While community development is always full of issues, there are new and perhaps more perplexing sets of tensions and dilemmas facing community development practitioners at the beginning of the twenty-first century. This paper begins by noting the range of contradictions and dilemmas facing those in community development today. It then draws on research into the operating frameworks that set the backdrop for much current community development activity in formal and semi-formal organisations. It notes the inconsistencies and consistencies between different operating frameworks and the pressure points and dilemmas for community development practitioners. The final sections of the paper deal with the issue of how to respond to the new discourses that have fused community and enterprise lexicon, and what the new constellation of operating frameworks and discourses can mean for activism in community development today.

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The aim of this article is to demonstrate the diversity in delivery of long-term care at the provincial level, within a national legislative framework that provides universal health insurance and public administration. Not all provinces have legislated provision of long-term care, but mandates for provincial long-term care programs typically address the needs of those with chronic health needs and maintain them in the community for as long as possible. Eligibility is based on common criteria of residency, health need, facility, assessment, and consent. The three common components of the service delivery system are institutional care, community-based services, and home-based services; the kinds of services within each component and the mix among them vary from province to province. There are also five common features in provincial service delivery systems: single point of entry, assessment, client classification, case management, and single administration. Throughout the article, examples from different provinces show the varying ways in which these aspects of service delivery have been addressed, and recent innovations have furthered this diversity. A detailed account of quality management systems also shows that while all provinces have adopted a common set of principles, they use a range of methods to pursue quality of care and to promote good practice.

Community development was born out of a commitment to practising ways of empowering people to take collective control of their own lives. This empowerment requires profound changes in the ways in which societies are organised, and community development has held out the promise of heroic change. While community development practitioners have been able to secure spaces for community development processes and policies, overall the successes of community development have been uneven and often quite modest. Indeed, the story of community development so far is one of considerable unfinished business. Drawing on two research projects, this paper considers whether third sector organisations, which form the bulk of organisational sites upon which community development take place, generate and nurture types of active citizenship that are appropriate to community development activities. The paper develops a typology of active citizenship and considers manifestations of the types in seven countries. The applicability of the types to community development is dependent upon what form of community development is being considered. The position presented in this paper is that we need more than a settled form of community development based around maintaining and defensive active citizenship. An unsettled and edgy community development is also needed and this requires critical, proactive, visionary and cosmopolitan citizens active citizens who are prepared to challenge existing power relations.

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