Acts of defiance: engaging community from the perspective of local government

What does it mean to engage the community? In an era when the very idea of community is fraught with contestation (Bauman 2007) and definitional slippery-ness, how might the work of formal institutions like local governments engage that which is necessarily plural, diverse and not always immediately present to the eyes of the outsider? What might the nature of this engagement be and how might the politics of representation- around what is considered community and how this comes to be- frame the very construction of community itself? This chapter explores these questions from the perspective of projects undertaken by the Community Development and Facilities branch of a large regional council located in south-east Queensland, Australia, and the collaborations between this branch, a sociologist-researcher and the community undertaken through 2011-2012. These projects sought to pin-down what community meant to the work of the community engagement professionals of the branch, and in the process charted the contested terrain through which community engagement work navigates. This chapter will highlight the mechanism by which conceptualisations of community were deployed by the branch, the role that active, field-based research evaluation plays within this and some new ways of working that local governments might assume as 'brokers' of community