ABSTRACT
This chapter presents developmental CARE and focuses on community activation from an overall developmental and more integral perspective, on the emergent foundation of the path of renewal. For Gudeman, 'development is not primarily about capital accumulation, but rather about innovation in the relationships of people, their immediate community, their external community, organisations and society'. Community in this wider sense offers him a reservoir of possibilities, and the key to development is to unleash the innovative potential that lies in it. An important dimension for such unleashing lies in what Arturo Escobar calls the vitality of place. The theoretical field of economic development has been dominated by formal economists and sociologists, at the expense of cultural anthropologists and depth psychologists. Therefore, in the 'global south', where closeness to nature and community is the norm, and the formation of the self is closely interwoven with both, orthodox 'north-western' development economics and the accompanying institutional forms have been antithetical to such 'southern' worlds.
