Deliberations in Community Development

Community development has become the new buzz in the social and health sciences. Although community development has been an important subject for deliberation and study for several decades, within the past ten years or so it has become politically correct and even fashionable to include mention of community development in government parlance, economic planning, social work, public health debates and liberal arts discourse. Whereas most texts on community development make only brief reference to the importance of theory, thereafter quickly dispensing with it, in this book, the approach taken to community development positions itself against that trend. The issues raised in the chapters of this book offer us alternative ways of looking at the familiar. This book informs us that community development is a complex conundrum of definitions, ideas, ideologies, interests, data, participants and locations.