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It is obvious to many, but unproven to others, that community development has a positive impact on the mental health and well‐being of those who are touched by it. In our recent study, Connect and Include (Seebohm & Gilchrist, 2008), we found strong evidence that individuals, groups and communities can benefit from the community development process. Positive outcomes included greater democracy and social justice, but in this article we focus on the contribution of community development to social inclusion and the benefits to mental health.

Modernisation and rapid industrialisation has caused not only structural changes in economic aspect but also in the social and political aspect of the Malaysian society. Changes in lifestyle, increase in awareness on individual rights and also the realisation of collective power has begun to change the social and political aspect of society. In all the changes undergone, it is quite often that the rural and urban poor who are marginalised and lag behind in economic advancement. Community development is an important element in pursuing economic progress and also in encouraging active participation of the capable and potential members of society. This article aims to look at the development of community development in Malaysia and the various programmes carried out under the Social Development Programme. Some suggestions are also given as a means to improve future community development programmes

The purpose of this study is to explore the factors that influence sustainable homestay development and suggest a model for adopting and implementing the homestay concept and its contribution towards sustainable rural development in Uttarakhand, India.

Researchers have collected a total of 360 responses from tourists, homestay owners/villagers and managers associated with homestay businesses in Uttarakhand to examine, assess and analyse the data with the help of different statistical tools such as SPSS and AMOS to validate the concept of homestay and its impact on sustainable rural development.

The analysis uncovered that collaborative consumption, sharing economy and family feeling and community development are positively associated with and, in return, community development affects sustainable development.

This study enables us to explain the “collaborative consumption” in the context of homestays functional in the state of Uttarakhand only.

The study results in evidence of crucial implications for policymakers. Policymakers should focus on opportunities in tourism and its integration with economic, environmental and social goals. Homestays will be new avenues for economic and sustainable development.

Homestay offers reasonable and cheap lodging for tourists within the existing ancient homes, typically restored for the guests to form a comfortable stay. Homestay is adopted to facilitate community-based tourism in the state. It also helps in developing a source of livelihood for the community. It is helpful for individuals’ economic, social and aesthetic desires to be consummated by maintaining cultural integrity, ecological processes, biodiversity and natural support systems through homestay, as social entrepreneurship. Homestay has been envisaged as a driver to realise the sustainable development goals by steering the pathways to a property future for all involved within the elected hill states.

This study validates a new homestay model that will be useful for developing community and achieving sustainable development.

The community school is a human engineering laboratory functioning on a broad basis to help people fulfill their basic needs. The basic academic needs of children and teen‐agers are fulfilled to a large extent within the formal portion of the program. Many other needs are fulfilled within the informal portions of the community school program. Much of the experience in the informal program strengthens performance and accomplishment in the academic areas of learning. Adults participate in many learning activities during the informal portion of the school day and obtain service through the school that helps them fulfill their basic needs. The community school takes the lead in involving children, youth and adults (sometimes separately and sometimes all groups combined) in programs that help to solve community problems. When individual learning needs of all age groups are fulfilled and when through united effort community problems are solved, community development will take place on many fronts.

This study aims to understand the linkage among sustainability initiatives (SIs), community development (CD) and community well-being (CW) in tourism.

The exploratory sequential methodology consists of expert interviews, a questionnaire survey and the model verified with analysis of moment structures 22.

This study shows that the direct relationship between community-level SIs and CD and CW is significant and positive. The direct relationship between CD and CW is significant and positive. CD partially mediates the relationship between community-level SIs and CW in Indigenous tourism business operations.

This study assumes significance in developing Indigenous tourism destinations and calls for an integrated development strategy at the community level to enhance CW. This study provides a path for examining the contribution of grassroots-level sustainable business initiatives, their development and the community’s well-being. This study was confined to protected area-based destinations and focused on CD and well-being as a result of local-level SIs.

This study extends the scope for further research in measuring other perceived linkages of SIs with Indigenous community’s quality of life.

This study provides a path for examining the contribution of grassroots-level sustainable business initiatives and their development contributions and the ‘community’s well-being.

This exploratory research examining the relationship among community-level SIs, CD and CW hitherto unexplored in tourism among grassroot-level communities.

A partnership of the federal government and the states implement rural community development policy today, yet researchers rarely examine the nature and efficacy of this extensive intergovernmental collaboration. The authors collected data on Community Development Block Grant awards made by one state to small and rural communities for a variety of development projects over a period of more than ten years, and using a modified rural classification system detected patterns and trends in allocation. This study seeks to determine if a federally funded program assists states address the development needs of a diverse mix of rural communities. Do federal block grant programs help states meet rural community development policy objectives? This information should be helpful to local, state, and national government policy makers as they ponder proposals to reorganize dramatically the funding and implementation of community and economic development resources. Perhaps most importantly, this study will also help policy makers understand the complexity of the federal-state-local partnership for rural community development.

Economic development as a public initiative is traditionally designed to assist designated members of a society in their efforts to adjust to structural change and economic dislocation. The goal of a typical economic development program, while a public interventionist initiative, is to stimulate private sector economic activity, thereby alleviating the stress and damage associated with structural change and economic dislocation; in other words, to help fellow citizens and perhaps neighbours through an economic transition. These are honourable and worthy goals, but even here compassion, empathy, innovative thinking, and resources — especially resources — have their limits.

Socio‐economic decline in rural areas is a pervasive and debilitating phenomenon in terms of regional development, particularly when former models of economic growth which once stimulated business generation and regeneration can no longer be counted on to do so. In these austere times, models of social and community enterprise are becoming more important. This corresponds to the emergence of theories of community‐based entrepreneurship and social enterprise as explanatory variables. Such theories are used to label enterprising behaviour enacted within our communities, even when the theoretical arguments underpinning these re‐conceptualisations require to be stretched to permit this. Often the resultant explanations are not entirely convincing. The purpose of this paper is to challenge existing conceptualisations of community‐based entrepreneurship and social enterprise.

Using a case study methodology, the paper reports on the activities of the Buchan Development Partnership (BDP) – a community‐based project situated in the Buchan area of Aberdeenshire, Scotland – demonstrating how individual and community enterprise can be utilized to develop enterprising individuals and communities by growing enterprises organically. The case articulates this process, as it occurred in a rural development partnership using a narrative‐based case study methodology to examine activities and growth strategies.

The case bridges issues of entrepreneurship, entrepreneurial process, community and regional development and tells a story of community regeneration through the process of “Community Animateurship”.

Research, practical and social implications are discussed but in particular the need to adopt a more holistic “bottom up” approach.

This case challenges existing conceptualisations of community‐based entrepreneurship and social enterprise.

The purpose of this study is to focus on the development experience in the global world of two small communities, Viimsi in Estonia and Magog in South Africa. These two communities were chosen as exemplars because the authors were familiar with both, and understood them to be illustrative of differing outcomes of interaction of small communities with the global economy offering the prospect of generalisation of findings to the framework and theory. Twenty years ago, both were poor, since then Viimsi has become wealthy, while Magopa remains poor. It is not believed that becoming the wealthiest community in Estonia was Viimsi’s per-determined destiny. What people of Viimsi did to make their community a success relative to the surrounding peer communities is a story of the visible as much as the invisible attributes.

These attributes are examined using a framework the authors’ originally developed to explore the participation of Indigenous communities in the global economy in pursuit of development as they defined it. A thorough investigation was done on the interactions among various community stakeholder groups in an attempt to describe the social fabric of these two communities, and this was used to explain why Viimsi was able to take advantage of globalisation, when Magopa was not.

While it will be hard, no doubt, to translate all the success attributes of Viimsi to a different location and time, some of the lessons that were uncovered from the study are universal in nature, making them potentially useable for other small communities trying to find their way in the global world.

Studying only two communities means that the generalisation of the findings is limited to theory. None can be made directly to the population of similar communities, except indirectly through exploration using the theory being developed to test its validity in other circumstances.

The findings from this paper will increase the understanding of the factors that contribute the a community’s success of lack of, in participating in the global economy.

This is an under-researched area within development literature.

Although the value of community capacity building is widely accepted within scholarly literature, these initiatives thus far appear to have achieved very little impact in the achievement of community development aspirations. This paper aims to increase knowledge regarding specific priority areas which when targeted will result in more effective pathways towards sustainable development.

This study was performed through utilization of a qualitative strategy, which involved the combination of a number of qualitative methods and techniques including individual interviews, surveys, focus groups, literary review and policy analysis.

The investigation found that improving identified CSD priority areas, aligned with the sustainable development goals (SDGs), seems to be the most effective strategy to enhance the ability of local communities to overcome sustainability challenges over time. SDGs 9, 4, 15, 16, 17 and 8 were identified as the areas of greatest significance for practical community capacity building for sustainable development (CSD).

This paper answers scholarly literature’s call for greater investigation into bringing sustainability research closer to society, to clearly define research direction and agenda. It also recommends ways to action the global goals locally.