Empowerment : Community Economic Development from the Inside Out

Abstract

Community economic development has achieved some enviable successes in both the US and Latin America. Community development corporations (CDCs) in the US are well networked among themselves and nurtured by a web of ® nancial intermediaries and technical assistance providers that channel resources and professional expertise to low-income neighbourhoods and communities across the country (see Wilson, 1995). In Latin America, most countries and many cities can point to their showcase low-income neighbourhoods where internationally funded non-governmental organisations (NGOs) have concentrated resources in creative programmes for community economic development, where one can ® nd local grassroots business incubators for hatching and supporting sectorally integrated micro-enterprises that share information, equipment, child-care and health services, and are governed through popular participation. Yet for all the growing sophistication and success stories, a sense of dissatisfaction has developed, perhaps most intensely among the `successful’ (King and George, 1987). In the US the feeling of malaise that comes with success in community economic development is one of selling outÐ to consumer society, to hierarchy and professionalisation, and to the non-pro® t funders themselves (Halpern, 1995). In Latin America, the malaise that comes with success is based on the awareness of asistencialismo, the realisation that rather than having empowered the low-income residents, the NGOs have made them dependent on outside assistance, even when the assistance itself is focused on providing the rod and not the ® sh (FundacioÂn Carvajal, 1995). Out of this dissatisfaction, new efforts have evolved in both US and Latin American low-income communities that point in the same direction: community economic development, if it is truly to empower people, must build community from the inside outÐ i.e. from the individual’ s realisation of selfef® cacy and interconnectedness with the larger community. Practitioners are discovering the pivotal role of the individual as subjectÐ not objectÐ of community economic development and social change. The urban economic development literature often leaves the individual to the domain of conservative `rational choice’ theorists (Sharp and Bath, 1993). Since conservative interest in the individual has emphasised the need for poor individuals to adopt the hegemonic values of the market economy, liberals have dismissed the interest as naive in the face of the structural and institutional impediments to redistributing power, wealth and income (Zippay, 1995). While conservatives

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