Community Asset Management A Good Practice in Participatory Local Governance

This article places the concept of community asset management (CAM), the focus of a DFID Knowledge and Research (KAR) project which has been described elsewhere, in the context of the broader concepts of participatory local governance and good practice, themselves the subjects of other recent KAR projects. It is contended herein that it is imperative to local development, service delivery and poverty reduction that these concepts are fully operationalised by the stakeholders involved in the governance process. The article argues that, not only is CAM as a community participation approach a good practice in good governance ‘in its own right‘, but the very practice of the CAM approach involves the operationalisation of other participatory local governance principles.