Call for Papers:
 
Special Issue Community Development: The Journal of the Community Development Society on Sustainable Rural Development: An International Perspective
 
Guest Editors:  Isabel Gutierrez-Montes, Tropical Agricultural Research and Higher Education Center, Costa Rica; Mary Emery, Iowa State University; Edith Fernandez-Baca, National Agriculture University La Molina, Peru; Cornelia Flora, Iowa State University
 
Most rural communities depend directly on local natural resources to maintain livelihoods.  In many cases, conditions of poverty force local communities to seek immediate satisfaction of basic needs, at the expense of long-term sustainability of their natural resource base, provoking a downward spiral of increased environmental degradation and poverty.  The concept of sustainable development emerged among development specialists in the late 1980s and reflected increasingly widespread acceptance of the need to reconcile the requirements for economic growth with those of social equity and the conservation of the natural resource base, from which all productive activities ultimately arise. While the concept of sustainable development recognizes the need to integrate economic development with environmental conservation, most development initiatives focus on economic growth and disregard the natural resource base. Initially strengthening capacities of those involved, ranging from scientists and academics to local farmers and merchants, at both practical and policy levels focused on an individuals economic activity.  With the evolution of the Sustainable Livelihoods Approach (SLA), the focus has broadened to include the ways in which households construct everyday activity to blend sources of income and asset development to support the household over time. According to the International Fund for Agricultural Development, SLA is defined as:

The sustainable livelihoods approach (SLA ) is a way to improve understanding of the livelihoods of poor people. It draws on the main factors that affect poor people's livelihoods and the typical relationships between these factors. It can be used in planning new development activities and in assessing the contribution that existing activities have made to sustaining livelihoods.

The two key components of the SLA are:
a framework that helps in understanding the complexities of poverty
a set of principles to guide action to address and overcome poverty

The SL framework places people, particularly rural poor people, at the centre of a web of inter-related influences that affect how these people create a livelihood for themselves and their households. 

Similarly, the introduction of the Community Capitals Framework (a systems approach that looks at assets, investments, and interactions among 7 types of capital including: natural, cultural, human, social, political, financial, and built capital) offers a method of analyzing inputs and impacts from both within and without the community that determine the success of sustainable livelihoods activities. In this special issue, we take issue with those approaches and focus on sharing examples and furthering the research field related to how social equity, economic survival, and environmental stewardship can lead to sustainable practices at the household, community, and state levels.
 
For this issue, we seek papers that address the following:

• Case studies that report on the use of SLA and or CCF in the field, particularly those that address one or more of the following:  social equity, economic sustainability, and environmental stewardship,
• Studies that make use of SLA or CCF in analyzing data,
• Evaluations of SLA and or CCF projects,
• Theoretical pieces that deepen our understanding of the approaches,
• Studies that offer strategies for identifying and measuring indicators relevant to SLA and or CCF.

We invite paper submissions from all fields and disciplines working in this area. Complete manuscripts are due May 31, 2008.  Please address questions or concerns to Mary Emery memery@iastate.edu  Complete manuscripts can be submitted to that email address as well.