BUILDING SUSTAINABLE COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT PROJECTS: A FIVE-PHASE FRAMEWORK FOR INITIATION, IMPLEMENTATION, AND OVERSIGHT

Community development continues to remain an important path of participation that focuses on solving local social, economic, and environmental problems. Yet many community development initiatives fail to sustain results, not so much because they are based on poor diagnosis, but because they are based on imposed solutions that do not reflect community aspirations. This paper argues that participatory ideals and methodical project practice are not opposites: structured processes can provide protection for participation by improving clarity, accountability and learning. Drawing on some of the most important debates on what "community" means and how our most important development theories are translated into practice, the paper provides a cyclical 5-phase framework for community development projects: participatory entry and shared diagnosis; co-design and local resourcing; community-led implementation; adaptive supervision, participatory monitoring and collective evaluation with scaling pathways. Brief cases are used to illustrate how the framework is useful in understanding success, partial failure and possible application in complex urban settings.