If Rural Development is to be sustainable, then it must be seen like a table around which all parties who meet to plan development bring something to contribute.  What is more, each party should have unique contributions to the development process.  Historically, development is something that is done by experts from the outside who parachute into communities to ‘develop them’.   Despite good intentions, this type of development is seldom sustained over the long run because it does not give local people a personal stake in that development. 

Communities, however, do have important assets to contribute towards the development process.  They bring their social capital and ways of working together; local knowledges of the land, of history and of community; and, increasingly in a neo-liberal development model, they are the keys which unlock development funding which external actors can access.  

As a Carnegie Consultant from 2005 – 2007 I was commissioned to write a model of Asset-based Rural Community Development (ABRCD) for the report of the Carnegie UK Commission for Rural Community Development, and to contribute to it’s “Charter for Rural Communities: The Final Report of the Carnegie Commission for Rural Community Development.”   This also resulted in an academic paper “Asset Based Rural Community Development:  putting the ‘rural’ into ABCD in the UK” published in the Proceedings of the Rural Futures Conference at the University of Plymouth, 2006.  Since then I have been awarded a number of research contracts which contain a Community Assets focus including the use of Place-based Education in the “Highland Perthshire Initiative” (2006), “Forestry for People Social Benefits” (2008), and “An Audit of the Provision of Support for Scots Language” in 2008/9.  

Key to all these projects is the fact that Communities have large amounts of Intangible Assets which they can bring to their own ‘development’ in order to achieve their own goals and outcomes, and which are, in fact, essential to making such development successful and sustainable.