City development fund: A financial mechanism to support housing and livelihood needs of Thailand's urban poor Bussara Sripanich a, * , Vilas Nitivattananon a , Ranjith Perera b a Urban Environmental Management Field of Study, Asian Institute of Technology, Thailand b Department of Civil and Architectural Engineering, College of Engineering, Sultan Qaboos University, Oman article info Article history: Received 20 August 2014 Received in revised form 8 April 2015 Accepted 21 May 2015 Available online 20 June 2015 Keywords: City development fund Community fund Housing finance Urban poor Thailand abstract Community funding, or setting up community fund, is an innovative way of financing housing. It is growing fast in many countries, but its mechanisms and managerial practices have received little aca- demic attention. Consequently, this study aims to investigate the mechanisms of city-level community funding known as the city development fund (CDF) which is well established in Thailand. This qualitative research was conducted through multi-source data. The study reveals that the design of CDFs was based on four established concepts in the citywide program. These are networking, collectivity, decentraliza- tion, and combination of bottom-up and top-down management. The Thai CDF operates four primary components. These are its members, committees, types of funding, and supporters. They are linked at five levels ranging from the local community level savings to national-level funds. Such linkages make the CDF crucial as a financial and social intermediary in terms of savings mobilization, delivering loans for housing and livelihood improvements, as well as developing the urban poor's management skills. Findings of the current study contribute towards a better understanding of how CDFs operate and the roles of all stakeholders. Lessons learned from the Thai case study can be applied to promote setting up city-based funding and integrated into housing finance policy in other contexts as well. © 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction In searching for new housing finance systems for the poor, community-based finance is an innovative funding source (UN- Habitat, 2007; United-Nations, 1991). Community-based finance was developed from the concept of community-driven action (Lee, 1998), which is one of the best instruments for improving living conditions of the poor (UN-Habitat, 2007). It also used the concept of networking. This involves working in well-organized networks of poor communities give them comparatively more bargaining power to acquire whatever is needed to improve their livelihoods (UN-Habitat & UNESCAP, 2008). Community-based finance typi- cally organizes households to save and borrow for the develop- ment, construction, and maintenance of housing (Ferguson & Smets, 2010). However, community-based finance can be oper- ated in various forms including credit unions, cooperatives (United- Nations, 1991), community savings groups, community funds (ACHR, 2008; Archer, 2012), or government programs such as the Community Mortgage Programme in the Philippines (Ferguson & Smets, 2010). According to UN-Habitat (2007), community fund- ing is an innovative way of financing housing, in addition to gov- ernment funding, shelter micro-finance, and the private sector. Significant growth of community funds in various Asian and African countries was driven by concerted efforts to find effective methods to provide the poor with development financing (UN-Habitat, 2005). A particularly successful program is that of the Asian Coa- lition for Community Action (ACCA). It used financing as an effec- tive instrument to augment community-driven processes in 19 nations (Archer, 2012). By 2012, ACCA helped establish city-level community funds in 107 cities in Asia, including several in Thailand (Archer, 2012). However, savings in Asian countries reached maturity in the last 15 years. Small to large initiatives became a platform for setting up city-level funding (ACHR, 2008). Exemplary work was done by Shack/Slum Dwellers International (SDI). They have 15 affiliates within their network, encouraging the urban poor to get better shelter and basic services through estab- lishment of saving groups which are federated at both city and national levels (Mitlin, 2008; UN-Habitat, 2005). Since its founding * Corresponding author. Urban Environmental Management Field of Study, Asian Institute of Technology (AIT), Klong Luang, Pathumthani, 12120, Thailand. E-mail addresses: st111530@ait.ac.th, sara_sripanich@yahoo.com (B. Sripanich). Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Habitat International journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/habitatint http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.habitatint.2015.05.011 0197-3975/© 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Habitat International 49 (2015) 366e374