. Current Project: Community Sustainability and Security

August 2008: Launch of the English version of 'Community Sustainability and Security in Timor-Leste: Sarelari and Nanu', authored by the Globalism Research Centre's Damian Grenfell, Mayra Walsh, Carmenesa Moniz Noronha, Kym Holthouse and Anna Trembath, and produced in association with Oxfam Australia and Concern Worldwide in Timor-Leste.

See here a PDF version of the report and its cover, and see here for details of the launch.

Understanding community in all its manifestations has been a key theme of the Globalism Institute’s work in Timor-Leste. While the national community has been a focus, and one largely covered under our thematic area of nation building, we have been intensely interested in the condition of local communities as the new nation has come into being. We are interested in understanding how communities define themselves and see their strengths and weaknesses, and how this may differ from broader administrative processes that may seek to approach that community through a different lens.

Our approach to community has generally been framed by two concepts: ‘community sustainability’ and ‘human security’. Although ‘sustainability’ is usually considered in relation to environmental concerns, we extend the concept to explore the contribution made by a broad range of social practices and discourses to strengthening communities or breaking them apart. To help us understand this process we also draw on the concept of ‘human security’, a concept which deliberately attempts to identify the ways in which people experience violence and insecurity on a day-to-day basis, rather than formal security studies which has typically stressed foreign policy, weapons and military activities. By drawing on human security discourses however we are better positioned to understand how people experience threat on a daily basis and at the most localized levels, such as from a lack of clean drinking water or food, poor access to health systems or through the experience of gender-based violence. In turn, these two themes help understand the condition of the community and where the potential for resilience might lie or alternatively where and how fault-lines occur.

With this project we will generate a broad empirical foundation, one of use to communities, governments and other institutions in assessing policy directions. It will help to develop durable links between communities and researchers, government agencies and NGOs, providing information for communities themselves in enacting their own sustainability goals. And it will challenge some of the current theoretical trends that reduce community either to a form of social capital or to a residual concern in the putatively more important task of enhancing economic development.

This work intersects with a number of RMIT initiatives; a long-term interest in researching communities in the Globalism Institute within Australia and the Asia-Pacific, both the Community Sustainability and Human Security Programs under the Global Cities Institute, and an Australian Research Council Discovery grant. These different programs have been drawn together into a coordinated six-site two year program which in Timor-Leste has manifested into the Community Sustainability and Security program.

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Current Project: Community Sustainability and Security

Project Partners: Oxfam (Fatumean) and Concern (Luro)

The aim of this project is to build a comprehensive study of six local communities across Timor-Leste (please see the menu on the left for details of actual sites). The idea for this research originally emanated from a concern for understanding the impact of the 2006 crisis upon districts beyond Dili. Attempts at understanding this phenomenon were commonly limited to anecdotal evidence rather than adequately-resourced research, mimicking the over concentration of research in capital of Timor-Leste more generally.

Rather than confine this research to a single event, such as the crisis, the project undertakes a more generalized research study so as to understand the condition of small communities in relation to an emerging nation. Building upon a detailed understanding of six specific sites, the project will seeks to understand the impact upon those communities of broader socio-political events and processes, including those that emanate from Dili such as the crisis and also the 2007 national election process.

This research involves two unique features. Firstly, rather than attempting to locate discrete sets of data based on a singular theme across a larger community, this research will take a smaller sample size but look to build a thorough picture of that community. Secondly, the research would distinguish the participants’ sense of immediate community (face-to-face) from more generalised understandings of community (abstract, such as district and nation). By this, we seek to understand the themes of security and sustainability against the backdrop of how a local community understands its relationship with regard to the nation as a whole. By understanding how an immediate community defines itself in relation to other more abstract forms of community, there is a better opportunity to determine how events that occur in a different geographic location (the crisis and violence in Dili), or more generalized socio-political processes (reconciliation processes, elections), are understood to affect that community.  



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