This book explores sustainable community development in Ghana post-COVID-19, highlighting examples of how individuals facing extreme challenges have adapted to their changing circumstances. Through the voices of African researchers, it explores the different responses that local, subnational, and national stakeholders and communities initiated to preserve the gains made in achieving the Sustainable Development Goals in Ghana during the global pandemic. This collection considers how policy makers are tackling the pressing issues of sustainability, climate change and its effects on Africa and Ghana in particular, and multi-stakeholder policy responses to building communities in a post-COVID-19 world. The case studies show how communities are interacting to ensure sustainable community development and learning in the Global South, and the role that education and learning, both formal and informal, play in strengthening livelihoods, choices, and opportunities in African communities. An assessment of multi-stakeholder policy responses to building communities in Ghana, this book will be of interest to scholars and students in the field of Education, Education Management, Sociology, Economics, and African Studies. It will also be of interest to policy makers and practitioners engaged in community development programmes and activities and the development of associated policies.

Ordinary people, community leaders, and even organizations and corporations still do not fully comprehend the interconnected, “big picture” dynamics of sustainability theory and action. In exploring means to become more sustainable, individuals and groups need a reference in which to frame discussions so they will be relevant, educational, and successful when implemented. This book puts ideas on sustainable communities into a conceptual framework that will promote striking, transformational effects on decision-making. In this book practitioners and community leaders will find effective, comprehensive tools and resources at their finger-tips to facilitate sustainable community development (SCD). The book content examines a diverse range of SCD methods; assessing community needs and resources; creating community visions; promoting stakeholder interest and participation; analyzing community problems; designing and facilitating strategic planning; carrying out interventions to improve

The Routledge International Handbook of Social Development, Social Work, and the Sustainable Development Goals answers the question: What is the contribution of social development and social work to the Sustainable Development Goals? The success of these goals requires implementation, and each of the 17 objectives for sustainable social progress have a social dimension. The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), like the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) before them, were born of a larger social development movement which over the last 25 years has become increasingly mainstream in the fields of international development, sustainability, and social work. These practitioners are essential to the implementation of the SDGs. This handbook examines how the SDGs are being implemented in diverse contexts. No previous work has surveyed social development and social work’s contribution to the SDGs nor represented voices from the Global South on the SDGs. This book broadens the current literature by focusing on key sites throughout the Global South and featuring underrepresented voices from Africa, Asia, and Latin America. These regions are vitally important to assessing the SDGs, as this is where innovative social development projects are occurring, and where social workers are playing a leading role in achieving the SDGs. The book is divided into eight parts: • Context of Social Development, Social Work, and the SDGs • Perspectives on the SDGs • Case Studies on Engagement with the SDG Agenda • Case Studies on Ending Poverty • Case Studies on Health and Well-Being • Case Studies on Gender Equality • Case Studies on Climate and Sustainability • Case Studies on Governance, Peace, and Justice It comprises 35 newly written chapters by 74 authors. It will be of interest to a broad interdisciplinary audience of scholars, educators, and students in the fields of social development, social welfare, social work, social policy, human rights, international relations, political science, international affairs, sustainability, community development, area studies, and development studies.

Papua New Guinea is going through a crisis: A concentration on conventional approaches to development, including an unsustainable reliance on mining, forestry, and foreign aid, has contributed to the country’s slow decline since independence in 1975. Sustainable Communities, Sustainable Development attempts to address problems and gaps in the literature on development and develop a new qualitative conception of community sustainability informed by substantial and innovative research in Papua New Guinea. In this context, sustainability is conceived in terms that include not just practices tied to economic development. It also informs questions of wellbeing and social integration, community-building, social support, and infrastructure renewal. In short, the concern with sustainability here entails undertaking an analysis of how communities are sustained through time, how they cohere and change, rather than being constrained within discourses and models of development. From another angle, this project presents an account of community sustainability detached from instrumental concerns with economic development. Contributors address questions such as: What are the stories and histories through which people respond to their nation’s development? What is the everyday social environment of groups living in highly diverse areas (migrant settlements, urban villages, remote communities)? They seek to contribute to a creative and dynamic grass-roots response to the demands of everyday life and local-global pressures. While the overdeveloped world faces an intersecting crisis created by global climate change and financial instability, Papua New Guinea, with all its difficulties, still has the basis for responding to this manifold predicament. Its secret lies in what has been seen as its weakness: underdeveloped economies and communities, where people still maintain sustainable relations to each other and the natural world.

Community development has lately gained much prominence, but the emphasis has remained on the economic and social welfare of communities, rather than the environment. By focusing on 'sustainable' development in Kenya, this study shows the importance of integrating ecological concerns in socio-economic and cultural development processes.

This book, Engineering and Sustainable Community Development, presents an overview of engineering as it relates to humanitarian engineering, service learning engineering, or engineering for community development, often called sustainable community development (SCD). The topics covered include a history of engineers and development, the problems of using industry-based practices when designing for communities, how engineers can prepare to work with communities, and listening in community development. It also includes two case studies -- one of engineers developing a windmill for a community in India, and a second of an engineer "mapping communities" in Honduras to empower people to use water effectively -- and student perspectives and experiences on one curricular model dealing with community development. Table of Contents: Introduction / Engineers and Development: From Empires to Sustainable Development / Why Design for Industry Will Not Work as Design for Community / Engineering with Community / Listening to Community / ESCD Case Study 1: Sika Dhari's Windmill / ESCD Case Study 2: Building Organizations and Mapping Communities in Honduras / Students' Perspectives on ESCD: A Course Model / Beyond Engineers and Community: A Path Forward

This timely Research Handbook offers new ways in which to navigate the diverse terrain of community development research. Chapters unpack the foundations and history of community development research and also look to its future, exploring innovative frameworks for conceptualizing community development. Comprehensive and unequivocally progressive, this is key reading for social and public policy researchers in need of an understanding of the current trends in community development research, as well as practitioners and policymakers working on urban, rural and regional development.

This book states that whilst academic research has long been grounded on the idea of western or scientific epistemologies, this often does not capture the uniqueness of Indigenous contexts, and particularly as it relates to the achievement of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The SDGs were announced in 2015, accompanied by 17 goals and 169 targets. These goals are the means through which Agenda 2030 for sustainable development is to be pursued and realised over the next 15 years, and the contributions of Indigenous peoples are essential to achieving these goals. Indigenous peoples can be found in practically every region of the world, living on ancestral homelands in major cities, rainforests, mountain regions, desert plains, the arctic, and small Pacific Islands. Their languages, knowledges, and values are rooted in the landscapes and natural resources within their territories. However, many Indigenous peoples are now minorities within their homelands and globally, and there is a dearth of research based on Indigenous epistemologies and methodologies. Furthermore, academic research on Indigenous peoples is typically based on western lenses. Thus, the paucity of Indigenous methodologies within mainstream research discourses present challenges for implementing practical research designs and interpretations that can address epistemological distinctiveness within Indigenous communities. There is therefore the need to articulate, as well as bring to the nexus of research aimed at fostering sustainable development, a decolonising perspective in research design and practice. This is what this book wants to achieve. The contributions critically reflect on Indigenous approaches to research design and implementation, towards achieving the sustainable development goals, as well as the associated challenges and opportunities. The contributions also advanced knowledge, theory, and practice of Indigenous methodologies for sustainable development.

This book critically examines the practice and meanings of corporate social responsibility (CSR) and how the movement has facilitated a positive and somewhat unquestioned image of the global corporation. Drawing on extensive fieldwork material collected in Ghanaian communities located around the project sites of Newmont Mining Corporation and Kinross Gold Corporation, the monograph employs critical discourse analysis to accentuate how mining corporations use CSR as a discursive alibi to gain legitimacy and dominance over the social order, while determining their own spheres of responsibility and accountability. Hiding behind such notions as ‘social licence to operate’ and ‘best practice,’ corporations are enacted as entities that are morally conscious and socially responsible. Yet, this enactment is contested in host communities, as explored in chapters that examine corporate citizenship, gendered perspectives, and how global CSR norms institutionalize unaccountability.

More than forty authors in six countries representing the major regions of the world offer a truly global perspective on the changing nature of the practice and theory of community development.