“Re‑thinking,” “re‑imagining,” “shifting power” . . . Conversations about doing
development differently – and better – abound across the philanthropy and
international development sectors these days. As GlobalGiving and the Global Fund
for Community Foundations, we have participated in a number of these interrelated
discussions and processes, sometimes separately, other times together. To us, one
thing seems clear: whether it is explicitly stated or not, underlying all of them is a
recognition of the limitations of a development system that has been preoccupied for
too long with transactional flows of resources, rather than a lasting transformation
of power.

Informing many of these conversations is a growing appreciation of systems thinking,
and the idea that lasting transformation depends not on the success of an individual
project or organization but on a resilient system made up of multiple diverse actors,
and on the full ownership and participation of the people seeking the change.

And so, we come to “community‑led” development, a concept which has generated
renewed interest in recent years, particularly and most prominently among various
international development organizations and networks. Valuable data, analysis,
insights have been gathered, and tools shared and refined. However, these have
still tended to be framed from the perspective of external organizations, and
focused on improving the delivery of specific projects and programmes in terms
of implementation, rather than on “community‑led‑ness” as an observable
phenomenon from the perspective of community, away from the “noise” of external
funding and projects.