Community-Based Participatory Initiatives: Unifying Soft Power Agendas for Human Development of Traditional Communities

Abstract

Participatory community-based development initiatives that target traditional groups have gained increased attention and interest in the last decade or two among policy makers and the academy as well as throughout societies in general. Several reports and research literature show that promoting community participation at the local level boosts the impacts of policies aiming to fight poverty, loss of traditional knowledge, dispossession of land and migration from rural areas. It is widely acknowledged that policies with a top-down design are likely to achieve poor results in terms of human development. Nevertheless, evidence show that many governments and official agencies have not yet adopted a bottom-up approach to development. It has been observed, for instance, that often policies elaborated by large institutions, such as national governments, or policies supported by international donors, do not translate into local realities. To ensure that policies and development initiatives become more effective agencies need to further tailor their actions in line with the multidimensional features of specific local realities.