The preface describes how a chance story about black rain interfering with the traditional drinking water collection from village rooftops, led us to a massive but little-known Palestinian e-waste hub in the southern West Bank, employing a thousand people who work to collect, refurbish, and recycle a large portion of Israeli e-waste, creating livelihoods in a setting of few options after prolonged Israeli occupation of the West Bank. We describe our efforts to learn with and from these communities about the dynamics and scale of the informal e-waste value chain, and its serious environmental and health consequences, and to forge and test a vision for development that would preserve this precious source of livelihood while eliminating its crippling harms. We overview the intertwined stories we tell in the book about our years of community-based research and advocacy, and their lessons for different audiences.

Rising poverty, shrinking economic opportunities, disengaged citizens and contentious public discourse, and racial inequality have become some of the greatest challenges communities are confronting. In efforts to maximize participation in addressing these issues, universities, community organizations, corporations, local government entities, and foundations are, independently or collaboratively, devoting resources to develop local leadership capacities. This chapter examines these community leadership development efforts and details two cooperative extension programs in a Midwestern US state. Through analysis of these case examples, the chapter offers a vision for how to reimagine community leadership programs so that they are more responsive to the complexity of current and emergent community challenges. An argument is made that US university extension services, because of their strong ties to local communities and networks nationwide, are well placed to support community leadership development that promotes community-identified strategies to address a wide range of local issues among diverse stakeholders. Insights from this chapter can inform future research and influence the design and implementation of community leadership development programs around the world.

The Chinese government launched a nationwide policy campaign regarding neighborhood governance in the early 2010s. The state-led movement served both to strengthen state legitimacy and enhance community development. But how it contributed to community empowerment or disempowerment is little examined. This chapter attempts to review the extant literature on the campaign from a community empowerment perspective. Implications and suggestions for future research are also included.

Neighborhood associations are geographically bound, grassroots organizations that rely on volunteer membership and direct participation to identify and address issues within their neighborhood. Often these groups serve as intermediaries between residents and local decision-makers, such as government officials, developers and business owners, and providers of public goods and services. As a case example, we describe the Minneapolis Neighborhood Revitalization Program (NRP), launched in 1990. The NRP is a notable long-standing attempt to bolster the role of neighborhood associations in municipal governance. It demonstrates many of the potential benefits as well as the challenges of neighborhood associations as vehicles for locally scaled democracy. After this, we examine dynamics of community power and empowerment processes in neighborhood associations and make recommendations for practice and future research.

Mentawai gibbons (Hylobates klossii) are one of the nine species of gibbon in Indonesia, all of which are threatened with extinction. We present a view of the future for gibbons on the Mentawai Islands using information from previous research as well as recent surveys. The largest gibbon population and habitat is currently in the Siberut National Park area, with approximately 10,484 individuals. In addition, there are 13 locations outside the national park with densities ranging from 1.04 groups/km2 to 4.01 groups/km2. A serious threat to the Mentawai gibbon is forest loss and hunting. Our survey also shows that the cultural value of Mentawai gibbons is being lost due to acculturation with modern culture. Uma (the Mentawai longhouse) and sikerei (the Mentawai shaman) are cultural symbols that are no longer found on the islands of Sipora and North and South Pagai. Currently there are only 94 uma and 135 sikerei (who have an average age of 64 years) on Siberut Island. We recommend conservation activities at the grassroots level for the Mentawai gibbon, activities that encourage local community capacity development and enhance the local economy, whilst at the same time strengthening Mentawai cultural and customary values.

In addition to adopting greater person-centred and recovery-oriented approach to build more productive partnerships between mental health staff and service users, mental health organisations that wish to become more socially inclusive need to develop partnerships with other agencies, particularly those that provide supported accommodation, supported education, and supported employment, so that these become more of a focus for care planning alongside traditional mental health interventions. Working in partnership to build bridges with local community resources and build capacity for the inclusion of people with mental health conditions acts to break down the stigma and discrimination that they experience. Services also need to ensure that people have access to personal budgets so that they are empowered to direct their own care and support. These approaches bring obvious benefits for carers too since creating a network of services and resources in the community for people will increase the social supports available and potentially reduce carer burden. Clinicians may also experience greater shared responsibility with other providers as they expand their community resource networks and are further rewarded by witnessing people building successful and participatory lives in the community.

In terms of human rights practice, the field has mostly been the province of lawyers, who are widely regarded as the main human rights professionals, though a social work literature on human rights has recently begun to emerge (Solas 2000; Reichert 2007). Most edited collections of articles on human rights, and journals dedicated to human rights, are written and edited by lawyers, and the law is commonly seen as the primary mechanism for the safeguarding of human rights and the prevention of human rights abuses (Beetham 1999; Douzinas 2000). The emphasis has been on legislation and on human rights treaties and conventions, and much of the literature is concerned with their analysis and implementation (Mahoney & Mahoney 1993). Many countries have human rights commissions, whose membership consists largely of people with legal training, and which operate in a legal or quasi-legal way, for example by hearing complaints and making judgments that have legal force.

This chapter looks at the projects that the Elmhirsts instigated on their estate to promote agricultural and industrial revival and democratic participation. It positions Dartington amid the many interwar rural reform ventures with which it cross-pollinated, from the New Deal in America and Sriniketan in India to Rolf Gardiner’s Springhead and government smallholding schemes in Britain. Dorothy and Leonard’s philosophy of rural regeneration – attempting to combine ‘microscopic’ support for community life with the ‘macroscopic’ approach that was international in its outlook – prefigured and helped shape the phenomenon central to the later twentieth century. The sociologist Roland Robertson calls this ‘glocalisation’: a process by which local community is reconfigured, and even strengthened, by global forces. The gradual migration of the Elmhirsts’ vision of Dartington – from a self-governing, holistically integrated collective to an outpost of centralised social planning – dovetailed effectively into plans for national reconstruction during and after the Second World War.

Human ability to adapt to shifting ecological regimes is tied to flexibility in our senses of place to engage and expand spatial and temporal scales. The challenge of regional conservation is to build intelligible senses of place from a mosaic of land uses that seemingly compete with one another and have difficulties scaling-up to characterise a regional geography. A regional place-making framework is developed that connects ecological relationships, structural forces of society and socio-cultural meanings in ways that negotiate tension between narratives of stability and change. Place-making asserts change as aspirational narratives of what should be, and inclusion of a temporal scale that recognises future states of conditions and relationships across communities. Place-making asserts stability due to concerns for restoring native ecosystems and production of socio-cultural heritage. Regional place-making is where global narratives meet local particularities in ways that integrate and prioritise narratives linked to stability and change.

The promise of an economy that creates good jobs, promotes social justice, and improves environmental quality is an alluring one. Proponents of a green economy argue that businesses and communities can overcome contradictions and conflicts between economic, social, and environmental goals through pursuit of the triple bottom line. Yet there is little consensus on what the green economy is and how to achieve it. In this chapter, we review the empirical studies on existing green economic arrangements in different parts of the world. We identify four streams of activities: macroeconomic restructuring, spatial replanning, industrial redesign, and local revitalization. Our review suggests that existing empirical studies remain overwhelmingly practical in their orientation, which leaves much room for theoretically motivated environmental sociological analyses. We conclude with a call for an environmental sociology of green economies that has the potential to enrich the academic literature and enable real-world transformations.