Studies in international, micropolitan, and/or regional settings provide the context for this issue. Contributing authors provide new insights for common frameworks as well as shed new light on diverse perspectives and strategies for community development research and practice. Attention to socioeconomic disadvantage, instances of exploitation of children, community resilience, and collective impact regionalism are among the issues presented.
Authors Meier and Gilster examined access to organizational resources in micropolitan cities. They suggest that these are important for research on place and inequality because of growing population and poverty within these particular contexts. Meier and Gilster’s findings reveal distinct characteristics of micropolitan geography, and they explore the role that these characteristics might play in future community development efforts.
Mary Ellen Brown and Birgitta Baker also conducted research in low-wealth communities that were involved with a neighborhood planning initiative. Using Colaizzi’s approach to phenomenology, Brown and Baker found that trust, resident-driven transformation, sense of community and cohesion, engagement and collective action, and openness to transformation to be vital components of community development practice and planning.
Situating their study in the Pacific Nation of the Solomon Islands, authors Thompson, Tupe, Wadley, and Flanagan revisit the possibility of positive community-based strategies as methodologies. They suggest that this perspective advances a comprehensive theoretical platform to facilitate a practice approach using customary and local measures in order to foster the status of women and children, to counter commercial sexual exploitation of children, and to advance community relations.
By focusing on vulnerable populations including (but not limited to) orphans, children, and HIV impacted households, authors Thompson and Moret engage in exploratory qualitative research to generate a causal model for the Community Care Program (CCP) in Mozambique. They used the Most Significant Change methodology to compile mini-case studies and identify primary causal pathways between program components and outcomes. Thompson and Moret also used the Community Capitals Framework to explore how CCP affected community-level resilience. Their findings suggest that CCP’s multi-component approach generated mutually reinforcing drivers that enhanced child-, household-, and community-level resilience.
Shifting to a broader context, authors Guerra, Schmidt, and Lourenço evaluate the previous experiences of Local Agenda 21 (LA21) in Portugal and Brazil, in order to identify factors hindering implementation, and how its legacy might contribute to a localized Agenda 2030. Despite the fact that aspects such as community engagement in decision-making and the safeguarding of the local commons have been on the LA21 agenda ever since the Earth Summit (1992), results show that actual achievements in these areas are meager. Nevertheless, the authors signal that LA21 planted the seeds of participative, bottom-up, and transformative development in local communities.
Lastly, authors Reece and Gough offer fresh insight into “collective impact regionalism.” Their study considers the SCI-RPG program through a lens of collective impact, examining their understanding of collective impact and the implications for regional planning for sustainability and justice. Reece and Gough find that the SCI experience incorporates components of collective impact and presents a unique iteration of collaborative governance, which they refer to as “collective impact regionalism.” Moreover, the authors suggest that this process leads to beneficial outcomes to support planning for long-term sustainability, justice, and diverse community development goals but is resource intensive and can be undermined by poor implementation planning.
As emphasized in this particular issue – the shedding of new light on traditional frameworks and the proposal of new lenses through which to view the field – we invite new authors to consider sharing their work as we aim to diversify methodologies and perspectives in both research and practice within Community Development.
We, along with John Green, want to acknowledge the extraordinary efforts, exceptional talents, and incredible guidance (not to mention endless patience) of our amazing editorial assistant, Ms. Elizabeth Sweeney. Elizabeth has been our rock in helping to run this journal for the past four years and was incredibly helpful in the transition between editors. We wish her well on her new adventures and will dearly miss working with her on a near-daily basis. Her kindness, knowledge, and attention to detail are well known by any author submitting and publishing with us. Thanks and good luck, Elizabeth!!