Development Assets is an attempt to influence the local development process in Syria today and to build on local initiatives in order to move to a new level of cooperation among stakeholders. This endeavor is presented in the context of exploring local and national resources, to provide a comprehensive vision rising above war and its geographic ramifications.

Building a deeper understanding of the diverse surrounding resources and enhancing interaction among these resources generates a positive communityoriented energy and a better awareness of the community’s environment and its needs, which allows stakeholders to draw on new quantitative and qualitative sources of value that can be used in the development process. This community capital emerges locally and interconnects nationally and internationally, and includes Syrian migrants, expatriates and refugees, creating opportunities to invest this community capital in an integrated process of re-development and reconstruction.

Improving individual knowledge for citizens of various age groups is an essential starting point for raising average community awareness and improving the ability to invest, interact and evaluate on the basis of evidence and dialogues. This opens up new perspectives on how to view the same daily landscapes, allowing synergies among different stakeholders’ efforts and recreating realistic hopes for local communities. Development Assets does not offer conclusions and judgments; instead it helps rearrange the landscape and its resources and dynamics so that they can be understood in a constructive manner. This enhances the ability of local stakeholders to create opportunities for development by improving their understanding of local interactions and presenting them in a comparative way in order to help in narrowing the gaps between our communities in terms of services, economy, society, environment, and space. Development Assets can be systematically replicated at the level of each neighborhood, village, municipality, city and country.