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The Right Response at the Right Time Relevance and control. These are the fundamental measures of DCB. We know from numerous studies that traditional reasons for grouping together have become less relevant. Many of the programs traditionally created by agencies, such as local organisations, have been a la puppeteer, directed from the top with little control vested in the “real people”. The “new” idea of capacity building, first enunciated by the 1992 Rio Earth summit, may be headed the same way. It may have become something that means all things to all people and nothing much to anybody. It may have become another pair of words for the famous jargon game – lingo bingo! A term which shines brightly from documents and reports but which causes no real excitement in people’s lives. Dynamic Capacity Building however does excite people. It excites and enlivens because it spawns ideas, activities, projects, relationships, behaviours, successes that are is relevant to us and able to be controlled by us. Important sociologist, Robert Putnam suggests that we need an era of “civic invention”. We need to work together as both agencies and as local communities to create new reasons to come together, build social capital and focus on real things that matter to us as human beings and as a society. Clearly, achieving ecological sustainability provides just such a focus. But hang on; have we not been working toward it for two decades now? Of course and there have been monumental achievements. However, any reading of continued climate damage, loss of biological diversity or the escalating deterioration of the land suggests that we desperately need to redouble efforts. We need a force multiplier. We need something that will eclipse the work done by governments and environmental agencies. The single most exciting possibility for this is the blossoming of local communities. A critical mass of “sustainable” local groups will create “sustainable” communities, a critical mass of which will create “sustainable” nations, a critical mass of which … The Dynamic Capacity Building idea developed by Vox Bandicoot is book-ended by relevance and control on the one hand and the Communiversity on the other. The journey is marked by human scale purposeful informality, active learning strategies, ecological sustainability philosophy and knowledge, and above all, copious hours of good, meaningful human relationship building and fun together. Communities are full of life. Full of imagination and energy. Harvesting this imagination and energy will produce results as good as or better than the million-dollar top down programs. The Communiversity is really the only big hope we have for redirecting our fundamentally unsustainable culture, which is removed from nature and characterised by materialism, waste and energy addiction. |
