Definition of Community Economic Development (CED)

Centre for Community Enterprise

People have long taken a 1-dimensional approach to economic development. They have understood it as industrial recruitment, buy-local campaigns, or Main Street improvement. Business people tend to be the only or the primary movers and shakers. Little attention goes to things that take longer than five years to achieve.

These approaches have had their champions and successes. There is nothing wrong with a single project or a series of projects that improve a community in some respect. But the 1-dimensional approach is essentially outdated in a time when towns and neighbourhoods find their way of life literally disintegrating around them. In this day and age, we can and must undertake something much bigger and more powerful: community economic development.

CED is the process by which local people build organizations and partnerships that interconnect profitable business with other interests and values - for example, skills and education, health, housing, and the environment. In CED a lot more people get involved, describing how the community should change. A lot more organizations look for ways to make their actions and investments reinforce the wishes and intentions of the whole community. Business becomes a means to accumulate wealth and to make the local way of life more creative, inclusive, and sustainable - now and 20 or 30 years from now.

At its most effective, CED is characterized by

a multi-functional, comprehensive strategy of on-going activities, in contrast to individual economic development projects or other isolated attempts at community betterment.
an integration or merging of economic and social goals to bring about more far-reaching community revitalization.
a base of operating principles that empower the broad range of residents for the governance of development organizations and their community as a whole.
a process guided by strategic planning and analysis, in contrast to opportunistic and unsystematic tactics.
a businesslike financial management approach that builds both ownership of assets and a diverse range of financial and other partners and supporters.
an organizational format that is nonprofit, independent, and non-governmental, even though for-profit or governmental entities are closely linked to its work.

The resources presented on this website are intended for use in such a wide-ranging strategy, not as isolated projects. Community economic development is intended to empower the community to handle its own destiny. It is not focussed on growth as such, but on the capacity to handle economic and social change for local benefit.

For a more detailed discussion of community economic development and how this approach to community change is distinguished from others, click here.