Extract

The self-organizing activities of local people are prerequisites for community-based, participatory rural development. The research objective of this volume was to identify the mechanisms through which rural people organize themselves for their development needs. We assumed that such mechanisms exist in local society. We regard local society as a system in which locality groups mobilize local institutions and resources to form and manage organizational activities. To identify the local social system, we applied an organizational process approach. We investigated the process by which local people organize themselves for development in various cases from seven Asian countries and observed how the actors, institutions, and resources in these local societies determine how local people organize themselves. In this concluding chapter, I synthesize the findings of the case studies to develop some propositions for understanding local society and the mechanisms that facilitate the self-organizing activities of rural people.