Examples of top-down formal institutional adjustments on community sustainability and inter-community conflict

This chapter describes how formal institutional structures have been developed to effectively deal with pressing community-level problems in four national settings with very different historical paths and contemporary challenges. This includes: the US federal government’s role in community-building in the 19th, 20th and 21st Centuries; the post-World War II European Coal and Steel Community, the predecessor to the European Union, as an institutional solution to long-term intra- and inter-national community conflicts; the post-genocide Rwandan government’s support of agricultural cooperatives as a way of integrating smallholder farmers into an emerging economy, but at the same time, build civil society institutions to overcome historical inter-tribal conflicts; and how the post-Soviet institutionalization of “shock therapy†in the 1990s and the later institutional adjustments in the first decade of the 21st Century affected Russian village household economies, their mental health and the social helping networks they employed to improve their standard of living.