Different levels of community participation in development projects.
Level I : Community receives benefits from the service, but contributes nothing
Level II : Some personnel, financial or material contributions from the community, but not involved in decision making
Level III : Community participates in lower level management decision making
Level IV : Participation goes beyond lower level decision making to monitoring and policy making
Level V : Programme is entirely run by the community, except for some external financial and technical assistance
Whoever wants to get involve in participatory development should 25
• Demonstrate an awareness of their status as outsiders to the beneficiary community and the potential impact of their involvement.
• Respect the community’s indigenous contribution as manifested in their knowledge, skills and potential.
• Become good facilitators and catalysts of development that assist and stimulate community based initiatives and challenge practices which hinders people releasing their own initiatives and realize their own ideals.
• Promote co-decision-making in defining needs , goal-setting, and formulating policies and plans in the implementation of these decisions. Selective participatory practices can be avoided when development workers seek out various sets of interest, rather than listening only to a few com- munity leaders and prominent figures.
• Communicate both programme/project successes and failures – sometimes failures are more informative.
• Believe in the spirit of ‘Ubuntu’ – a South African concept encompassing key values such as solidarity , conformity , compassion , respect , human dignity and collective unity.
• Listen to community members, especially the more vulnerable , less vocal and marginalized groups.
• Guard against the domination of some interest groups or a small un- representative leadership clique. This article pleads for a co-operative spirit and for a watch for oligarchic tendencies among community leadership.
• Involve a cross-section of interest groups to collaborate as partners in jointly defining development needs and goals, and designing appropriate processes to reach these goals.
• Acknowledge that process-related soft issues are as important as product- related hard issues. Any investment in shelter for the poor should involve an appropriate mix of technological and social factors, where both hard- ware and software are developed together. In this regard many scholars recognize the importance of a multi-disciplinary approach to project planning and development. The inclusion of a social scientist, and someone with the appropriate skills from within the community, to work together with planners, architects and engineers is very important. A multi-disciplinary approach will only succeed if technical professionals recognize and include the contributions of their social scientist partners in the planning process.
• Aim at releasing the energy within a community without exploiting or exhausting them.
• Empower communities to share equitably in the fruits of development through active processes whereby beneficiaries influence the direction of development initiatives rather then merely receive a share of benefits in a passive manner.
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Urban Development Management Study notes for M. plan Sem-III
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