Guest Editorial Community Development and Social Development: Informing Concepts of Place and Intentional Social Change in a Globalizing World John J. Green 1 Abstract As a pluralistic field of scholarship and practice, community development offers insights useful to social development, especially the realm of social work. Among these contributions, of particular interest are the ways in which place matters. Assessing conceptualizations of community and community development, this essay addresses the value of community development scholarship and offers recommendations for future research. The latter include paying more attention to demographic and socioeconomic characteristics and trends in relation to the population-level impacts from development initiatives. Keywords community development, social development, practice Introduction Serving as editor of Community Development , the peer- reviewed journal of the Community Development Society, I was asked by Bruce Thyer, editor of Research on Social Work Practice, if I would like to exchange guest editorials. I was excited by the prospect and quickly agreed. This request was particularly appropriate, given recent progress in our respective fields. For example, the International Federation of Social Workers, International Association of Schools of Social Work, and the International Council on Social Welfare released the ‘‘Global Agenda for Social Work and Social Development Commitment to Action’’ report in 2012. Additionally, the International Association for Community Development and the Community Development Society signed a historic agreement in 2015 for further collaboration (see Hamm & McConnell, 2016), and they will be holding professional conferences together in 2016. With social work and community develop- ment both seeking to inform practice by using scholarship to help promote greater human rights, equality, and sustainability, we can only benefit from more conversations with each other. However, each time I worked on the essay, I became over- whelmed by the variety of different paths I could follow. Finally, I decided to approach the task based on my personal and professional experiences working with multidisciplinary and multiprofessional teams, as we collaborated on social development initiatives. In such situations, working with peo- ple from diverse disciplines and fields including agriculture, pharmacy, public health, nursing, and social work, I often found myself trying to explain what the field of community development, especially applied community development scholarship, could bring to the table. Many of my social work colleagues recognized and even identified with community development because of the similarities and even overlap with organizational and community approaches to social work practice. As a field of research and practice, community development has made contributions to social welfare and more general human development through a variety of avenues. These include, but are not limited to, leadership, mobilization, orga- nization, and evaluation of intentional social change at the intersections of place and identity. Although numerous and lengthy essays could be written about each of these lines of work, I focus here on the ways in which community develop- ment scholarship has contributed to our understanding of what community is and the ongoing (re)construction of community. This too is a major endeavor, so I will reference efforts primar- ily focused on defining community and community develop- ment. My main argument is that this body of work may be used to help inform multidisciplinary efforts to understand the ways in which place matters to social development, including fields such as social work. Secondarily, I maintain that it is important to invigorate the ways in which the demographic and 1 University of Mississippi, Oxford, MS, USA Corresponding Author: John J. Green, University of Mississippi, Oxford, MS 38677, USA. Email: greenjj1@gmail.com Research on Social Work Practice 2016, Vol. 26(6) 605-608 ª The Author(s) 2016 Reprints and permission: sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1049731515627194 rsw.sagepub.com