Community Intervention: Negotiation and Strategic Action
Negotiate and Discuss the Proposed Intervention
The community worker should negotiate with the entity’s own project or institution and establish a treatment (more than a tacit agreement—a contract, as some authors refer to it). This need for negotiation, or better yet, transaction, is because projects that provide for participation do not always receive the same consideration by the community worker, popular organizations, or the administration. Rebollo highlights how the expectations for participatory projects need not coincide: what is raised from the state or local administration is not to change the power structure in society, but to strengthen the legitimacy with which one of the powers that fights in social reality operates: political power. The other mainstay of political-institutional discourse to promote citizen participation is efficiency.
Getting your administration to promote and/or support a possible community intervention requires significant effort. You have to think and act in terms of adaptation, or gradual adaptation, to proposals that provide for participation. Acceptance of new proposals, their key concepts, and their expected benefits should be part of a rationalization effort—a transition. The use of group-format sessions may be advisable.
This effort to win hearts within the entity by the community worker should not be construed as an activity to be developed only at a given time. The most appropriate way would be to understand that the community worker should be part of a team, and that this team is (like any group) a communicative reality: a set of shared understandings that has been built up over time (meetings, cooperative work, etc.). If so, the intervention project will be considered the team’s own project and will have much support in your institution.
A. Twelvetrees proposes that, as a strategic challenge to influence an organization to take an interest in an issue, you must establish an alliance, starting with those closest to you, and gradually involving more people from within and outside the organization.
Strategic Action
Current thinking lies in the idea that a project must be accompanied by the certainty that what has just been imposed is a strategic action that attempts to make the best match between the developments of ideals (as planned) and potential concrete interventions. Social situations develop within complex interaction systems in which effective practices emerge as a result of multiple relationships and influence transactions that occur between diverse agents.
Therefore, community workers must be understood as an inductive, bottom-up approach that relies on dynamic analysis of the challenges and results of the collective processes that are launched. Cembranos proposes two approaches to the concept of planning:
- Static planning: The overall framework designed initially.
- Dynamic planning: The process of correcting intervention in light of new data that is incorporated.
The key to this dual conceptualization lies in its ability to relax action processes enough to avoid planning becoming a corset that permanently limits progress, instead of being an essential tool. It is imperative to understand that, once the action starts, what is needed is strategic action. In part, this action appears as a strategic use of opportunities that arise in the process. In addition, strategic action is the realistic possibility that we face when addressing a complex situation (it is shot through with multiple dimensions, with various actors, and gives a variety of options for action). This strategic action takes into account the dynamic nature of the social intervention procedure, which provides for the development and/or permanent redefinition of knowledge and development plans as a result of events. In this performance, evaluation is part of strategic and long-term learning tools for analysis.