There's a timely and well-written CDF short paper on community development and empowerment published recently. It pays more attention than I expected to informal relations and cultural change, and concludes:
Empowerment can reach higher into decision-making procedures: setting agendas, raising aspirations and ensuring that the channels for communication and influencing between community members and their representatives, even at the topmost tiers, are accessible and acknowledged as legitimate aspects of the democratic culture. Community development practice aims to embed these structures and understanding into everyday democracy so that everyone knows how they can influence decisions as individual citizens but, more importantly, through collective approaches involving learning, dialogue and negotiation.
