Currently held views and policies commonly suggest that community participation in the development of physical infrastructure is primarily exercised to encourage local ownership…
Abstract
Currently held views and policies commonly suggest that community participation in the development of physical infrastructure is primarily exercised to encourage local ownership and generate local livelihoods. This article draws on the experience of recent primary education building programmes in India using cost-effective construction technologies to observe that the involvement of users in the delivery, maintenance and management of community assets is above all a pre-condition for the fulfilment of the globally agreed development targets. This conceptual distinction provides an experienced reason for any provider to seek an active partnership with the user community and appreciate their grass-roots realities, assets and resources. The article then provides observations from recent fieldwork in India to argue that a realistic mapping of community resources will help to redefine widely accepted development targets for community assets as well as identifying capacity building measures to streamline the delivery and management of community infrastructure.
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Robert Brown and Michael Theis
The reader might be forgiven for not being familiar with the term Community Asset Management. Indeed, doing a web search for ‘community asset management’ yields a disparate range…
Abstract
The reader might be forgiven for not being familiar with the term Community Asset Management. Indeed, doing a web search for ‘community asset management’ yields a disparate range of responses, suggesting connections to lessons from financial crisis, to knowledge management technology, to nutrition support in home care, to name but a few of the more interesting articles found in a preliminary web search. It certainly was not part of the lexicon in international development when the Max Lock Centre began using the phrase several years ago at the start of Department for International Development (DFID) - UK funded research on Community Asset Management (CAM) in India and Eastern and Southern Africa. Indeed, lack of recognition was one of the two reactions most often received when the term was first mentioned in discussions with various stake-holders in community development in these locations. Once the ideas behind CAM had been explained however, most quickly remarked something along the lines of, ‘Oh yeah, we're doing that’. (See for example MUTTER 2001; see also KRETZMANN and McKNIGHT 1993)
Drawing on recent research on communication for urban development and on new research on ’Localising the Habitat Agenda’, this article focuses on the communication aspects of…
Abstract
Drawing on recent research on communication for urban development and on new research on ’Localising the Habitat Agenda’, this article focuses on the communication aspects of transferring projects and good practices to different cultural contexts.
Communicating knowledge for the poor has been a research priority for development agencies in UK and USA for the last decade, as communicating best or good practices for achieving development has not been particularly easy or successful. In order to understand the reasons for these communication gaps, the Max Lock Centre at the University of Westminster, UK, undertook research into the complexity of the communication process, and developed methodologies to ensure the effective transfer of knowledge to differing contexts. There are two related challenges to this task. The first is the understanding that communication is a complex process involving actors and actions. The complexity of the interplay between these explains why the communication process suffers gaps that are difficult to bridge; this is why knowledge or best practices can be only communicated if certain conditions are met. The second involves finding a methodology for communicating projects and best practices to different contexts in which practices can be applied.