Analysis of Community Empowerment and Development, Community empowerment is a process where the community development initiative to begin the process of social activities to improve the situation and condition yourself. Community empowerment can only occur when citizens participate.
An attempt was successful only rated as “community empowerment” if the community or community groups become agents of development or known also as the subject. Here the subject is the driving force, and not beneficiaries (English: beneficiaries) or the object alone.
Empowering the community (community empowerment) is sometimes very difficult to distinguish from community strengthening and community development (community development). Because practically overlap, interchangeable and refer to a similar understanding.
Opinion of Cook (1994) stated that community development is a concept related to the improvement or development of society towards a positive direction. While Giarci (2001) saw community development as a matter of having the center of attention in helping the community in a variety of age groups to grow and develop through a variety of facilitation and support to enable them to decide, plan and take action to manage and develop their physical environment and social welfare. This process takes place with dukungancollective action and networking community developed
While Bartle (2003) defines community development as a tool to make more complex and stronger communities. It is a social change where society becomes more complex, local institutions grow, increasing its collective power and qualitative changes in the organization.
Based on the intersection and replace mutual understanding of community development and community empowerment, in a simple, Subejo and Supriyanto (2004) interpret the empowerment of society as a deliberate effort to facilitate local communities in planning, deciding and managing local resources that are owned through collective action and networking so that ultimately they have the capability and independence in economic, ecological, and social “.
In broader terms, community empowerment is a process to facilitate and encourage people to be able to put ourselves in proportion and become the main actors in exploiting its strategic environment to achieve a long-term sustainability.
Empowering communities have close links with sustainable development where community empowerment is a key prerequisite and can be likened to a train that will take society towards a sustainable economic, social and ecological dynamics. Strategic environment that is owned by local communities include, among others production environment, economic, social and ecological. Through empowerment, residents are encouraged to have the ability to utilize its resources optimally and fully involved in the mechanism of production, economic, social and ecological him. In summary the link between community empowerment to sustainable development.
Community empowerment is closely related to internal and external factors. Without play down the significance and role of one factor, in fact both factors contribute to and influence each other synergistically and dynamically. Although several examples of cases previously mentioned internal factors are very important as one of self-organizing form of society, but we also need to give attention to external factors.