General information about community development and citizen participation

What is community development?
Community development is about building active and sustainable communities based on social justice and mutual respect. It is about changing power structures to remove the barriers that prevent people from participating in the issues that affect their lives. Community workers support individuals, groups and organisations in this process on the basis of the following values and commitments.
 

Values:
Social Justice	Enabling people to claim their human rights, meet their needs and have greater control over the decision-making processes which affect their lives.
Participation	Facilitating democratic involvement by people in the issues which affect their lives based on full citizenship, autonomy, and shared power, skills, knowledge and experience.
Equality	Challenging the attitudes of individuals, and the practices of institutions and society, which discriminate against and marginalise people.
Learning	Recognising the skills, knowledge and expertise that people contribute and develop by taking action to tackle social, economic, political and environmental problems.
From “A Strategic Framework for Community Development”. The full text is available here

Community development puts the emphasis on the abilities of local communities to organise themselves and co-operate in a democratic way. Our main goal is to help create self-managing local communities which are able to identify their needs, recognise their common interests and which, in addition to representing these interests, are also able to actively reinforce them.

Accordingly, community development is essentially both a social reform scheme and a new helping profession which assists people in their active social participation in all areas of life.

Community development is a way of strengthening civil society by prioritising the actions of communities, and their perspectives in the development of social, economic and environmental policy. It seeks the empowerment of local communities, taken to mean both geographical communities, communities of interest or identity and communities organising around specific themes or policy initiatives. It strengthens the capacity of people as active citizens through their community groups, organisations and networks; and the capacity of institutions and agencies (public, private and non-governmental) to work in dialogue with citizens to shape and determine change in their communities. It plays a crucial role in supporting active democratic life by promoting the autonomous voice of disadvantaged and vulnerable communities. It has a set of core values/social principles covering human rights, social inclusion, equality and respect for diversity; and a specific skills and knowledge base.

From “The Budapest Declaration”, 2004. The full text is available here