Participatory development refers to the theories and practices in development studies that explicitly include a role for the people served by development projects in the specification, design or implementation of the projects. This loosely defined term refers to a wide variety of strategies to encourage the involvement of local citizens at various stages of the project. Thus, the intention and efficacy of local participation vary widely. Historically, development studies research was restricted to studying the policy pathways that would lead to the development of the post-colonial nations in a very narrow sense. The definition of development was mostly restricted to economic growth and was heavily biased by euro-centric ideas of progress. As such, there was no platform for those to be emancipated to voice their desires or concerns with the development agenda set by the scholars in the West, and there was no attempt to include them in the actual implementation of the projects which was assumed to be best left to the experts.
There was a reversal of this trend in the latter part of the 20th century when decades of development efforts were seen to bear no fruits and even successful efforts were seen to have provided mixed benefits to the served. There are various degrees to which development efforts create space for the served to voice their opinions. On one end are scholars that see local involvement as a necessary ingredient to the efficient and effective implementation of pre-set projects. In practice, this means that the goals, means, and tools of development are still prescribed by the experts, while some responsibility and power in the implementation are devolved to the local population. On the other extreme are programs like the Program for Rural Appraisal (PRA) where the external agencies limit themselves to creating spaces for the local population to discover their own development roadblocks, decide on the best ways to tackle those and plan and implement the requisite projects. Here, development workers serve as educators, resource providers, facilitators, and even co-learners in a process fundamentally driven by the local population. Most instances of participatory development fall somewhere between these extremes – some of the goals and tools of development are prescribed by external factors like state policies and donor intentions and the technological and infrastructure realities of the target regions. Ultimately, participation is about self-determination and power. Along with the invited spaces of power-sharing between development agencies and local populace described above, there are instances of participation demanded and obtained by the populace through political and activist platforms. The theory of participatory development also anticipates and accepts these claimed spaces of participation.
Although participatory development is now widely accepted by development scholars and practitioners to the point of it being part of the development orthodoxy, it faces a few challenges both in its theory and practice. First and foremost, related discourses often pit local development organizations and civil society platforms against the State and State policies. Assumptions about national development policies being antagonistic to, or ineffective for, local development are unfounded. Especially in today’s globalized world, local development efforts often face global challenges, like climate change, that require non-local solutions. The other challenges to participatory development relate to its implementation in practice. Many development agencies do mere lip service to participation, create a brand around participation and open up ineffective channels of participation without any real empowerment of the local population. Even well-meaning organization often fail to empower the most disenfranchised because they treat the target population as homogeneous and fail to consider local power structures. These efforts run the risk of amplifying local differences and getting blocked by entrenched local institutions.
In conclusion, participation is rightly a necessary ingredient of sustainable and beneficent development of the underserved regions of the world. Scholars and practitioners should include real deep participation as an essential tool in their toolbox along with the focus on expert-led and state-guided development and be wary of the pitfalls that stem from essentialization of the target population when creating spaces for local participation in the development effort.
This article is a review of the essay on participation development in The Companion to Development Studies.