A systematic review of existing community development models and frameworks: Current trends and future trajectories

Abstract Social Workers who are specialized in community development (CD) adopt different approaches to solve social problems. These approaches are chartered into various models in literature. We used the PRISMA method to comprehensively analyse community development models (CDMs) and highlight their underlying features. In total, 43 articles were selected to identify the CD problems addressed, country of origin, the type of CDM employed, its attributes, level of intervention, application, and thrust. Besides, we have used a bibliometric tool to find if there was any building upon the existing CDM. The analysis shows no significant connection between the models. The present systematic review also highlights the absence of a meta-theory linking all the CDMs, because each model has addressed a unique social problem in its own way. Our findings also show that no ethical theory, such as utilitarianism, altruism, or libertinism, is directly incorporated into any CDM. Hence, the extant literature has not adopted or suggested ethics as a meta-theory for CD. In this context, formulating a meta-theory is plausible in the future by building a paradigm using ethical theories.