ASSESSING COMMUNITY PARTICIPATION

Abstract

Since 2007 Government of Indonesia implementing mass National Community Empowerment Program, well-known as PNPM which is reaches thirty three provinces. This program has become an important development program for national as well as local and regional level across Indonesia. The program using bottom up approaches since it implemented based on fostering local community participation; strengthening local community organization with the ultimate goals is to reduce poverty at local level. The regulation and technical guidance affirmed by ministry and it is running by local community organization. The study goes to examine the research findings that the Indonesia CDD’s program is effective to enhance local participation. It also examines the extent to which research findings used to increase higher public participation on this project since the program focus on small scale infrastructure and mostly it has taken up uniform activity of the program agenda all over the countries. The program basically focus on building basic need infrastructure projects, such as, piping drinking water project, paving small roads at rural or paving narrow ‘labyrinth’ at dense urban area. However, hardly to find innovation program from the local governments since they have no adopted anything remotely near the ‘National Package’. Moreover, the quality of participation is still questionable. This study concludes with a discussion of the limits to evaluation and recommend stragies for promoting forther practice and methods of The Urban-Poverty Project public participation evaluation. Based on the literature study, this paper try to give contribution on an understanding of the successful of project implementation, in turn could be used to formulate future public partcipation project.
 Keywords: Empowerment, Poverty Reduction, Local Participation, Community Driven Development