Community Development: Community-based alternatives in an age of globalisation, presents important principles of community development and empowers students to understand the ways in which community development practitioners can work in different contexts.

While this book has a practical application, and attempts to incorporate both theory and practice, it does not provide simple prescriptions of how to ‘do’ community work. A number of principles of practice are outlined, but the way in which they are translated into community development practice will vary from community to community and from worker to worker. Community work is, at heart, a creative exercise, and it is impossible to prescribe creativity. Rather, one can establish theoretical understandings, a sense of vision and an examination of the nature of practice, in the hope that this will stimulate a positive, informed, creative, critical and reflective approach to community work.