Community Development

Introduction
Community development has been one of the
most significant social forces in the process
of planned change during the last three
decades.
In the past change has occurred without plans
or guidance, but today the increasing trend
towards planned change enabled large
segments of people to participate in the
planning and change creating programs which
affect their lives.
Community development as an instrument of
change has become a controversial topic and
one hopes this will change the attitudes of
policy makers.

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 Community Definition
Community is a master system encompassing
social forms and cultural behavior in
interdependent subsidiary systems.
Community is a social system composed of people
living in some spatial relationship to one another,
who share common facilities and services, develop
a common psychological identification with the the
locality symbol. And together frame a common
communication network.
A community may be organized along residential
boundaries, a functional lineament need not
demand exclusive territorial precedence.

Community Definition
A community is also recognized as social unit,
such as a group or association based on
common needs, interest, values and function.
Then, a community accentuates, in addition to
territorial definition, such essential constituents
as a common bond, membership in a group, the
sharing of common interests and a identity,
together with an acknowledgement of the rights
and responsibilities of other community
members.

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 Community Definition
People
What are the limits of a community in terms of
population size?
The population size of communities are different
from one another. Predictions about the social
characteristics of a community cannot be made
from its population size alone.
Density of population is important. Obviously the
opportunities for development are greater where
there is a relatively high density than where the
population is thinly scattered over a wide area.
The important demographic characteristics
include the age structure, the sex ratio, the density,
and the degree of homogeneity.

Community Definition
Place
What natural resources are available to the
community?
Environment extends beyond physical features to
include the whole ecological base of the community.
Anthropologists have recently developed the useful
concept of a social network, comprising all
relationships of individuals. Virtually everywhere
this network extends beyond a single community
and reaches into other communities, so that one
needs to know the types of relationships and links
that a community has with county seats, cities,
roads, markets, and the wider world generally.

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 Community Definition
Time
How long has the community been in existence,
and how long has it been in its present location?
It is likely to be easier to interest in development
those who feel securely settles in traditional lands
than those who are either threatened by others
coveting their land, or who regard themselves as
temporary sojourners, waiting to return to
ancestral lands from which they have been
evicted.
Providing adequate preparations are made,
resettlement can be a great opportunity to
improve community life and to accelerate
economic development.

The Nature of Social Change

There are no entirely stable, selfsufficient,
enclosed societies, for all are undergoing some
degree of change.
Social change which has remained controversial is
its relationship to the psychological state of
individuals involved. Social change has
emphasized the individual’s need for achievement,
and its relationship to change in different cultures.
The concept of accommodation helps to break
down the unreal polarity which is sometimes
posited between traditional and modern spheres of
action. Tradition is simply what people do, and all
societies of the world are faced with conflicting
values.

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 Community Development
Community development has gained universal
recognition in the last three decades as a
substantial force for inducing planned change.
Rapid technological advances have resulted in a
series of inescapable social realities, and
community development can help adapt to these
new realities.
Community development provides the possibility
of altering by democratic means,, at times anti-
human directions of technology, urbanization
towards more human ends.

Community Development
In ideal community development, all members
of a given community may express their voice
of discontent. Members may learn the
dynamics of change so that they may effect
changes desired by the community.
It must be emphasized that , while community
development is a dynamic force in effecting
social change, it will mot magically transmute
our present into a Utopian future.
Community organization endeavored to provide
a systematic approach to the management and
direction at the community level.

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 Community Development
Social Development vs. Community Development
Social Development
Social development are initiative, adaptive and ameliorative
in nature, practitioners of economic, and work in planning
economic programs especially in terms of predicting the
logical social consequences.
Social development must also assist people in adjusting to
the social consequences of programs of change.
A prominent thrust of social development in serving the
adaptive and ameliorative functions is the education of the
population so that people will gain an awareness of the
changing social conditions they are engulfed in, and will
participate more readily in development programs.

Community Development
Social Development vs. Community Development
Community Development
Community development is to initiate, give direction to and
sustain community action.
Community action is initiated in response to real problems,
such as perceived by the community members, about
which there is genuine concern.
Ideally theses problems are systematically analyzed so that
realizable goals may be elucidated with the aid of the
appropriate strategies for attaining them.
The central credo of community development is to develop
the competence of a community so that it may confront its
own problems.

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 Community Development
Democratic Participation
Participatory democracy is the means of
approaching the democratic ideal which should be
the focus of community development.
Citizen participation is not analogous to
democratic participation, but is a means towards
realizing the democratic ideal by establishing a
new power base at the community level.
Simply stated, citizen participation via community
development can lead towards democratic
participation, only when the present power
structure has been challenged and replace by a
genuine democratic process.

Community Development
Context of Community Development
Community development is a viable means of
facilitating the great change and then
responding to the consequences.
Attention may be focused on the
organizational and super-organizational level.
Most community members inactive onlookers,
or it may focus on the neighborhood level
where substantial community participation is
attainable.
Community development is process, method,
program and movement.

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 Community Development
Types of Community Development
Process
Community development as a process is a systematic
approach to change in which each of the phases of
the process may be sufficiently defined and measured
in accordance with specified criteria.
Method
Inherent to this perspective is a teleological
underlining of means and ends, or the methods
appropriate to achieving specified goals.

Community Development
Types of Community Development (cont.)
Program
In community development, often program of
activities is formulated and followed. Planned
programs may be multipurpose or may focus
upon one community interest.
Movement
The inference is to community development as
an ideology which celebrates the principle of
progress. The advantage of perceiving
community development as a movement is
precisely its danger.

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 Community Development
The Elements of the Community Development
As a unit of action
The community may vary in size, in the extent, in the
function of the territorial definition and so forth. All
this serves to illustrate the complexity of contextual
variables that intervene in any community
development endeavor.
Local initiative and leadership
A fundamental precept to community development is
the involvement of members in the developmental
process, which includes defining the needs, taking the
necessary action for satisfying these needs, and the
ultimate execution of the resultant programs, as
formulated by the members.

Community Development
The Elements of the Community Development
Use of local and outside resources
It is the responsibility of community development
practitioners to discern which resources must be
imported, where they are available, and how they
may best be integrated into the development
process without diluting the determination and
strength of the community.
Participation
Community development process must assume,
assuring that all individuals and groups may be
accommodated into the developmental process.

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 Community Development
The Elements of the Community Development
Organized comprehensive approach
Community development needs to recognize the
ideal of attention to those issues which are least
situation-bound, which affect the greatest
proportion and range of people, and which may be
responded to which reference to the vast range of
resources within the community.
Democratic accomplishment
Community development tends to avoid overly
hasty change and emphasizes decisions and
actions based on consensus and on the broadest
possible participation of community members.

Community Development
The Roots of Community Development
Education
The term “community development” was defined
and adopted in 1984 to replace the earlier term
“mass education”.
Governments were preoccupied with problems of
establishing and maintaining law and order to
enhance trade with the metropolitan.
This reappraisal had the effect of extending
education far beyond the sphere of the
conventional school system, and to a large extent
determined the emphasis which has been placed
on community development as essentially an
educational process.

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 Community Development
The Roots of Community Development
Social Work
Social-work process has often been regarded as
belonging more specifically to community organization
than to community development.
In the setting of the community, the helping process of
social work enables people to learn how to determine,
articulate, and establish in some scale of priority their
needs; to learn the art of working together to meet
those needs and to solve community problems; to
become better able to handle community situations; to
get things done by organizing their resources and
acquire that confidence and desire to cooperate further
which comes only from the discovery that needs can be
met by working together.

Strength & Weaknesses

Strength
Community development agents to subscribe
to gradual change. It can take generations to
change a people’s value system, especially so
in the less developed, more traditional context.
And emphasis on consensus and citizen
participation further delays task-oriented
structural changes.Community development,
with its predilection for a psychological
orientation towards social change at the
expense of socio-economic change, is largely
a method of social service.

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 Strength & Weaknesses
Weakness
The most severe criticisms of community
development is that it is a subtle tool of those
in power, who use it to maintain their vested
interests. This is based on the observation
that community has had little influence on the
socio-economic structure, and indeed there is
much to substantiate this. A brief
investigation of the foundations of such a
challenge is the sincerity of community
development.

Potential
A process and program orientation towards
community development pays equal attention
to a bi-dimensional, integral view of change,
embracing both the idealist view and the
materialist view.
A holistic process-program view towards
community development holds the potential of
becoming a powerful force in effecting
psychological and socio-economic change.

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 Summary & Conclusion
Community development is not, as is
sometimes suggested, a new phenomenon
that started in the 1650’s, it is an outgrowth
of earlier experiments and concepts in
education and social work, both of which
have much influenced contemporary thought
and practice.

Bibliography
Arthur, V., 1970, Community development – Whither bound? Community
Development Journal, 5, 85.
Hillery, G., 1955. Definitions of community: Areas of agreement. Rural
Sociology. 20, 111-123.
Sanders, V., T., I. 1958. Theories of community development. Rural
Sociology. 23, 1-12.
United Nations. 1954, Methods and techniques of community development in
the United Kingdom development and trust territories. New York.
United Nations, 1956, Special study on social conditions in non-self-
governing territories. New York.

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