Abstract
This paper describes the work of community-based self-help groups, the community development councils (CDCs), initiated by the Colombo Municipal Council in the late 1970s. Although, initially, the CDCs were exclusively urbanbased, the creation of a new layer of local government in the mid-1980s, the provincial councils, allowed them to exist and operate across administrative boundaries in the peri-urban interface. This paper describes in detail the organization and functioning principles of the CDCs, and how the links to higher levels of the city administrative structure such as district, municipality and province have enabled communities to act in relation to the tensions typical of peri-urban settlements in transition from “rural” to “urban” characteristics.