ABSTRACT
Having seen the background to community management and some of the challenges with it, this chapter seeks to assess the characteristics of success in community management over past 30 years around the world so as to further develop people's understanding of what successful community management looks like. It implies that success in community management depends on the coming together of three interrelated components: internal plus, external plus and underlying socio-economic wealth. Unacceptable failures in rural water service delivery have called into question the prominence of community management as the dominant service delivery model in the sector and yet, at the same time, community management has played a significant role in the expansion of water services to rural populations around the world in recent decades. In Latin American and the Caribbean, the growth in resources available at either the household or government level appears to be leading to an improvement in the overall levels of success in the community management model.
