Participation to Development: an Approach from Three Perspectives

Experience from the past five decades, since the foundation of the World Bank, has shown that top-down development to poor countries is in itself rarely sufficient to alleviate poverty. Indeed, some development projects, strategies and reforms have actually exacerbated inequities and injustice. In 1975, the World Bank reported some of its results from its development policy in Latin America. It argued that the failure of some of the development and growth programs to alleviate poverty was due to the lack of local people’s involvement. Since then, participation has become a buzzword surrounding development projects sponsored by the Bank and other international development institutions.

Even after the amount of literature generated on the concept of participation, it continued to be viewed with considerable skepticism in both development theory and practice. Neither politicians nor developers have linked participation to core decision-making for national development strategies or large-scale development project. Academic research, on the other hand, has focused on the mechanics of participation and the social movements that generate it, often linked it to political participation, violence and struggle, but not how participation can really impact national development. This lack of clarity, sometimes voluntary and sometimes involuntary, has come to define in many cases power relations among the State, multinational organizations and citizens, consolidating that I call the participatory paradox.

At international scale, the discourse of participatory approaches is becoming a global theoretical phenomenon in which development practitioners, researchers and civil society advocates are accomplices in that Arturo Escobar (1995) calls the bureaucratization of the social action. Participation has become a popular if not trendy concept in much of the development discourse. From early community participation concepts of the 1950s to the international declarations about popular participation of the 1970s, to participatory action research in the 1980s, growing evidence suggests that people’s participation in development could improve the legitimacy, quality and accountability of development programs. Academic research, in fact, has suggested that public participation in development can determine the success of strategies for reducing poverty and democratizing societies.

The term participation, however, has several interpretations attached to it. With the increasing literature built up on the subject in the last two decades, the scope of the concept has gradually widened. It has become an umbrella term to refer a group of theoretical approaches, practices and beliefs regarding people’s role in the development process. Thus, participation has since enjoyed an increasing profile, one often linked with sustainable development and its potential benefits are now widely accepted among the international development community. The concept is used almost universally in development theory, but often with different meanings and implications. Despite recognition of its importance, participation remains an elusive component in many development programs and when it exists, participation remains a hybrid concept for which each person and institution gives his own definition and approach. Part of the problem is that participation often conceals doubts as to how and why it might be applied because it is, in part, the result of confronting conceptions and perceptions among development organizations, the State and society.