'Local and Community Driven Development: Moving to Scale in Theory and Practice' provides development practitioners with the historical background and the tools required to successfully scale up local and community driven development (LCDD) to the regional and national levels. LCDD gives control of development decisions and resources to communities and local governments. It involves collaboration between communities, local governments, technical agencies, and the private sector. Since the 1980s, participatory approaches have received new impetus via participatory rural appraisal, the integration of participation in sector programs, decentralization efforts of developing countries, and greater space for civil society and the private sector. This book traces the emergence of the LCDD synthesis from these various strands. 'Local and Community Driven Development' provides the theoretical underpinnings for scaling up, guidance on how to adapt the approach to the specific institutional and political settings of different countries, diagnostic tools, and step-by-step instructions to diagnose the national context, adapt policies, and expand programs. It will be a useful guide for rural and urban development practitioners, public administrators, and policy makers who wrestle daily with the problems the book addresses.

Community-driven development boasts many islands of success, but these have not scaled up to cover entire countries. Binswanger and Aiyar examine the possible obstacles to scaling up, and possible solutions. They consider the theoretical case for community-driven development and case studies of success in both sectoral and multisectoral programs. Obstacles to scaling up include high economic and fiscal costs, adverse institutional barriers, problems associated with the co-production of outputs by different actors on the basis of subsidiarity, lack of adaptation to the local context using field-tested manuals, and lack of scaling-up logistics. The authors consider ways of reducing economic and fiscal costs, overcoming hostile institutional barriers, overcoming problems of co-production, adapting to the local context with field testing, and providing scaling-up logistics. Detailed annexes and checklists provide a guide to program design, diagnostics, and tools. This paper--a product of the Office of the Vice President, Africa Regional Office--is part of a larger effort in the region to improve understanding of community-driven development.

Participatory approaches that involve local communities in their own development have gained substantial support among international donors over the past quarter-century and have become increasingly important in the work of the World Bank. Community participation is an approach to development that can be used with any Bank lending instrument and across sectors. Projects can involve communities in different ways--by sharing information, consulting, collaborating, or empowering them. The process of involving communities in project activities is also expected to contribute in most cases to communi.

States can do much to tap community-level energies, and resources for development, if they seek to interact more synergistically with local communities. The broader spin-off is creating a developmental society, and polity. Using case studies from Asia and Latin America, the authors show how: 1) State efforts to bring about land reform, tenancy reform, and expanding non-crop sources of income, can broaden the distribution of power in rural communities, laying the basis for more effective community-driven collective action; and 2) Higher levels of government can form alliances with communities, putting pressure on local authorities from above, and below to improve development outcomes at the local level. These alliances can also be very effective in catalyzing collective action at community level, and reducing :local capture" by vested interests. There are several encouraging points that emerge from these case studies. First, these powerful institutional changes do not necessarily take long to generate. Second, they can be achieved in a diversity of settings: tightly knit or loose-knit communities; war-ravaged, or relatively stable; democratic, or authoritarian; with land reform, or (if carefully managed) even without. Third, there are strong political payoffs in terms of legitimacy, and popular support for those who support such developmental action.

The poor and vulnerable populations suffer disproportionately from the adverse impacts of climate change and disasters, which result in loss of life, damage to household and community assets, disruption of livelihoods, and loss of income. Solutions that recognize localized risks and address them in the context of wider socioeconomic development are needed. This guidance note underscores the importance of scaling up resilience-building measures through community-driven development projects. It proposes a framework that recommends five key considerations that should be factored in the design and implementation of community-driven development projects to ensure that they deliver on scaling up of resilience-building measures.