Skip to main content

Community-Based Organizations

  • Living reference work entry
  • First Online:
  • 637 Accesses

Synonyms

Grassroots development organization

Definition

A bottom-up approach for popular participation in development efforts. It is an innovative approach to developing communities in response to the failure of top-down development strategies.

Introduction

Community-based organizations (CBOs) are nonprofit membership organizations (public or private) open to all residents of the physical community (a neighborhood for example), and focused on issues and concerns at the local level. They are institutional blueprints for improving citizen’s abilities based on local sociocultural conditions (Dill 2010). The primary purpose of community-based organizations is the improvement of the physical, economic, and social environment of its geographic area of operation. They achieve these goals by addressing one or more critical problems of the area – housing, health, education, microfinance, safe water, and sanitation. Most CBOs focus their attention on the needs of persons of low and moderate...

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.

References

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Osaore A. Aideyan .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2017 Springer International Publishing AG

About this entry

Cite this entry

Aideyan, O.A. (2017). Community-Based Organizations. In: Farazmand, A. (eds) Global Encyclopedia of Public Administration, Public Policy, and Governance. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-31816-5_144-1

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-31816-5_144-1

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-31816-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-31816-5

  • eBook Packages: Springer Reference Economics and FinanceReference Module Humanities and Social SciencesReference Module Business, Economics and Social Sciences

Publish with us

Policies and ethics