Water Conservation; Environmental Economics & Policies;
Governance Indicators; Poverty Assessment; Health Economics &
Finance; Community Development and Empowerment;
Decentralization; Agricultural Knowledge and Information Systems
Summary: States can do much to tap community-level energies, and
resources for development, if they seek to interact more
synergistically with local communities. The broader spin-off is
creating a developmental society, and polity. Using case studies
from Asia and Latin America, the authors show how: 1) State
efforts to bring about land reform, tenancy reform, and
expanding non-crop sources of income, can broaden the
distribution of power in rural communities, laying the basis for
more effective community-driven collective action; and 2) Higher
levels of government can form alliances with communities,
putting pressure on local authorities from above, and below to
improve development outcomes at the local level. These alliances
can also be very effective in catalyzing collective acti