The Practice
of Sustainable Community Development: A Participatory Framework
for Change is a book published in November 2012
by Springer Publishing (New York) that details a systemic
approach to
sustainable community development (SDC), encouraging full
participatory involvement and promoting confidence for all
peoples. The book’s author, Dr. R. Warren Flint, is
a sustainability specialist with more than 15 years’ experience
in working with communities toward achieving sustainability.
After fully engaging in the meaning of sustainability, the
reader of this book – the student, the practitioner,
and the community leader – is presented with experiences
of people, relationship building, group dynamics, and community
improvement methods that a practitioner of SCD would experience.
The book discusses, analyzes, and encourages alternative
actions at the community level to promote wide-spread change,
while fostering local choices that lead to more self-sufficiency
and to the buffering of communities from the impacts of business
as usual.
The reader
is taken step-by-step through a community development
procedure, that includes processes of community assessment,
visioning, setting of goals and objectives, and defining
strategic actions that can be pursued to achieve the
measured outcome of sustainability. Through application
of the tools
and strategies discussed, community members are putting
aside day-to-day concerns in recognition of the bigger
picture that nature and people are inescapably under
the influence of one another through connecting relationships.
The brilliance of the sustainability movement is its
demand
for seeing things as interconnected and interdependent – its
ability to provide a bridge between disciplines and interests,
between the pieces of the whole and the whole itself.
This book’s
purpose is to discuss the difficulties and opportunities
of
getting
societies to engage with issues
from an environment fraught with unforeseen events and
unexpected outcomes, where the science is pretty good but
the social response, from politics to economics, is focused
elsewhere. The book emphasizes that if we can begin to
judge proposed actions and policies for their economic
value as well as for their ecological and evolutionary
affects, we will be following a model of sustainability
by associating different human values with the multiple
dynamics of natural systems. More information about Practice
of Sustainable Community Development can be found
at Springer
Publishing or by contacting Dr. Flint at rwflint@eeeee.net.
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