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Community Development and Ecology: Engaging ecological sustainability through community development

The Centre, in conjunction with Borderlands Cooperative and the International Association of Community Development (IACD - local networks), hosted its third Community Development Conference in March 2008. In keeping with previous community development conferences, there were two streams to the conference, academic papers and community workshops and forums.

Academic papers & Workshops

The academic section of the conference explored the contemporary contexts of community development, including conceptual and theoretical advances and social, cultural, political and economic settings.

Papers canvassed the need for radically shifting paradigms in the context of the tipping point of contemporary society including theoretical, strategic and community approaches to climate change and other contemporary environmental issues.

Workshops provided an opportunity for exchange of theories, ideas and actions relating to the themes below.

The abstracts of papers presented can be viewed here

Themes

• Community Development & Housing: cooperative, rural and metropolitan, community activism for energy efficiency, community gardens.
• Community Development & Urban Renewal: changing/greening cities, restoring neighbourliness, green transport.
• Community Development & Food Sovereignty/Relocalisation: food and resource production (carbon neutral communities / restoring local/cooperative activities and local economies and water issues).
• Community Development & Rural /Regional Issues: carbon offset actions/reafforestation, bioregional action, green corridors, forest action, land care, water action, critiques and efficiency.
• Community Development & Globalisation: developing countries and climate change issues; rapidly developing economies, energy demands and the impact of climate change upon the poorest countries; climate change refugees, water issues, fair (and green) trade issues.
• Community Development: Responding to disasters: effective community development responses to natural and socio/ political disaster. Ensuring sustainable international aid programs. What can community development offer?
• Community Development and Building Social Movements: networking across differences, making local/global links eg zero emissions, aid development and carbon emissions, emerging climate change action groups

Conference proceedings publication

Papers presented at the conference are currently in the process of blind peer review for inclusion into a conference proceedings publication which will be available from the Centre offices.