Abstract
Community-driven development is an approach to development that emphasizes community control over planning decisions and investment resources. Over the past decade, it has become a key operational strategy for many national governments, as well as for international aid agencies, with the World Bank alone currently supporting more than 190 active community-driven development projects in 78 countries. Community-driven development programs have proven to be particularly useful where government institutions are weak or under stress. This paper examines what the evidence shows about the utility of community-driven development programs for helping governments improve the lives and futures of the poor. The paper also addresses recent critiques of the community-driven development approach. The paper makes three main arguments. First, community-driven development offers governments a useful new tool for improving the lives of the poor. The empirical evidence from evaluations confirms that community-driven development programs provide much needed productive economic infrastructure and services at large scale, reasonable cost, and high quality. They also provide villagers, especially the disadvantaged, with a voice in how development funds are used to improve their welfare. Second, community-driven development programs are not a homogeneous category, and it is important to acknowledge the differences between national, on-budget, multi-year programs, and off-budget programs. And finally, community-driven development works best and achieves the greatest results when it is part of a broader development strategy that includes reforms to governance, investments in productivity, and integration with efforts to improve the quality of public service delivery.
Highlights
Community-driven development (CDD) is an approach to development that emphasizes community control over planning decisions and investment resources
Even without straining the historical genealogy, recent articles have separately traced the current interest in CDD back to Gandhi’s independence and swaraj movements in India, Magsaysay’s counter-insurgency program in the Philippines, and various local development program ideas supported by the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations in Latin America
2 As described we argue that the design model of Social Funds begun in the early 1990s is quite different from the latest generation of CDD programs begun in the late 1990s
Summary
Community-driven development (CDD) is an approach to development that emphasizes community control over planning decisions and investment resources. Our goal in this paper is to examine what the evidence shows us about the utility of CDD programs for helping governments improve the lives and futures of the poor. We address recent critiques of the CDD approach As both proponents and managers of national community development programs, we are firm believers that CDD offers governments a useful new tool for improving the lives of the poor. CDD is not a fix-all tool that can be applied indiscriminately to all contexts, nor does it in any way replace the need for the kinds of structural transformations in developing countries that will create new industrial and service jobs, provide technical services that lie well beyond the communities’ purview, and promote other large-scale improvements to human welfare. In contexts where more traditional approaches have not been able to reach the poor, having a new approach that developing country governments can use to engage communities that are poor and often hard to reach, and in ways that are popular, sustainable, and effective, is already a valuable contribution
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