problem. And so you start to actually build up community practices, community networks. You’re enabling community organizations. You are creating a network of parents who are really seeing the positive impact of something in their community.

And I think part of it is giving people alternatives and, you know, it’s really hard to just ask a community what they want and not have them look to the past, like who in the community really has a vision for the future that is tied to where the future is inevitably going, which is tech. And you know, we are going to live in this different world. 

I think it’s really difficult to ask a community to know what they want in a design oriented way or an innovation oriented way. But it’s not hard to ask them like, what are problems in your community? What are the institutions that are working in your community? You know what, just things that if you can put the right forces in alignment, I think there are things to tap into, which maybe draw on a community’s best instincts for what they want as opposed to just an, what I think we see a lot of right now, which is this nostalgia fantasy where it’s a past that never was, and all you feel is disgruntled. 

And so there’s a lot of what you want feels, like, wanting in scarcity and wanting for yourself and wanting for survival as opposed to wanting toward what could be the great future that we all could be joining in. 

[00:17:05] Lucie: It’s funny talking to you ’cause you’ve said before that you are very much a city person. You like big cities. I live in a small village. I can ignore tech. I’m very happy as long as I can communicate with people and things. But otherwise it doesn’t need to have such a big part of my life. 

[00:17:21] Kate: But tech is your whole life. We couldn’t be having this call if we didn’t have Zoom. 

[00:17:23] Lucie: Yeah. 

[00:17:23] Kate: You couldn’t be living in your small village, you would have to move somewhere where you could work with your whole team. The way that it has let you live in your small village and still actually have a nice life as opposed to one where you’re just, you feel like there’s no opportunity and you’re hopeless. That is all tech. 

[00:17:43] Lucie: And I do recognize that, I do recognize that. Yeah. 

[00:17:48] Kate: But that is, I think that’s such a, I think that’s a really important factor in thinking about what community is, what communities want. And as much as, and I see this a lot in community tech movements where, there’s a desire to roll back the clock and at the same time you recognize you need the innovation. It makes for this very conflicted, you’re unwilling to consider that technology is just a tool and it’s actually about what your values are, what your, it’s these very different Yeah, it, I’m not sure the point I’m making there, but…

I think so much of this talk of what communities want is giving people ideas of what’s possible that could be good as opposed to exploitative or extractive, it’s not really for me. And then I think people can start to think toward things that are more beneficial for the entire community, as opposed to everything is fear based. 

[00:19:00] Lucie: And it’s a sort of method for the supporting communities or, enabling them to see options. I was thinking of that, the difficulty of, expecting communities to find their own solutions, I can’t remember, if it was this morning or yesterday. And I think people do get stuck into that. Or at least I’ve seen, I’ve seen other programs expecting communities to have their own solutions but not recognizing that they don’t have the experience perhaps to see or think of what might be possible.

[00:19:31] Kate: Think of the experts we work with or our own team. We all have these bands of expertise, but if I weren’t working in collaboration with other people, I couldn’t possibly come to think toward the things that I’m interested. Like the number of people who’ve contributed to my understanding, who did deep research, that I just got to learn from, assimilate into my thinking. 

So a community that’s a small, again, coming back to geographical thinking, but if you’re living somewhat in isolation, you are not that connected, education is always an issue, all these things are always systemic. So it’s like, what does it take to put a community or group of individuals in a place where you would have that collective intelligence, kind of wisdom, knowledge, whatever it is, to actually start to be productive of something that’s a vision for your community as opposed to not being able to have that. 

[00:20:37] Lucie: And you know, I think we have sort of argued, we’ve started off by saying this is ridiculous, helping communities do what they want to do doesn’t really make sense and it’s very problematic. But I think we’ve come around to arguing that there’s a clear need for people, like not only us, but other people to support communities do what they want to do. Which is I think a nice, a nice journey.

[00:21:00] Kate: I wasn’t skeptical. I was only asking for us to clarify the terms a bit. 

[00:21:03] Lucie: Definitely, yes. And it is, yeah, it needed it. 

[00:21:11] Kate: But I do think it’s a great ambition. 

[00:21:15] Lucie: Completely undefined, but very generally. There we go. 

[00:21:22] Kate: Yeah, no, I think it’s good. I think people have vague ambitions all the time. I just wanna make the world a better place, or I want people to be healthy. Those are quite abstract or general. And then most of us find our way, you either flounder about and don’t make any progress or you choose a very specific, you figure out how to dig into that.

So I think that’s what you’re doing right now. Your research methods support is a lot of that work of… 

[00:21:52] Lucie: Yeah, it is, definitely. There’s like the actual topic of what the community wants to do doesn’t matter to me too much. In the work that I do at the moment, it’s all kinds of different aspects of agroecology. It’s from nutrition to crop breeding and markets for selling different types of seeds. 

So the actual, the subject matter in itself isn’t what’s so important, but it’s the, how can they do it better? Of course, because of all of those other caveats that I agree with it, they want to do it also, that they’re working with the people who are involved. Yeah, it’s an interesting one. 

[00:22:23] Kate: But you do see just one final comment, you do see impact of that work, so you see the positive outcomes and then you see how those individual positive outcomes drive positive behaviors and outcomes in other places. 

[00:22:34] Lucie: Yeah, that’s what’s the rewarding aspect is, isn’t it? That you see the developments happening. 

[00:22:42] Kate: Yeah. 

Okay. I guess we can end there, but I feel like we will continue to have conversations on community tech since this is our area of interest. 

[00:22:51] Lucie: Definitely. I look forward to it. 

[00:22:52] Kate: Thanks, Lucie. 

[00:22:54] Lucie: Thank you, Kate.