The Project brings together community groups, independent research institutes, universities, and non-government and government organizations from many countries.

The Project as a whole is in fact a matrix of community-situated projects which are being conducted using a common methodology and sharing a common set of research ‘tools’.

The project is currently co-ordinated from the Globalism Institute at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia, but it is made up of a truly collaborative and international group of researchers, all inspired by the hope that critically understanding the complexity of how we live will make a difference to living more sustainably in the world today.

This long-term research project, studying localities around the globe, seeks to determine if and how communities are negotiating transformations across the complex layers of social life from the local to the global. The framing concept is ‘community sustainability’. Although ‘sustainability’ is usually considered in relation to environmental concerns, we extend the concept to explore the contribution made by a broad range of social practices and discourses to strengthening communities or tearing them apart.

Over time the project will generate a broad foundation of empirical research materials, one that will be of use to communities, governments and other institutions, in assessing policy directions. It will help to develop durable links between communities and researchers, government agencies and NGOs, collaborating on the production of information that will not only be of use to researchers but will also foster and support communities’ goals and desires for sustainability. And it will challenge some of the current theoretical trends that reduce community either to a form of ‘social capital’ or to a residual concern in the supposedly more important task of enhancing economic development.