Community development

Abstract

The term "Community development" requires a conceptual clarification, as there is considerable ambiguity in its meaning, as shown by analyzing the historical route and the different meaning that is given to both terms (community and development). These details allow us to define community development as an intervention method that incorporates all the players that make up the community, establishing processes of participation and coordination between people and institutions, promoting an educational process and participatory capacities of actors and mediating structures in order to achieve common goals and default to improve the economic, social and cultural communities, and whose results can be continually assessed. This approach conflicts with the practice of what is meant by community interventions made in response to emergency situations of deteriorating social and convivial, seeking effective interventions in short periods of time, in contradiction to its status as pedagogical processes always open and dynamic, which should be worked from the perspective of prevention of social problems in the longer term.