ABSTRACT
This chapter has two parts. The fi rst part provides background information consisting of a changing concept of community, a defi nition of community development, and the broad features of a developed society in terms of individualism, emerging new forms of communities, weakening traditional communities, and top-down orientation and policies related to community development. Further, it delineates fi ve broad approaches that contribute to community development in developed countries. However, it should be noted that, rather than defi ning what community is, a broad, general and fl exible approach has been employed to discuss the term community in terms of geographic-locality-based community, interest-based community and virtual community, as the concept of community changes from its traditional understanding, with all these variants being applied in the fi eld depending upon the context. Although a desirable defi nition of community development for the book is introduced in this chapter, the fi ve broad approaches that contribute to community development do not necessarily follow or fi t the defi nition. Indeed, at times these approaches may appear inconsistent with or contradict the given community development defi nition. In the second part, the chapter discusses eleven community development practice areas in the three developed countries of the region (as classifi ed by ESCAP)—Australia, Japan and New Zealand. Again it should be pointed that the defi nition of community development and the fi ve approaches presented in the fi rst part do not mesh in any precise way with these eleven community development practice areas. Some of them may contradict the defi nition of community development, while partially or fully refl ecting a combination of the fi ve approaches. The attempt is to cover what various agencies regard as community development activities across a range of areas, irrespective of whether they dovetail with the defi nition given or not. Such a broad and fl exible approach is required to explore community development trends in different countries. It may also be noted that, although the categorization of developed and developing countries is appropriate, in every developed country there are developing
areas and in every developing country there are developed areas, howsoever large or small. Thus some of the phenomena presented in this chapter may apply to relatively developed contexts in the so-called developing countries of the region.
