International Community Development Ideas Changing

A return to that simple idea would be healthy for everyone. We believe in it so much that our website includes the term "useful."

Somewhere along the way, the UN and other major international organizations began to advance theories and elaborate precepts that began to obscure the individuality of what works in a particular setting and society.

In fact, one question we were asked on this website that we refuse to answer was how many theories of community development are there? It just seems to us that time is too precious to waste on worrying about theory-building outside of academia.

For the first time in history, a majority of the planet's population is said to live in urban areas. This fact, plus our electronic and inexpensive communications, means that we can share knowledge about creating urban vitality and developing entire societies into healthier and more prosperous communities in a way never before possible.

Idea sharing is incredibly valuable, while theory weaving seems less important to us than sharing detailed stories about what works.



Of course "what works" varies with the cultural context, underlying religion, norms about relationships, how news spreads, how ideas are discussed and agreed upon, constraints or mandates from governments, wealth or lack of it, human discouragement or vigor, concepts of ethical behavior, attitude toward democratic ideals, and a host of other elements.

These days technology is allowing the development of some shared elements of a worldwide youth culture. All societies can now learn from one another, and speak directly with each other.

Key Concepts of International Community Development Practice

Nevertheless, internationally when community development is discussed, a few key ideas are usually lurking behind the individual actions:

• The notion of community itself is important enough that building or developing community is seen as an important enterprise.

If only tribes exist, community development doesn't become an issue. When groups try to form themselves into a unit to share a common infrastructure (roads, water sources, leadership) and to devote themselves to one or more types of income-producing activity (as opposed to finding or growing daily sustenance), there is a geographic community.

But when the geographic community begins to influence individual destiny for good or ill, there is an opportunity for community development.

• People have a right to self-rule and self-determination about the form of that organization.

This idea led to overthrow of colonialism, nation-building, attempts at democracy, and continuing efforts to organize nations and alliances along cultural, ethnic, and religious lines.

• Change is possible. It seems elementary, but when people are so downtrodden by extreme poverty, disease, war, desertification, extreme isolation, enslavement, or oppressive government that they cannot see this point, it's very unlikely that any type of international community development will occur.

• External change agents are necessary before community development can occur.

There is a tendency in international community development discussions to believe that "help" from the outside is needed.

That might include financial assistance or technical assistance in the form of advice and instruction in techniques, but this is often a core belief in the crowd that discusses such issues.

• Everything is connected to everything else; thus a holistic approach to international community development is necessary.

Professionals who consider themselves as community developers think this way, and indeed in past decades it was popular for them to identify with systems theory or other attempts to describe nearly everything.

But ordinary citizens don’t necessarily think this way. So it's very common for volunteers, untrained leaders, and governments to adopt piecemeal approaches. Of course, piecemeal is also easier politically, financially, and logistically.

• Any citizen participation that is encouraged or permitted—and international community development professionals are big on citizen participation—aims toward community improvement.

While this statement might seem a truism, actually many citizen participation activities are undertaken for the purpose of legitimizing something that a government or other types of rulers and leaders would like to legitimize.

Examining the Validity of Community Development Assumptions

After some decades of experience in international community development, I think it's time to reconsider some of these ideas.

International community development officials already borrow in a very eclectic fashion from many different disciplines.

But on the other hand it will be difficult, of course, because institutions, individuals, academics, and governments are entrenched in their own belief systems about what works. They claim to be pragmatists, but the reality is that the practices of these groups and individuals are highly value-laden.

While it's well beyond the scope of this website to do so, it would be very worthwhile to begin an open international examination of what has actually raised the level of performance and satisfaction in various societies.

Our Western bias toward what's important has led to many, many missteps as we have tried to impose our particular concepts of democracy, human rights, citizenry, economic progress, happiness, cooperation, progress, negotiation, and nuclear family on others.

Probably the recent economic meltdown in the U.S. and threatened European debt crisis will shake up our thinking about who's leading whom.

There's a real possibility that it will be the increasing capacity and growing middle-class consumers of the emerging market nations that will allow the "developed" markets to reinvent themselves enough to survive.

Another positive spin on the Atlantic nations' recession is that the world can begin to question free market capitalism, at least in its most excessive forms.

As we see in China, complete self-determination in matters such as where you live and what job you do don’t necessarily go hand-in-hand with a very successful approach to business.

So perhaps there are many more possible blends of these Western values with non-Western values that can be successful in generating successful lives around the world.

The idea of success itself is subjective and culture-laden. For all these reasons, international community development is headed toward new and more fragmented theory, and with that the already abundant variety of definitions of community development will become even more pluralistic.

Community development outside the so-called developed nations will need to focus explicitly on poverty and the makeshift slum settlements that are arising outside most major cities.

For reports of interesting collaborations between the urban poor and universities in mapping and thereby gaining insight and power over these informal settlements, see the Shack/Slum Dwellers International website.

If you live outside the U.S. and Europe, especially, please share your own international community development perspective. (If you click that link, you have the opportunity to make a comment that becomes its own web page. Your friends can then comment too!)

Even the notion of community is being called into question in a radical way because of the development of virtual communities. While some people want to insist that a permanent, place-based, geographic, and potential face-to-face relationship is necessary for community, what's happening electronically is pretty interesting, don't you think?

Learning Resources for International Development

My own personal favorite is the Millennium Promise global poverty site, which we think is backed by a sophisticated but practical analysis of what is required to lift people around the world out of extreme poverty.

It's just an opinion, but it seems to us that extreme poverty has to go away before many other international community development issues can be resolved.

Simply looking at the Maslow hierarchy of values, people who aren't eating and who are disease-ravaged are unlikely to invent the battery that stops climate change in its tracks.

A few books we recommend, each coincidentally with a wonderfully descriptive title, are The End of Poverty, The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries Are Failing and What Can Be Done About It, and Community Development in Theory and Practice: An International Reader. The latter is an anthology of articles from the Community Development Journal.

One more book, specific to the southern hemisphere, is Megacities: The Politics of Urban Exclusion and Violence in the Global South.

Another good resource is Britain's Overseas Development Institute.Isn't it wonderful that ordinary folks can now "talk" to people around the world, and make more realistic determinations about "what works?" Let’s do more of that.

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