COURSE ID : 4202

COURSE NAME : Poverty, Gender and Social Protection: Debates, Policies

and Transformative Interventions

LECTURERS : Erhard Berner and Amrita Chhachhi

TITLE OF PAPER:

Redefining Community Participation

STUDENT ID (NOT E-MAIL ADDRESS):

SB 1316
ABSTRACT
Once a motivating alternative from the top-down interventions (which are deemed to be ignorant to the real
needs of the poor people), community participation had a noble beginning. Community participation will
ensure that different dimensions of poverty as experienced by the community themselves are captured, and
not only income poverty which has often been used as the prime measurement of deprivation. However, it
seems to have become a checklist item in NGOs’ development projects, and some have also started to argue
that community participation has been used as a pretext for a pushing forward a neo-liberal agenda to reduce
the role of the government. This paper argues that based on the conceptual challenges of community
participation, it should be redefined towards addressing inequality and income redistribution, and the
understanding of rights and citizenship, rather than merely empowering the poor people to be self-sufficient in
finding solution to their poverty.

Community participation seems to have been adopted as a mandatory ingredient in poverty

alleviation strategies by most Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs), donor agencies and even
government. A motivating alternative from the top-down interventions which are deemed to be
ignorant to the real needs of the poor people, community participation had a noble beginning. ‘The
realities of poor people are local, complex, diverse and dynamic’ (Chambers, 1995) and who are
better to describe it than the poor themselves? ‘Participatory appraisal confirms many dimensions
and criteria of disadvantage, ill-being and well-being as people experience them’ (ibid).

Yet, despite the general agreement that community participation is a good way to ensure
appropriate and needs based interventions, many critics have scrutinised that it is usually merely an
element of the techniques and practicalities of the implementation, rather than the goal of
participation being to empower people. It has become a checklist item in NGOs’ development
projects, and a reassurance for donors that the interventions are developed based on the voice of
the community themselves.

In addition to that, some have also started to argue that community participation has been used as a
pretext for a pushing forward a neo-liberal agenda to reduce the role of the government. As
community participation acknowledges the active agency of the poor, it also turns into a self-help
solution for poverty alleviation which may distract us from the issues of inequality and redistribution
(Berner and Phillips, 2005).

Therefore, has community participation lost its meaning? Should it be perfected or redefined
altogether? This paper will discuss the prospects and problems of the idea of community
participation in poverty reduction, including a historical review on how it has been taken up as a
development approach and how it may have been distorted from its original idea. From this analysis,
a new alternative view will be offered on how the concept of community participation can
contribute to poverty reduction.

PARTICIPATION AND POVERTY

The concept of participation itself is not new, however the practical application of participation in
the development context owes much to the advocacy of Robert Chambers since the 1990s. His work
describes the emergence of the linkage between community participation and poverty alleviation.
Inspired by Paulo Freire’s book Pedagogy of the Oppressed in 1960s, the idea of participation offers
a different way to look at reality through a role reversal. ‘The Freirian theme, that poor and
exploited people can and should be enabled to conduct their own analysis of their own reality has
been widely influential [...]’ (Chambers, 1994). Participation began to be adopted through the use of

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a participatory approach for Rapid Rural Appraisal (RRA) in the 1980s, in which ‘the dominant
purpose [of participation] was seen as stimulating community awareness, with the outsider’s role as
catalyst’ (ibid). RRA evolved into Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA)1 in the 1990s, an approach that
was then extended by NGOs and aid agencies with the objective to empower the local community.
Chambers also outlined three similar ‘prescriptive ideas’ to the original idea of Paulo Freire and the
PRA, that ‘poor people are creative and capable’, ‘outsiders have roles as conveners, catalysts and
facilitators’, and ‘the weak and marginalized can and should be empowered’.

Community participation became more wide-spread since the World Bank took this up by supporting
Participatory Poverty Assessments in Ghana and Zambia in 1993. In the context of poverty reduction,
this means putting the community in the driver’s seat instead of an outsider (the NGOs or
Government), telling them what is best for them. The idea was that participation will ensure that
different dimensions of poverty as experienced by the community themselves are captured, and not
only income poverty which has often been used as the prime measurement of deprivation.
Community participation should also ensure that the community is involved in the process of making
priorities to improve their own lives, by acknowledging their local wisdom.

In order to do this, a set of participatory methods or tools were introduced to assist the process of
encouraging participation in poverty reduction programme/projects. There, these tools are used at
different stages, from design to monitoring and evaluation. They are useful for gathering
information on the real situation on the ground as well as discovering the community’s priorities
which is important information to design a sound intervention.

In this respect, it is important to understand that there are different views of participation. Cornwall
(2003) developed a categorisation of participation according to ‘the construction of participation and
participants’, consisting of four different modes of participation as presented in the table below.

The table encompasses different constructions which can be used for different purposes. Although
all is about participation, it is vital to understand which level of the participation is taking place and
that others may interpret it differently. Community participation here is seen as only ‘instrumental’
where the purpose is only ‘enlisting contributions’ and ‘delegating responsibilities’; however for
others the term community participation may also include the consultative and transformative
purposes. For a successful poverty reduction programme, understanding the different levels of
participation as outlined in the table is necessary to ensure the sustainability.

1
PRA then evolved again into Participatory Learning and Action (PLA), which consists of the same tools and methodologies
but the label is more general and can be used for different stages of intervention.

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THE PROMISING FUTURE OF COMMUNITY PARTICIPATION

The notion that the poor are resourceful and they are the ones who know best about their situation
and therefore should be consulted is ‘emancipatory’ and ‘transformative’. It is no longer deemed
true that the NGOs or Government are superior and the poor know nothing. Many poverty reduction
programmes have attributed their success to having involved the poor themselves not only as
beneficiaries but as the main actors that take charge of their own lives. The spirit of working
together promoted by the concept of community participation is seen to build up confidence,
solidarity and unity in the efforts to get them out of poverty.

‘Self-critical analysis, sensitive rapport, and participatory methods can contribute some valid insight
into the values, priorities, and preferences of poor people’ (Chambers, 1995), and these in turn
contribute to the design of most appropriate interventions. Through this, a sense of ownership
emerges which ensures the sustainability of the success of the interventions.

The biggest success of the community participation approach is the space created for the poor to
demand for their rights and get their voice heard. It is not questionable or taken with hesitation
anymore that the involvement of the poor people themselves is necessary. ‘The paternalistic roles of
many “development experts” during the past four development decades impeded a lot on
participatory development approaches’ (Botes, 2000). Poverty reduction programmes are no longer
designed and planned by someone who sits behind the desk far away from the realities of the poor
people.

Many developing countries have adopted community participation in their national development
planning processes. For example in Indonesia, since a few years the planning process has been what
it is called Musrenbang (Musyawarah Perencanaan Pembangunan or Development Planning
Discussion), which starts with involvement of community at the village level of which the results feed
into the discussion at the district level, the provincial level, and ultimately the national level.

In cases where the resources are scarce and the government is still weak, the community has proven
to be able to sustain their lives. ‘As documented by their very survival, poor people are experts in
making the most of scarce resources under adverse circumstances, and have always used
institutions of mutual support and risk sharing in order to do so. To acknowledge and attempt to
strengthen these capacities and institutions is a both obvious and sensible approach to community
development’ (Berner and Phillips, 2005). The community is able to participate and contribute, for
example in the Orangi Pilot Project’s support for lane sanitation developed by Mahila Milan in India,
the community was mobilised to manage the construction of sewers/drains and therefore reducing
the cost.

Certainly the prospects of community participation are not without doubts, however to continually
focus on its faults and pitfalls will not do justice to it. Understanding the challenges would help us to
better analyse the conduct of community participation. The essence of community participation
should not be lost in the ungenerous criticism of its implementation.

THE CHALLENGES OF COMMUNITY PARTICIPATION

Cooke and Kothari (2001) expressed two strands of criticism to community participation, one that
concentrates on the faults of the participatory techniques and one that looks at the concept itself.
They argued that these critiques ‘provide a serious and fundamental challenge to participatory
approaches and demand at best their rethinking, if not their abandonment’.

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Technical challenges

The criticism within this strand is concerned with the tools that have been developed for community
participation. The methods themselves have become an obsession for NGOs and community
participation is reduced to set of tools to use together with the community, after which one can say
that the community has been actively involved in the programme but only to bring in the pre-
designed intervention afterwards. ’”Participation” has been translated into a managerial exercise
based on “toolboxes”of procedures and techniques, it has been “domesticated” away from its
radical roots; we talk of problem solving, participation and poverty rather than problematization,
critical engagement and/or class’ (Brown, n.d. as quoted in Cleaver, 1999).

NGOs or the Government often have restrictions in their mandate to realise the priorities of the
beneficiaries, this prevents the information gathered through participatory methods from being
allowed to (radically if necessary) alter the intervention, turning community participation into
something like a ritual.

A setback in community participation has been that it is hard work, time consuming and there have
to be investments in training the facilitators. It also assumes the poor will have time to do all that
without incentive. There has been a trend that all NGOs want to have community participation when
they do assessments for potential programme/projects but with no promise that the
programme/projects will be implemented. One community may be visited by one NGO after
another, all wanting to do participatory assessment with them. On the other hand, some
communities are used to this and will just anything so that their priorities can match the mandate of
the NGOs.

Conceptual challenges

This latter strand more fundamentally scrutinises the ideology of community participation,
questioning whether community participation is an appropriate approach for poverty reduction or
any development intervention. It questions the assumptions behind community participation, as it
has become an ‘act of faith in development’.

First, despite little convincing evidence that it has been effective and sustainable, community
participation is continued to be promoted without looking deeper into the problems, therefore we
need to ‘move beyond an identification of technocratic limitations of, and adjustment to, the
methodology to more fundamental critiques of the discourse of participation’ (Cooke and Kothari
(2001).

Second, community participation assumes that poor people are all capable and it romanticises the
knowledge of poor people. This leads to the question whether the poor really understand their
needs, because there may be a difference of what they need and what they want. Cleaver (1999)
questioned whether this tendency to lean on this local wisdom will actually lead to the similarly
damaging notion of “they know best” instead of “we know best”, as there seems to be apparent
hesitation to accept that anything local is right.

Third, community participation seems not to consider the power relation and social structure both
between the community and the development professionals and within the community itself.
When promoting community participation, development practitioners often forget the power
relation between agency and structure, at every stage of the community participation process.
‘Concepts of “the individual” underlying participatory approaches swings [sic] widely between

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“rational choice” and “social being” models’ (ibid), can be conflicting where for instance the
participants come from various backgrounds2.

Fourth, the question of who the community is, has also been under scrutiny, as the idea of
community participation means involving the whole community, there are elements in the
community for example the women or the disabled people or other marginalised group who are
often excluded.

Finally, there is a danger that community participation is misused to camouflage a neo-liberal

agenda (Berner and Phillips, 2005; Miraftab, 2004). The current conservative government of the
United Kingdom, in response to the recent financial crisis, has offered ‘Big Society’ as an alternative
to ‘Big Government’, which is about strengthening the community with the idea ‘to foster local
ownership of needs, problems and solutions’ (Stott, ed, 2011) and at the same time reducing the
role of the government and making severe cuts in public spending. Is the term community
participation in poverty reduction being used in a similar way? ‘The recent popularity of using
community participation to emphasize social capital and empowerment is better understood in the
light of economic liberalization and public-sector restructuring’ (Miraftab, 2004).

Anzorena (1998) notes that ‘many of the deprivations faced by low-income groups are the result of
local authorities failing to meet their responsibilities for service provision’. Community participation
can be appreciated from the assumption that the poor are poor because they need to be
stimulated/educated, not that they are deprived of services to which they are entitled.
In the context of social provisioning of basic services, community participation seems to be only used
in targeted programmes of poverty reduction and this can be seen as drawing the attention away
from a more universal policy. It is difficult to know to what extent community participation can
influence the decision making for social policy.

REDEFINING COMMUNITY PARTICIPATION

Going back to the four types of participation described by Cornwall (2003) above, the concept
community of participation should be advocated in its transformative mode rather than
instrumental, as the discourse on poverty has shifted towards the issue of inequality and income
redistribution. Perhaps it is time to put a different light on community participation, looking at it
from a more macro perspective of rights and citizenship instead of just inclusion and involvement.
‘[A] critical challenge for the twenty-first century is to construct new concepts and forms of
citizenship which will help to make rights real for poor people’ (Gaventa, 2002).

Community participation should not mean less government responsibilities, and the poor people
should not be assumed to be self-sufficient although they may be capable of self-help. Empowering
poor people should mean helping them to understand their rights and citizenship. ‘Through linking
concepts of rights to constructs of citizenship that emphasise the agency of poor people acting for
themselves to claim their rights, and by holding others accountable for them, we can hope to begin
to make rights real’ (ibid).

In light of a return to universal social policy as poverty reduction strategy, community participation
can be referred to involvement of all people, not only the poor people, to ensure income
redistribution. For example, through improving taxation to address inequality which involves the

2
The author has personally experienced this conflict within the aforementioned Musrenbang project in Indonesia, where
government staff and the community members sat together in one space, the community felt intimidated

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participation of the middle class and the upper class, which in turn will yield basic services for all,
including the poor people.

CONCLUSION

Based on the debate between the prospects and problems of community participation, many would
agree that the concept of community participation is essentially good but the current take on it
seems to accommodate the push towards smaller role of the government and to draw the attention
away of the underlying problem of poverty which is inequality.

Therefore community participation should be redefined beyond the techniques and tools and the
efforts to make the poor people capable to help themselves. The concept of community
participation should be changed to be more in line with the efforts to address inequality and income
redistribution, and the understanding of rights and citizenship.

REFERENCES

Berner, E. (2005) 'Left to their Own Devices? Community Self-Help between Alternative
Development and Neo-Liberalism', Community Development Journal 40(1): 17-29.

Botes, L. (2000) 'Community Participation in Development: Nine Plagues and Twelve

Commandments', Community Development Journal 35(1): 41-58.

Chambers, R. (1995) 'Poverty and Livelihoods: Whose Reality Counts?', Environment & Urbanization
7(1): 173-204.

Chambers, R. (1994) 'The Origins and Practice of Participatory Rural Appraisal', World Development
22(7): 953-969.

Cleaver, F. (1999) 'Paradoxes of Participation: Questioning Participatory Approaches to

Development', Journal of International Development 11(4): 597-612.

Cooke, B. and U. Kothari (2001) Participation: The New Tyranny?: Ed. by Bill Cooke and Uma Kothari.
London [etc.]: Zed Books.

Cornwall, A. (2003) 'Whose Voices? Whose Choices? Reflections on Gender and Participatory
Development', World Development 31(8): 1325-1342.

Gaventa, J. (2002) 'Introduction: Exploring Citizenship, Participation and Accountability', IDS

BULLETIN-INSTITUTE OF DEVELOPMENT STUDIES 33(2): 1-11.

Miraftab, F. (2004) 'Making Neo-Liberal Governance: The Disempowering Work of Empowerment',

International Planning Studies 9(4): 239-259.

Stein, A., J. Anzorena, A. Hasan, S. Boonyabancha, Y. Cabannes, S. Patel et al. (1998) 'Reducing Urban
Poverty; some Lessons from Experience', Environment & Urbanization 10(1): 167-186.

Stott, M. (2011) 'The Big Society Challenge', The Big Society Challenge.

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