This book explores the dynamics of community self help in local neighbourhoods. It shows how widespread it is, and argues that it should be considered as the third major sector of social and economic organization (alongside the state and market). Danny Burns, Colin C. Williams and Jan Windebank examine community self-help as a springboard into the mainstream, a complement to it, and an alternative. Finally, the book opens out a vision of social organization with self-help and mutual aid at its heart.

This report documents the results of road-testing two frameworks for assessing community participation: Active partners: Benchmarking community involvement in regeneration (Yorkshire Forward, 2000) and Auditing community participation: An assessment handbook (The Policy Press, 2000). The report examines whether the tools were useful, what worked most effectively and how the tools might be amalgamated on the basis of what was learned from the road-testing. The practical difficulties involved in using the tools were also explored. The lessons learned have enabled the production of a new...

Systemic action research works with real social and organisational issues to uncover their complex dynamics, often revealing unexpected opportunities. This book shows how this process can be integrated, in any context, to the process of social and organisational development and change. The book explains how systemic thinking works and how systemic action research can be embedded into organisational structures and processes to catalyse sustainable change and critical local interventions. Practically written, it details how to design a programme and build it directly into policy and practice...

Governments and organizations invest huge sums of money in development interventions to explicitly address poverty and its root causes. However, a high proportion of these do not work. This is because interventions are grounded in flawed assumptions about how change happens -- change is rarely linear, yet development interventions are almost entirely based on linear planning models. Change is also characterized by unintended consequences, which are not predictable by planners and by power dynamics, which drive outcomes towards vested interests rather than real need. Development processes need...

Governments and organizations invest huge sums of money in development interventions to explicitly address poverty and its root causes. However, a high proportion of these do not work. This is because interventions are grounded in flawed assumptions about how change happens -- change is rarely linear, yet development interventions are almost entirely based on linear planning models. Change is also characterized by unintended consequences, which are not predictable by planners and by power dynamics, which drive outcomes towards vested interests rather than real need. Development processes need...