Positive deviance: Stories of regional social innovations from the Big Stories, Small Towns project

Since 2008 the multi-year, multi-platform Big Stories, Small Towns documentary project (bigstories.com.au) has facilitated the telling, recording, archiving and disseminating of auto/biographical narratives in Australia, Cambodia, West Papua, Malaysia and Indonesia through face-to-face engagement of filmmakers with local people. The focus of the project is to shine a light on people caring for and creating their community. During this time we, the filmmakers, have operationalised an approach inspired by the synchronous ideas of negative capability and positive deviance Unlike other theories of structure and agency, positive deviance (and by inference negative capability) does not delimit individuals to either compliance or rebellion but rather portrays them as able to participate in a variety of activities of self-empowerment. Positive deviance explores how human beings innovate and resist within confining social contexts and seeks to identify behaviours or strategies that enable people to find solutions to problems despite having no special resources or knowledge. This paper reflects on members of small communities featured in Big Stories from across Australia and South East Asia who have created local social innovations and embody this concept of positive deviance. These innovations share key characteristics – they are relationship driven, require minimal external management and have been extensively replicated (both in regional and urban communities). To illuminate these characteristics, the chapter is underpinned by a case study of the Lepo Lorun Weavers Collective, initiated in 1998 by Alfonsa Horeng in Sikka Regency on the island of Flores, Indonesia. This model has now been replicated in multiple towns across the island, engaging over 1,200 women. The case study, one of many identified in the project, embodies the notion of operationalising the concept of positive deviance by showing a focus on regional stories of local people caring for and creating their community, far from popular media representations of small town dysfunction.