2: Context

c: principles of community development

Often, when we deal with problems in isolated rural places, what we actually deal with are problems of scale, which are not necessarily unique to rural places. A small school in an urban place faces similar problems and characteristics to one in a rural place.

Very often, in the rural development field, the emphasis is on the wrong side - the Big. Bigger is not necessarily better, and often not at all better. In these terms, this often means a focus on the policy context, and not on the context of rural communities themselves. It is important to see rural communities as being the subject of development activity, not the object of it. Development policy should help communities empower themselves, make their own initiatives and aid them in forming common objectives, between themselves and within a wider network of communities and other development actors. In this sense, empowerment may be a dangerously misleading word, implying that it is something that is given to people and communities by others who are ceding power that they hold.

A problem is that professional practitioners often bring their own personal world-view to the project and very often, their world-view is quite different from that of those who are the subjects of development.

And interesting question is whether the terms 'community development' and 'local development' describe the same or different things. Opinions varied from one pole to the other, but the process of attempting to open up the definitions provided a useful way of addressing the issues of the conference. One definition specified that 'community development' involves increased internal capacity in an individual or community whilst 'local development' involves increased resources and ability to act within a local area. In the context of new forms of governance, discussed above, it may be that the two are coming closer together in practise.

It was pointed out that there is no difference between the words in terms of action - in both, the action is always [or should always be] local. What matters is the scale from which it is approached. Another definition posited that community development is development where the community sets the agenda. Local development would be, by contrast, agendas instigated, initiated, and managed by the government or outsiders. However, participants agreed that what was of interest to them were the ways in which locally controlled and democratically conceived institutions, organisations, as well as people, were able to 'take charge' of their own futures by acquiring their own resources (e.g. land, fish, banks, knowledge and 'data') and developing these.

Definitions of 'development' have changed, as well. In the end we are left with an agreement that development can be either top-down or bottom-up, and that success was more likely with the latter rather than the former. This, in relation to issues of scale, lies at the foundation of one of the most fundamental aspects of community or local development - that it must produce benefits to members of the local community, and must do it in ways which they define as success - including growing respect and self-respect, increased impact on decisions which affect the local area, and the opportunity to capitalise on their resources and networks to improve their lives. Thus it was agreed that the two terms could be used almost interchangeably so long as the emphasis was on material improvement in rural people's lives as a result of it, and on their participation in the processes involved.

One of the needs identified is for a set of best practice models of communities taking the initiative to engage with their own future, as a short or long term strategy. Equally, it is important to learn about what did not work.