Community governance is a fairly popular concept though with fairly broad, diverse meanings and connotations. Totikidis V, Armstrong A F & Francis R D (2005) define it to usually refer to community participation, engagement and decision-making in public matters and is related to terms such as local governance, social governance, network governance and participatory governance. Community governance therefore should embody community policy making, community management and decision-making in relation to community needs and building community capacity and well-being.

Community governance is useful for enhancing collaboration for better health. But if community governance is at the community level, by whom is it undertaken, with what goals and purpose and how is community participation or engagement executed? These questions are as pertinent to governance as they are to policy-making. The concept evokes similar memories of the concept of community participation principle of the Primary Health Care (WHO, 1978). Community participation ended up having varying definitions and meanings depending on who defined it or championed it. Are we likely to see the same with community governance? For instance, what will be the degree of participation, or engagement or involvement in management and decision-making by the community members? Will the decision making and management be by or with or for the community members? Who in the community will be engaged and what will be their attributes? Whose needs will be served? These are important questions for developing countries in particular. Robert Dahl in his classic study: Who Governs? (Dahl, 1961), looked at who made important decisions in New Haven, Connecticut, USA? He concluded that those with more power resources did so. And that power resources are not equally distributed in any society and thus communities are not and cannot be homogeneous. The power resources include education, expertise, social standing, wealth, access to credit and those holding high office.

In this discussion, I argue that in developing countries, the situation may be even more acute. Communities tend to be neither fully informed nor active. The main reasons for this being low levels of education, literacy and high levels of poverty. Communities/stakeholders for example need to be fully informed and active to engage health researchers as well as policy makers to ensure knowledge translation of research findings into policy, (Andy Haines, Shyama Kuruvilla, & Matthias Borchert 2004). If not, the level of engagement will remain low.

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Similarly, it is equally important to ask: what is a community? This is quite a debatable matter related to shared environment and interests, both of which are linked to health. However, two concepts tend to come into mind, the relational one and the geographical. The former is slowly getting diluted with both more rural to rural and rural to urban migration. Clans are no longer necessarily living together. Now the more common is the geographical community since traditional clan communities have become more diluted. Economic dictates of relative wealth in cash and ownership of assets are coming to the fore. The issue then becomes more one of power relations on the basis of wealth and also to some degree cultural and gender issues in a given geographical setting. What other factors other than power relations and cultural norms and practices might you know would contribute or militate against participation in community governance at family and community level?  

For a community to be fully engaged and participate fully, it needs both ability and a voice to articulate its needs, define their goals, participate in formulating and planning as well as implementing interventions that are appropriate to their needs, demand accountability and monitor results. Given the impediments cited above, the illiterate, the less educated and the poor will tend to be voiceless. They are not likely to be so fully engaged, leaving the ones with more power to dictate matters and usurp the management of public affairs.

It would therefore seem that issues of education and poverty eradication ought to be brought to the fore in developing countries to empower citizens for the concept and practice of community governance to meaningfully take root and be of value to the majority of members of various communities. We would love to hear your thought on this!