ABSTRACT
This book has discussed different contexts of sustainable development projects observed in Brazil, Kenya, Ghana and Japan by reference to the evolving conceptualization of community and participatory development. In essence, the experiences of the settlers in the Amazon, slum-dwellers in Nairobi, small farmers in semi-arid Ghana or disaster victims in Japan have suggested that they were tacitly reflecting on their experiences with consequences for nation-state building, neoliberal market-oriented development, natural disaster, and the potential politicization of development and citizenship building. As a consequence of this reflection, they have taken pragmatic actions and moved on, trying to make and sustain lived-in places as corporeal citizens. While their placemaking endeavours have not yet clearly culminated in reshaping existing institutions of governance, their potential alliance with reformist policy-makers and non-governmental development or environmental experts can potentially lead to create interstitial institutional innovations to influence different levels of the institutions of governance, as we saw in the previous chapter.
