“Community-Led Development (CLD) is a development approach in which local community members work together to identify goals that are important to them, develop and implement plans to achieve those goals, and create collaborative relationships internally and with external actors—all while building on community strengths and local leadership.” *

Decentralization

Local government represents the oldest form of government. Communities traditionally banded together locally and selected local leaders to mobilize them to solve local problems and protect their rights against incursions from competing communities. Accountability was often very direct, ranging from early forms of consensus democracy to trial by sword. In this era, people were the authors of their own development; there was no other alternative.

Read more about decentralization

Nations grew up from this traditional base of local self-governance, but added upward – feudal – forms of accountability and tax collection. Colonialism replaced traditional feudal structures with bureaucracies, but maintained the same feudal mindset of upward accountability. The post-colonial area, often attracted by the apparent efficiencies of state socialism, maintained this system. As a former Indian politician once said, “The British created a system to enslave us, and we have carefully preserved it ever since.”

With concentration of power (and often, in the absence of systems of checks and balances) came bureaucratic inefficiency and rising corruption. Attitudes of alienation, powerlessness, and dependency grew among the people.  Leaders around the world seeking to correct this situation by mobilizing “people power” began campaigning for greater decentralization, such as in Ghana in 1983, the Philippines in 1986, and India with the Panchayati Raj Act of 1993. The World Bank and UNDP pressed for decentralization as a pathway to greater efficiency.

An excellent history of this “first wave” of decentralization can be found at this link.

Social Movements

The science of Community-led Development, however, is much older and has its roots in the quest for human dignity towards the end of the colonial era:

• Mahatma Gandhi’s Sarvodaya Movement began in South Africa in 1908 and was later transplanted to India by Gandhi. In 1958, it was further transplanted by Dr. A.T. Ariyaratne to Sri Lanka as the Sarvodaya Shramadana Movement.
• The Rural Reconstruction Movement was founded by Y.C. James Yen in China at the end of World War I, and it continues today as IIRR.
• The work of Paolo Freire on educational praxis began in Brazil in 1946.

Success at Scale

Community-led development has occurred at scale in Korea, India, Indonesia, the Philippines, Afghanistan, and more. The first literature using the phrase “community-led development” in the way we use it appears in Canada and New Zealand in 2012, where this approach was adopted as national policy for the empowerment of indigenous First Nations.

More examples of where CLD has been done at scale

Korea attributes its tremendous economic growth to its Saemaul Undong program of the 1970s.

The Kerala State of India launched its People Planning Campaign in 1996, the first systematic implementation of Gandhi’s vision for the rural local self-governance, following the 1992 passage of the 73rd amendment of India’s constitution, devolving specific powers to local government (panchayats).

Indonesia piloted its CDD program, KDP, in 25 villages in 1997, and then decided to scale it up in 2007 as the National Program for Community Empowerment (PNPM).

The Philippines’ Kalahi-CIDDS program reached 1.6 million households from 2002 to 2013 with support from the World Bank, and then expanded it into the National Community-Driven Development Project. The government of the Philippines hosted our movement launch in 2015.

Afghanistan launched its National Solidarity Program, as a donor-funded community-driven infrastructure development program in 2003, and in 2018 converted it into a comprehensive Citizen Charter program.

Policies Around Community-led Development and Localization

In 2014, the African Union adopted its Africa Charter on the Values and Principles of Decentralisation, Local Governance and Local Development. As of the start of 2019, too few countries have signed it for it to go into force.

In 2015, the international community adopted the Addis Ababa Agenda for Financing for Development, where paragraph 34 acknowledges “that expenditures and investments in sustainable development are being devolved to the subnational level, which often lacks adequate technical and technological capacity, financing, and support. We therefore commit to scaling up international cooperation to strengthen the capacities of municipalities and other local authorities.

* InCLuDE Report, MCLD: Veda, G., Donohue, C., Nicholls, R., Cloete, E., Trandafili, H., Wright, M., Williams, A., Delgadillo, D., Cruse, M., Westhorp, G. (2021) Impact of Community-Led Development on Food Security (InCLuDE): A Rapid Realist Review. The Movement for Community-Led Development & Charles Darwin University.