Can participation be induced through the type of large-scale government and donor-funded participatory programs that have become a recurrent theme of development policy? This report reviews almost 500 studies on participatory development and decentralisation. Three key lessons emerge from distilling the evidence and thinking about the broader challenges in inducing participation: 1) induced participatory interventions work best when they are supported by a responsive state; 2) context, both local and national, is extremely important; and 3) effective civic engagement does not develop within a predictable trajectory.
This report shows that participatory projects often fail to be sensitive to complex contexts – including social, political, historical and geographical realities – and fall short in terms of monitoring and evaluation systems, which hampers learning. Key lessons are that:
- Induced participatory interventions work best when they are supported by a responsive state. The state does not necessarily have to be democratic, though being democratic helps a great deal. But in the sphere in which the intervention is being conducted – at the level of the community or the neighbourhood – the state has to be responsive to community demands. Parachuting funds into communities without any monitoring by a supportive state can result in the capture of decision making by elites who control the local cooperative infrastructure, leading to a high risk of corruption. In the absence of a supportive state, participatory engagement may still be able to make a difference, but projects implemented in such environments face much greater challenges.
- Context, both local and national, is extremely important. Outcomes from interventions are highly variable across communities; local inequality, history, geography, the nature of social interactions, networks, and political systems all have a strong influence. The variability of these contexts is sometimes so large, and their effect so unpredictable, that projects that function well usually do so because they have strong built-in systems of learning and great sensitivity and adaptability to variations in context.
- Effective civic engagement does not develop within a predictable trajectory. Instead, it is likely to proceed along a ‘punctuated equilibrium’, in which long periods of seeming quietude are followed by intense, and often turbulent, change. Donor-driven participatory projects often assume a far less contentious trajectory. Conditioned by bureaucratic imperatives, they often declare that clear, measurable, and usually wildly optimistic outcomes will be delivered within a specified timeframe.
