Participatory Development Projects Research Articles

Mideno’s Schemes as Agent of Rural Agricultural Development: The Case of Maize Production in Mezam Division in Cameroon

As African policy makers strive to attain Food Security and alleviate poverty by 2015, Maize was highlighted as one of the main crops through which agricultural production policies could be effective – “BIOMASS”. It is in this light that MIDENO’s schemes of Micro credit and agricultural education of 2005 under (GP-DERUDEP) become central in rural transformation for sustainable production. Thus, the study examines MIDENO’s schemes by a random survey of 250 farmers who participated under the Grass Field Participatory and Decentralised Rural Development Project (GP-DERUDEP). The inaccurate nature of farm records necessitated the adoption of the multinomial logit estimation technique from which the study investigates the influence of MIDENO’s schemes on rural productivity and transformation. It is found that, the micro loans and agricultural educational scheme contributed significantly to the rural transformation but the rate of change in levels of production is impeded by the conservativeness of farmers in adapting to the present challenges towards food security. Thus, the study recommends a more sustainable training of agriculturist in a complete curriculum as a sustainable solution. MIDENO should train farmers on writing sustainable agricultural projects that fetch real funding.

韓国農村地域における住民主導によるマウル企業に関する研究

After the 2000's, the rural village development projects are designated as participatory rural village development programs and projects. Through this study, I drew finding as follows; 1) The community business was able to be founded taking advantage of experience of the Resident's participation. 2) And then, In establishment and management of the Community Business, carried out to Internal Organizations. 3) At the last, Positive support of administration. Based on the results of the study, the following recommendations were made.

Worlds apart? Challenges of multi-agency partnership in participatory watershed development in Rajasthan, India

Effective management of natural resources in ecologically fragile regions has remained a major concern for international development donors, project implementing agencies as well as for resource-dependent communities. It is suggested that multi-agency partnerships involving various stakeholders (donors, governmental agencies, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), etc.) could ensure better management of common property resources, such as water, pastures or forests. This is important in dryland regions like Rajasthan in India where the majority of agriculture is rainfed and the development of watersheds is crucial for the livelihoods of smallholders. This article presents a critical analysis of multi-agency partnership in a participatory watershed development project implemented in the late 1990s in rural Rajasthan. Based on multi-sited ethnography and qualitative research in the post-project period (2003–2005), it demonstrates that while the theoretical argument in favor of multi-agency partnerships is very strong, there are several practical challenges that come in the way of successful realization of such partnerships. Unrealistic donor expectations, differences in cultures and incentive structures, widespread corruption in the government sector and diverse agendas of NGOs may hamper multi-agency partnerships in watershed development. Policy-makers and project functionaries need to address these issues for multi-agency partnerships to work.

Achieving Socially Inclusive Practice: Analyzing Power Dynamics in a Participatory Approach to Service Development

The paper is concerned with what works and why in relation to socially inclusive practice in diverse community services settings. Drawing on the findings from a research study involving a participatory evaluation and service development project in a large community services organisation in Melbourne, Australia, the paper asserts that organisations can become more inclusive by paying attention to the ways in which they perpetuate existing oppression and by intentionally challenging associated limiting power/knowledge formations. The study was situated in rights-based approaches to health and social development and drew on Foucauldian conceptualisations of power that see the point of operation of power as the point of resistance, and therefore containing the possibility for change. The researchers worked in three diverse service contexts: children and families experiencing homelessness, people with disabilities, and older people with a history of homelessness and exclusion. The ongoing analysis of the power relations between and within the different stakeholder groups was important in ensuring that the development of the process did not reinscribe oppression and marginalisation. Within the growing body of work that theorises participatory and inclusive practices, the application of a Foucauldian framework offers new insights for anti-oppressive practice in the context of service development.

Participatory development of ICT entrepreneurship in an informal settlement in South Africa

A unique Participatory Entrepreneurship Development (PED) project was implemented in an informal settlement (Zandspruit) in South Africa. The purpose of the project was to stimulate, among local members of the community, the establishment of innovative, needs-based ICT-related businesses. Training was offered in participatory methods, the process of business development (including needs assessment, business idea generation, business modelling, feasibility analysis, and business plan writing), and sensitization to possible ICT solutions as inspiration for innovation. Participants were expected to propose ICT business solutions for the community, by the community. Results were mixed, with perhaps the most important insight that lack of in-depth ICT knowledge might be the crucial inhibiting factor for community-driven pro-poor ICT-related entrepreneurship.

Between supply and demand: the limits to participatory development in South Africa

Much of the focus in the literature on participatory development has been on the demand side and on the extent to which citizens succeed in pressuring the state to deliver basic services. Less attention has been focused on the supply side of participatory development, namely on how state institutions give effect to development policies. Post-Apartheid South Africa is replete with policies and legislation supporting participatory processes and yet in practice this has seldom lived up to the ideals espoused. This article examines the delivery of public housing in poor communities in three municipalities in South Africa and argues that there is a mismatch between how the formulators of policy understand participation and how it is interpreted by beneficiary communities and local officials. It concludes that considerably more attention needs to be focused on why officials fail to translate national policies into action if participatory democracy is to attain any legitimacy in the population at large. Points for practitioners Effective citizen engagement in decision-making processes is the key factor in participatory development programmes. Enabling legislation and policy is essential to the process but it is not sufficient to ensure participation. The design of participatory programmes will thus need to take into account the capacity of communities to organize themselves and will need to factor in the means and time to develop their ability to engage effectively. Officials managing participatory development projects need to undergo formal training so that they understand that the manner in which beneficiaries participate is as important the actual activities in which they are involved.

Can participation be induced? Some evidence from developing countries1

Influenced by Amartya Sen, over the last decade, The World Bank has allocated nearly US$80 billion to local participatory development projects targeting poverty, improved public service delivery, and strengthened social cohesion and government accountability. But the success of these programs is hindered by both endogenous local factors and flawed program design and implementation. Two especially important local obstacles are (1) entrenched interests of political agents, civil bureaucrats, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) with either incentives to resist or capabilities to appropriate program resources, and (2) poverty and illiteracy, as the poor and illiterate participate less and benefit less from participatory projects than do the wealthier, more educated, and more connected. After reviewing hundreds of participatory projects, three lessons are clear for program planning. First, contextual factors like inequality, history, geography, and political systems (among others) are important. Second, communities do not necessarily have a ready stock of ‘social capital’ to mobilize. Third, induced participatory interventions work best when supported by a responsive state – donors cannot substitute for a non-functional state, and successful programs combine enlightened state action from above with social mobilization from below. Future participatory development projects would benefit substantially from revised planning and considerably more attention paid to evaluation and monitoring. Project managers have historically paid little attention to context, monitoring, or evaluation, in part because The World Bank’s operational policies did not provide incentives to do so. Donor agencies should also exercise greater patience and allow for flexible, long-term engagement to facilitate contextual and programmatic learning, including learning from failure.

Involving users in the wild—Participatory product development in and with online communities

In its traditional stance, participatory design (PD) is centred on certain work/application settings and is concerned with the involvement of representative users from these contexts. Nevertheless, current web technologies enable new forms of distributed participation which might allow PD processes to be implemented in a broader and flexible way, but may at the same time raise new issues in relation to participation. In this paper, we report on a Participatory Product Development project, using social technologies, where new issues were raised—a large population of heterogeneous and globally distributed users; a range of personal and institutional purposes, and the use of these technologies in a largely untested environment. We will reflect on insights that we gathered by through observation of and participation in a software development process driven and influenced by members of an existing online community. By means of participatory observation, analysis of the use of online tools and through semi- structured interviews we identified issues around different notions of timeliness and of process structures that are related to different roles, responsibilities and levels of experience. Our results indicate that the involvement of heterogeneous users in such a context needs to be handled carefully, for the reasons we set out. The role of user representatives acting for a broader online community can become crucial when managing heterogeneity, formulating acceptable compromises and- perhaps most crucially- dealing with different professional and ‘hobbyist’ worldviews. Additionally, we found that the use of standard web technologies only partly support online participation processes. PD ‘in the wild’ needs to be better embedded in use situations and environments (e.g., by linking discussion and design space, using feedback tools, continuous reflection of the current state of development) rather than refining participatory design as a meta-process separate from use.

Participatory approach for integrated development and management of North African marginal zones: demonstrative plan to fight desertification in Morocco and Tunisia

A demonstrative and participatory development project on desertification mitigation and rural development has been launched in Northern Africa under SMAP Programme (Short and Medium-term priority environmental Action Programme) financed by the European Union. The project, which title is Demonstration Project on Strategies to Combat Desertification in Arid Lands with Direct Involvement of Local Agro-pastoral Communities in North Africa, is carried out in sensitive regions of Morocco and Tunisia with the coordination of the Nucleo Ricerca sulla Desertificazione (NRD, Desertification Research Center) of the University of Sassari (Italy) and the partnership of Morocco and Tunisia Agriculture Ministries. The areas concerned are located in regions characterised by rural poverty, food dependency and land abandoning where urgent measures are needed to promote optimisation of resource availability and management for a sustainable development. The project involves direct desertification mitigation by vegetation cover restoration, with drought resistant perennial forage species ( Opuntia ficus-indica , Atriplex nummularia and Acacia saligna ) in highly degraded rangelands in order to mitigate desertification processes while improving rangelands productivity; and adopts measures for local population technical capacities building through training sessions related to all project activities, and making it a concrete demonstration supported by the direct involvement of local communities. Successful actions already carried out in this field by the participants of the project as well as by other Mediterranean countries, has been taken into account, re-elaborated and exploited, thus promoting south/south co-operation and exchange of knowledge. Participation of all actors and especially of local communities is the key point in all phases of the project and is strengthened by means of dissemination and sensitisation campaigns and by training courses. At the end of the project, all actors own/share all choices made and the technology used participating thus to the intervention sustainability.

Donor support towards good governance in Bangladesh: a focus on people's participation and accountability

International donors to Bangladesh have emphasized governance reform since the 1990s, on the basis that bad governance was siphoning away both domestic and foreign aid resources. While donor support towards good governance is encouraging, such support should be judged in the light of actual contributions to the promotion of good governance. This article examines a donor-funded project called the Participatory Rural Development Project (PRDP), which aims to promote good governance at the grassroots level. The article assesses the effectiveness of PRDP in promoting good governance, especially in bringing transparency and accountability to Bangladeshi Public Administration. The core finding is that the project achieved remarkable success, with a tangible impact in terms of promoting good governance at the local level. The paper analyzes the reasons for this success with the aim of providing indicators for other donors working in this area.

Securing Livelihoods: The Watershed Plus Approach and Emergence of ‘The Social’ in a Watershed Project in Odisha

Critiques of the fact that traditional watershed development approaches favour the landed and richer sections in villages have led to the growth of the watershed-plus approach that ostensibly tries to address the needs of the landless and the poor. The present essay provides a review of the relevant social science literature on watersheds in India. Drawing upon fieldwork undertaken in an ongoing participatory watershed development project in Kalahandi, in the Indian state of Odisha, it tries to establish interlinkages between the emerging importance of livelihood-related concerns in watershed development and the ways in which this new focus is related to, what this paper calls, the emergence of ‘the social’ as a site and trope of governmental action.

Joining Inner and Outer Approaches to Freedom

Humanistic psychology is distinguished as a discipline that champions freedom, dignity, and positive growth. Based on her case study of a participatory community development project in Guatemala, the author argues that existential-humanistic definitions of freedom and self-determination do and do not speak to the experience of the world’s developing communities and that humanistic psychology’s focus on the existential and experiential aspects of freedom must be balanced with attention to economic, social, and political freedoms. The work of human development theorists Sen and Max-Neef are introduced. The author suggests that through both its theoretical framework and its explorations of the experience of human freedom and oppression, humanistic psychology can make important contributions toward the theoretical approach and practice of participatory community development in the developing world.

Psychological Implications of Participatory Community Development Projects and their Relevance for Poverty Alleviation in Rural Communities in Africa

This article addresses the psychological foundations of participatory and effective community development projects in rural communities in Africa aiming at poverty alleviation. Psychological implications of such projects include improved collective self-esteem of individuals and groups in those communities. Positive community projects also enhance agentic behaviour in communities which are enables in their capacity for action.

Women's activism, overseas funded participatory development, and governance: A case study from China

Synopsis Since the 1990s, a number of women's non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have undertaken overseas-funded participatory gender and development projects in rural China. Through their efforts to empower women and increase their community participation, these NGOs and the projects they run are introducing new ideas and practices relating to governance, as well as to gender and development. The aim of this report is to understand the dimensions of the new approaches to rural governance, the history and politics of their introduction, the directions in which they are shaping governance in villages across China, and their impact on gender relations. The report focuses on the work of West Women, a large women's NGO based in Xi'an, the capital of the western province of Shaanxi, and on two overseas-funded participatory development projects run by West Women in Danfeng and Ningshan counties, in Shaanxi.

“But the winds will turn against you”: An analysis of wealth forms and the discursive space of development in northeast Brazil

ABSTRACTIn this article, I explain the unfolding of a participatory development project in northeast Brazil by exploring how local genres of public speech articulate with categories of wealth. Although development resources cannot be easily categorized into local classes of wealth, they nonetheless evoke some of the anxieties cultivators feel when dealing with wealth forms susceptible to the evil eye. Beliefs surrounding the evil eye shape cultivators' relations to material objects, and they also define the contours of safe and acceptable speech within the village development association. As a result, during association meetings, the villagers speak in ways that frustrate development agents seeking to generate “open” and “transparent” managerial discourse felicitous to project success—at least, external notions of project success. Appreciating the link between wealth and speech forms sheds light on both the local implementation challenges that participants in such projects face and the reason development agents frequently blame ostensive project failures on beneficiary backwardness. [wealth, Brazil, development, evil eye, peasant society]

Photo Essay Digging Deep: Community Driven Development and the Uganda Village Project

Winner of the fall 2008 SAIS Review Photo Essay Prize, Krause’s photos follow the Uganda Village Project’s Community Constructed Shallow Well program, a participatory development project in Uganda.

‘Living with culture’: creative citizenship practices in Toronto

This paper addresses the contemporary creativity ethos through the lens of citizenship. The paper builds upon governmentality scholarship to examine how creativity and cultural participation are being recast as moral duties of active citizenship. It notes the development of governmental projects that seek to optimize the creative capacities of individuals toward a variety of ends. The paper develops these observations through an examination of cultural planning practices in Toronto. It notes how the city's cultural policies are viewed in increasingly therapeutic terms as technologies of creative citizenship. Emphasis is placed on the proliferation of participatory arts festivals and arts-based community development projects that enlist urban denizens into creative citizenship practices. The paper then explores a paradox at the centre of this emergent regime of creative citizenship. It describes how the creative citizen is construed in cultural planning practice as a heroic agent of innovation and civic renewal, and, at the same time, as an object of continual monitoring, assessment and risk-management.

Transcending Boundaries

SUMMARY This paper presents a participatory research and planned change effort to develop a coordinated community response system to domestic violence in a United States culturally diverse community with a large immigrant population. This work grew out of an international, interdisciplinary project that was designed to establish ongoing collaborative relationships between university and community practitioners in the United States, Honduras, and Costa Rica around the theme of intra-familial violence, particularly gender-based violence against women. The paper analytically describes the international collaborative project, the local community-based participatory research and community development project, and lessons learned from both the local and international interdisciplinary collaboration. Examination of differences across disciplinary and cultural contexts generated critical reflection on the need to consider reframing domestic violence in the context of fundamental human rights, as is the case in Central America. At the same time, challenges around developing a coordinated community response, addressing inadequacies in the legal system, and implementing education and training were echoed across boundaries, demonstrating the need for continued international collaboration.

Lessons for farmer-oriented research: Experiences from a West African soil fertility management project

Donors, scientists and farmers all benefit when research and development projects have high impact. However, potential benefits are sometimes not realized. Our objective in this study is to determine why resource-poor farmers in Togo (declined to) adopt recommended practices that were promoted through a multi-organizational project on soil fertility management. We examine the processes and outcomes related to the adoption process. The project was undertaken in three villages in the Central Region of Togo in West Africa. The development and research processes that took place during the implementation of the project were critically analyzed using a conceptual framework that may be useful for improving the impact of future participatory projects. At the macro level, opportunities for innovation were not deliberately explored with participating farmers and other village members; consequently “pre-analytical choices” made during the planning phase resulted in practices that resource-poor farmers were, for a variety of reasons, unable or unwilling to adopt. From the outset, donors and scientists focused on soil fertility management, but failed to take into account the wider economic context within which soil fertility management took place. This was a major obstacle to the subsequent adoption of recommended management strategies. Scientists and donor partners measured the success of the Project in terms of crop productivity, but farmers’ choices were influenced by a complex mix of socio-economic, political and technical factors. We also illustrate the importance of selecting appropriate categories of farmers for a particular experiment. We conclude that for participatory research and development projects to be successful, it is not enough to develop technologies that “work” in a technical sense. In order to be scaled up and widely implemented, such technologies must also meet a variety of needs of resource-poor farmers and be acceptable from a socio-cultural point of view.

Local development agents' training for sustainable and endogenous development: A participatory development project among mayan communities

This paper focuses on the capacity building of ‘local partnership’ members or leaders as development agents in their Mayan communities. It relates to an education/training process started in 1995 in four different regions of the Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico, which was carried out by Non Governmental Organizations (NGO) and academic institutions. It refers to the topics, methods and techniques used in eight training workshops involving local groups' leaders from fifteen Mayan communities. The paper points out the capacities acquired by the local Mayan leaders and the impact on their own lives, and their current work with groups and communities. It is based on participant observation in workshops and communities and on interviews with trained agents. It was found that the major impact of the entire process relates to the agents' personal development. The pedagogic relation employed to encourage local and ethnic identities, traditional knowledge and self-confidence was of great importance in this process as well.