ABSTRACT

This chapter proposes an alternative developmental paradigm based on collaboration and inter-connectedness among rural–urban agencies. We propose a developmental ecosystem to foster connection and collaboration between external agencies and rural communities, leading towards holistic development of the communities. This developmental ecosystem combines exogenous and endogenous development processes by connecting billions of individuals all over the globe as external agents (the crowd capital), including traditional development agencies for collaborative knowledge exchange. Democratization of tools for self-expression using social technologies (e.g., social media, where anyone can create and exchange content), availability of anytime-anywhere mobile connectivity using social technologies, and greater opportunity towards resource mobilization using the principles of sharing economy (e.g., mobilizing crowd resources using digital platforms) will facilitate a movement that will shift control from centralized development involving a handful of traditional development agencies to decentralized development involving crowd capital – billions of development agents.