What Is CDRD?

Community Driven & Recovery Development (CDRD) articulates the community's self-perception and future vision and offers a development plan to realize that vision. The plan generally comprises a series of prioritized actions beginning with specific tangible subprojects. Through the community-driven process, community members review and analyze their resources and needs, prioritize their requirements,

develop a plan of action, organize into a decision-making body (or refine an existing one), receive and manage resources, carry out the subproject, and ensure quality and accountability. The role of external partners is typically only to "facilitate" the process that enables the community to decide and implement the subproject rather than to "implement" the subprojects for the community based on the community's inputs. This is a principal difference between a "community-driven" approach and a "community-based" approach.

The advantage of CDRD is that it targets aid better at the local level, and that stronger ownership among users and beneficiaries helps promote self-financing and sustainability. At the same time, a community-driven approach helps strengthen and build local institutions as a basis for good governance and stability. It also helps build social capital locally by making it possible for community members to work together to identify their common problems and to implement projects together that address critical social needs. It helps build public sector governance from the bottom up and supports participation, decentralization, and use of existing nongovernmental capacity. CDRD should be seen not only as an emergency instrument in the early stages after conflict, but as a long-term effort from early reconstruction to engage toward sustainable development with local participants.

When is CDRD appropriate and when is it not? CDRD is relevant across many sectors as it is an "approach," not an "instrument." The potential for CDRD is greatest for goods and services that are small in scale and not complex and that require local cooperation, such as common pool goods, public goods, and civil goods. But not all goods and services are best managed through collective action in the community. Public goods that span many communities or that require large, complex systems are often better provided using a market-based approach. CDRD can, however, fill gaps where markets are missing or imperfect, or where public institutions or local governments fail to fulfill their mandates.