Solidarity and Agency: Rethinking Community Development

Despite its four decade-long history, community development is still insufficiently conceptualized. Its name is buried under various euphemisms, although its ideology has become the legitimizing cachet for social interventions of all sorts. This paper presents a reformulation of the classic idea of community development as the pursuit of solidarity and agency. Such a formulation aligns community development with the central intellectual concerns of today. While community development pursues the same goals as many other endeavors, its distinctiveness lies in the manner in which it pursues them, namely, by adhering to the principles of self-help, felt needs, and participation.