The Movement for Community-led Development

Media Coverage

• Huffington Post by Åsa Skogström Feldt on the importance of Community-Led Development to achieving SDG 2. September 2016
• Huffington Post by John Coonrod: “Putting People First: The Movement for Community-Led Development.” September 2016

Relevant Speeches

• Address by Judith Karl, Executive Secretary, UN Capital Development Fund, at the event “No Transformation Without Localization”
• Address by Pope Francis to the UN General Assembly September 2015. “To enable these real men and women to escape from extreme poverty, we must allow them to be dignified agents of their own destiny. Integral human development and the full exercise of human dignity cannot be imposed. They must be built up and allowed to unfold”

Books… and why you should read them

• Tell the People: Conversations with James Yen, Pearl Buck, 1945. Y.C. James Yen was founder of China’s Rural Reconstruction Movement in the 1920s and later founded IIRR in the Philippines. For two days at her farm in Pennsylvania, the Nobel Prize winning novelist pulled from Yen a comprehensive picture of his methodology. (Out of print, contact John Coonrod about ebooks).
• Pedagogy of the Oppressed, (Free online access) Paolo Freire, 1973. THE foundational source book on the profound psycho-social transformation required for people to become authors of their own development. Free online Spanish Edition. Free, condensed French Edition.
• Rural Development: Putting the last first, Robert Chambers, 1983.
• Whose Reality Counts? Putting the First Last, Robert Chambers, 1997

Relevant Papers and Handbooks

• John Coonrod, “Participatory Local Democracy: Key to Community-Led Rural Development”, Development (2016). doi:10.1057/s41301-016-0008-2
• Learning By Doing by Inspiring Communities in New Zealand presents comprehensive thinking, learning, examples and results from community-led activities.  It’s become a ‘must have’ handbook for people and organisations wanting to empower and support locally-led change.
• State of Participatory Democracy Report, a multidimensional index across 50+ countries, The Hunger Project, 2013 and 2014.
• What Happened to Integrated Rural Development?, by Susan Chase and Elisa Wilkinson.
• Some Characteristics of World Bank Experience with Community-Driven Development (CDD), By Susan Chase
• From Social Engineering to Community Transformation: Amul, Grammen Bank and Mondragon as Exemplar Organizations, Bhawuk, Mrazek and Munusamy, University of Hawaii, 2009.
• A Ladder of Citizen Participation, Journal of the American Planning Association, by Sherry R. Arnstein, 1969. 35:4, 216-224. This is one of the earliest, most tough-minded and most cited papers on the subject.