People Participation is a process through which stakeholders
influence and share control over development
initiatives and the decisions and resources which affect them. Unless the poor
are given an opportunity to participate
in the development of interventions designed to improve their livelihoods, they will continue to miss the
benefits of any intervention.
The
need for stakeholder ownership is now well established in the donor community.
Ownership of a project by stakeholders
involves ensuring the widest possible participation of those who are supposed to be the beneficiaries of the
project. The essence of ownership is that the recipients drive the process. That is, they drive the
planning, the design, the implementation, the monitoring and the evaluation of the project.
The
main tenet of participative approaches to development is that the community and
stakeholders are collaborators in activities at every stage of development
process. Thus, participative methods are
meant to generate a sense of ownership of decisions and actions. This is in contrast to the alternative model
of development where project conceptualization, objectives and design are imposed on the
community by people external to the community who are characterized as experts. Participatory
approaches can also challenge perceptions, leading to a change in attitude and agendas. They can
also provide new and sometimes surprising insights.
Participatory
Approaches in Rural Development
Participatory approaches have been used in
several settings in development both in rural and urban areas. In particular,
participatory approaches allow a community to:
■
Express and analyse the realities of their lives;
■
Plan themselves what action to take to change the situation;
■
Monitor and evaluate the results themselves.
However, the rationale for using participative
methods is a pragmatic one. A problem with non-participative methods is that
they often impose a commitment on the community to do certain things even
though they were not involved in the project. Where the community has not been
involved in a project, they are not equipped to
fully understand the nature and rationale of the commitments they are being
asked to make. It is futile for the community to give its commitment only for
it to be demonstrated that in practice, they are unable to fulfill their
commitment. Conversely, it has been found that where communities have been
involved, projects have a better chance of surviving through shocks, as the
commitment is there to ensure that the project does not fail.
In the area activities, it may well be the case
that interventions reliant upon behavior change may fail if the community was
not involved in designing these. However, when communities are involved, such
messages are much better understood and are therefore taken on board. A
secondary benefit is that members of the community will subsequently be better
placed to act as change agents.
It must be said that it is important that all
stakeholders are involved in the development of projects and not just direct
beneficiaries. Three levels of stakeholder defined to include beneficiaries can
be considered:
·
Direct beneficiaries (end users, farmers, urban
poor etc.)
·
Intermediaries
(e.g. professionals, advisers,
practitioners, consultants,
experts etc.)
·
Decision, policy makers (politicians, senior
civil servants, etc.)
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