Community Development: Achievements and Deficiencies

Abstract As a subject, community development has been more prone to false hopes and high flown phrases than most. At times, especially in the late fifties, it became, like the missionary gratuitousness which preceded it, something of a cult. Even today, the term, although a bit faded, is redolent of pious good works and conjures pictures of hardworking and devoted civil servants, khaki clad, talking earnestly with local chiefs in a durbar in Enugu or a barraza in Morogoro or the backwoods of Kenya. Or, in a different form, one recalls the shining morning faces of Peace Corps volunteers in the barriadas outside of Lima, anxious to transform society “from below.”