Just and Lasting Change: When Communities Own Their Futures
This book is both a description and a prescription: a description of some such communities, and the process through which they achieved enviable health levels, as well as a prescription for other societies to follow suit... This is the one book I would unhesitatingly recommend to anyone interested in underdevelopment and health.(V. Raman KuttyInternational Journal of Epidemiology)This book is a 'must-read' for those seeking to carry out or to understand true change in health equity and health improvement. This book shows us the real potential of honest partnerships between communities, governments, and technical experts. With an unmatched global reach and breadth of examples, from Appalachia to the Tibetan high plateau, the Taylors have laid out for the reader both the complexity and the underlying simplicity of principle that enables us to approach health from a systems perspective. Nurturing these resonant and self-reinforcing systems, rather than filling out the static prescriptions of past top-down development efforts, can put us on the path to a healthy world. Many of us with experience in development are scared of the 'do-gooder' syndrome which frequently lacks a sustainability and growth component.Just and Lasting Change, however, makes a unique contribution to the field by detailing how a continuous empowerment process of skill and will can realize the potential for cumulative growth in development programs.(Halfdan Mahler, Director General Emeritus, World Health Organization)I know of no one else in the world who has the breadth and depth of experience in international development work as Carl Taylor. InJust and Lasting Change, he and Daniel Taylor-Ide offer a perceptive analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of current development efforts and, in their SEED-SCALE model, a practical guide for those engaged in this kind of work today and a highly relevant approach to these problems in this age of globalization.(W. Henry Mosley, M.D., M.P.H., The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health)This book describes in detail a concept of community development that is not only exciting but eminently practical and capable of achieving positive results. The SEED-SCALE model for international development presented inJust and Lasting Changeis based on the need for local consensus and cooperation, recognizing that when community residents, government officials, and outside experts work together, they can create the proper environment for sustainable development. Applicable to any community where growth has been lagging, whether in the developing or the developed world, SEED-SCALE has been repeatedly tested and proven successful. In spelling out so succinctly the manner in which community development can be stimulated through the SEED-SCALE concept, this book makes a valuable contribution to the literature on sustainable development.(Flora MacDonald, former Canadian Foreign Minister)