El desarrollo local y las organizaciones solidarias; diversas estrategias para afrontar el desarrollo: un caso colombiano

This article presents a Colombian experience which contributes to the ongoing debate on local development understood as a process that drives forward a community that chooses to generate development in association with support organizations. The case in study: Management, dynamics, and practice in a local development experience in Colombia: Our research on Fundación San Isidro's experience was based on the question: How to articulate and sustain local development practices in a community? Summing-up, the case in study shows that local development aimed by any particular community is sustained by: 1) The long term systemic articulation and steadfast management of development strategies, 2) the implementation of the relevant strategies by the local leaders with the help of locally created support organizations, and 3) the community's creation of their own concepts of both development and strategy together with fitting practices to carry them out. All these elements should be thought of as long term projects and ultimately end in the creation of the community's own development model, model which in this paper we refer to as "emerging development model".