Local community involvement: A handbook for good practice

The subject of this handbook is one of the most pressing areas where better community involvement is needed, namely in schemes to develop or regenerate disadvantaged localities. The gradual evolution of a European element in socio-economic policy over the past 20 years has shown the usefulness of having a common thread unifying the different national and regional approaches to local regeneration. For example, as a major new period of the Structural Funds approaches, behind the debate about the distribution of the Funds is a sense of the need to identify universal factors underlying the diversity of local experiment. A strong role for the local community is one of these factors.