Rounding out the Cycle: Completing the CED-SS Model

In my last post, I built the first portion of the community economic development-opportunity-social sustainability model and explaining the relationship between the first two. Now, it’s time to take it one step further and see how the model rounds out and comes full circle.

Opportunity is at the center of the model, and we saw it is supported and enhanced through community economic development. How do opportunity and social sustainability relate, though?

The Connection Between Community Economic Development and Opportunity

Buckle up, ladies and gents; we’re moving on.

The last several posts have focused on defining the three concepts that we’re playing with and trying to connect: social sustainability, opportunity, and community economic development.

Now that we have those well-defined, we can move on to the meat of the project: exploring the connection between the three.

From Government to Governance: Orienting Local Policies through Community Economic Development

Community economic development calls for a recalibration of the local democratic processes where social sustainability policies are created and implemented, a change from the classical governmental-focused frameworks of old to a new, progressive approach.

“A traditional government approach is top-down, hierarchical, and operates in isolation from other stakeholders, while new governance, in contrast, cultivates horizontal, flexible relationships for policymaking.”

Relationships. Relationships are the tracks on which the train of community economic development runs. Relationships between citizens and their local authorities, their neighbors, and the environment around them are at the core of mobilizing social sustainability.

Community Economic Development: Reawakening Democracy

What’s so important about the community, anyway? Aren’t the national and international stages more important?

In terms of building and growing social sustainability, the more macro-scale policy arenas have their place in laying down broad strokes, but the real heavy lifting comes on the community level. A national or international policy that attempts to fulfill social sustainability as we’ve come to frame it will not be effective in all communities because, inherently, each community is unique in its composition and its reaction to such a policy. However, if that same policy is tailored on the community level for their unique circumstances, the effectiveness of that policy will logically be higher.

This is where community economic development enters into the social sustainability picture, as it’s the mobilizing strategies and framework that lie behind effective social sustainability.

Community Capital: A Lens for Social Sustainability

The past few posts have focused primarily on opportunity and what exactly I mean by that. Yet, you may be wondering how that is relevant to what this blog is supposed to be about: social sustainability and community economic development.

That’s a fair point, I’ll give you that. But give me a chance to connect the dots. I swear it won’t be for naught.

The Quixotic Dream of Egalitarian Opportunity

In my last post, I talked about the need for communities to embrace a culture of opportunity for all. However, I don’t want that to be misconstrued as support for equality of opportunity, because they are two fundamentally different ideas.

Not convinced? Let’s work through it.

Embracing a Culture of Opportunity

“It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position.”

The American Dream sounds a lot like what social sustainability should look like, at least intuitively. When James Truslow Adams first introduced the term in his 1931 book The Epic of America, the American Dream was a reality in which “life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability and achievement.”

Potential. Achievement. Opportunity. For all. These are what Adams saw as major tenets upon which a society should be built.

Social Sustainability: The Shorter Leg

Sustainable development has become the gold standard for policy-making around the world as awareness has grown of the inability to continue along the traditional development path taken generations before us. There is a popular analogy for sustainable development as a three-legged stool, with environmental, economic, and social factors working together to keep the stool stable. However, as it has been deployed over the past three decades, the three legs have not been developed evenly and, thus, the stool is not as even and effective as it was intended to be. Social sustainability has not been given the same attention and implementation as its counterparts, and that has held back sustainable development around the world from reaching its maximum potential.

Why, then, has social sustainability been treated like the neglected stepchild of the three?