Can residents work together to improve the quality of life in their community? Asset Building and Community Development examines the promise and limits of community development and explores how communities are building on their key assets such as physical, human, social, financial, environmental, political and cultural capital.

A comprehensive approach focused on sustainable change Asset Building and Community Development, Fourth Edition examines the promise and limits of community development by showing students and practitioners how asset-based developments can improve the sustainability and quality of life. Authors Gary Paul Green and Anna Haines provide an engaging, thought-provoking, and comprehensive approach to asset building by focusing on the role of different forms of community capital in the development process. Updated throughout, this edition explores how communities are building on their key assets—physical, human, social, financial, environmental, political, and cultural capital— to generate positive change. With a focus on community outcomes, the authors illustrate how development controlled by community-based organizations provides a better match between assets and the needs of the community.

The 1990s have been marked by a wide-spread awareness of the convergence of environmental, economic and social problems and issues. Many local workers have begun to recognize that severe setbacks or even collapse of their local economy is strongly related to environmental problems: either to the depletion of local resources (such as timber, fish, or minerals) or to severe pollution and degradation of the local ecosystem. This in-depth collection of case studies of urban and rural communities committed to a process of sustainable development provides a more detailed description of this dynamic process than was previously available. This provocative book demonstrates the commonalities in approach across a wide variety of environmental and cultural settings, examining an emerging consciousness from cultural, economic, social and environmental viewpoints.

The concept of community development is often misunderstood, holding different meanings across different academic disciplines. Moreover, the concept of community development has been historically abstracted, not only in the way the concept has been conceptualized in academic studies, but also by the way in which practitioners use the term in the vernacular. Departing from traditional definitions of community development, this volume applies the New Public Service (NPS) perspective of Public Administration to community development to illustrate how public administrators and public managers can engage in community development planning and implementation that results in more equitable and sustainable long-term outcomes. This book will be of interest to practitioners and researchers in public administration/management, public administration theory, community development, economic development, urban sociology, urban politics, and urban planning.

Politics, Power and Community Development, the first book in a new series, Rethinking Community Development, offers unprecedented critical reflections on policy and practice relating to community development in the United States, Taiwan, Australia, India, South Africa, Germany, Ecuador, Peru, and other nations. Addressing the global dominance of neoliberalism, the contributors consider the extent to which practitioners, activists, and policy makers can challenge, critique, or resist its influence.