Mobilizing Community Assets in Tikapur, Nepal: Applying Asset-based Community Development Strategy

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

The national and local governments in Nepal have grappled with problems of poverty, unemployment, lack of health care, inadequate food supplies and substandard educational institutions. In response to these intense problems, national development agendas have tended to experiment with various top-down plans in cooperation with international organizations. Tikapur, the most well-planned city in western Nepal, has become the site of several development projects following such top-down approach. Recently, however, local and regional communities have been asked to play a front-line role in mobilizing human resource, public institutions, and space assets to help establish economic and social development initiatives from the bottom-up. This "Asset-based community development" approach emphasizes that development depends on finding and mobilizing hidden and under-utilized capabilities and assets already on the ground to discover sustainable development. This paper argues that this approach is applicable to the developing countries due to their significantly larger proportion of underdeveloped places and institutions. In this sense, the authors analyze the degree of utilization of local assets and the relationship between socioeconomic status and asset utilization based on empirical data collected in the Tikapur region of Nepal. The findings reveal statistically significant relationships between the utilization of community assets such as bank and cooperative, and income group. Based on the findings from a questionnaire survey, this paper offers recommendations for greater sustainable community development in Nepal.

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