About the Defining Key Concepts series

In 2018 Philanthropy for Social Justice and Peace (PSJP) started to facilitate a learning space for a cohort of philanthropy and development practitioners who wanted to increase the effectiveness and impact of their work. They identified themes such as dignity, community resilience, measuring change, sustainability, community philanthropy, leadership, power, among others, that they wanted to unpack.

These terms are frequently used in development and philanthropy, and they are included in many organizations’ mission statements and performance indicators, but often there is no clear understanding of what they mean in practice or how they can be measured. Words like ‘sustainability’ and ‘dignity’ lack a solid theoretical base. They are polysemic concepts which means they have different meanings and have both descriptive and normative content. Furthermore, they are cluster concepts made up of many different components, none of which is either necessary or sufficient to define the term. These characteristics make these terms highly ambiguous and yet they are in abundant use in the sector – there is a problem at the heart of the language we use in philanthropy and development. For instance ‘sustainability’ in relation to development work can mean both staying in business and sustaining the work, and going out of business having achieved ‘sustainable’ change. Similarly, the term resilience can be used across two poles. In some contexts, it means weathering and supporting the transition to change, while in others it is used to protect the structural frames of the status quo and so to absolve the state and other actors of responsibility.

As a group, we wanted to develop our collective understanding of these concepts so that we could apply them more meaningfully to our work. Most importantly, we wanted to base our learning on lived experience rather than on academic concepts and abstract theories. In order to enable this learning, we began facilitating online dialogue spaces called the ‘learning circles’.

A key element of the learning circles was that they were based on the principles of ‘Bohm Dialogue’ where the emphasis is on listening and observation while suspending judgements, and on co-creating meaning together from our shared experiences.

The dialogues were supported by follow on papers and reflective blogs so that we were also developing narratives that reflected the diversity of this field, highlighted the positive deviance from the traditional ‘top-down’ ways of development practice, and that were consistent with an enlarged and nuanced understanding of just, compassionate, dignified, sustainable, community-based development. These emerging narratives are not to be seen as definitive. They are offered as part of a process to increase the understanding of practical issues in the field and to stimulate conversation about these concepts, to try to understand their meaning through the lens of practice and experience. Overall, in the process of the learning circles we sought to embody the spirit of the philosophy of Ubuntu ‘I am because you are’. Participants found these to be meaningful spaces in creating a sense of community, in unpacking complex concepts and applying them to their practice.

There are eight published papers from the Defining Key Concepts in Development and Philanthropy Series: