Community Development Literature Review

CHAPTER TWO
2.0 Literature Review
2.1 Introduction
This chapter focuses on the exploration of key concepts embedded in the study. This includes concepts of Development, Community Development, Rural Development, as well as the challenges faced by CBOs and possible interventions. The theoretical framework that mainly informs the study is the Efficacy-Outcome Expectancy Model.
2.2 Development
Development is a complex term. For this reason, Ferguson cautions that when evaluating development, one should be careful not to solely focus on the “development industry”. As it is bluntly denoted, development should be about the desire for a better quality of life or standard of living for the people. It is therefore no longer a historical phenomenon

(2007) one of the key principles of community empowerment is rooted in allowing communities to make their own priorities because giving people choice is essential to human development and subsequently that would trickle to community development. Community Development is often a process that has slow progress. Therefore communities need considerable and specialised support for a considerable period of time. Lucie (2009) sees a crucial learning function for human development in community development by stating that:
‘because community development specialises in mobilising people in the interests of social justice and in developing social relationships based on cooperation rather than individualism, it should have a certain role in the process of confronting community crises and in designing a more sustainable future which places people centre stage without divorcing them from their ecological

Even though that is the case, according to Mansuri and Rao (2004), economic activities in rural areas have suffered from cycles of severe recession, stagnation and lack of economic opportunities causing migration from rural areas. There is a need therefore to revisit the policies and processes of facilitating rural development to make them more relevant to emerging issues and challenges. Rural development in Botswana today is complex and very different from what it was in the early years of independence. During the infant years of Botswana, rural development was more skewed towards the provision of basic infrastructure in rural areas and access to basic amenities of primary health and basic education (Moepeng, 2013).
With the potential and promise that CBNRM CBOs gave to rural communities as a means to achieve rural poverty reduction and at the same time conservation of biodiversity, the approach has in recent years been criticised by policy makers and the rural communities themselves. The observation by one of the leading pioneers of Community Based Conservation in southern Africa, Marshall Murphree, captures this well when describing CBNRM thus:’’… one where successes stand as islands in sea on initiatives where performance rarely matches promise and is sometimes abysmal” ( Buzwani et