Publication: Localizing Development : Does Participation Work?
Abstract
The Policy Research Report Localizing Development: Does Participation Work? brings analytical rigor to a field that has been the subject of intense debate and advocacy, and billions of dollars in development aid. It briefly reviews the history of participatory development and argues that its two modalities, community-based development and local decentralization, should be treated under the broader unifying umbrella of local development. It suggests that a distinction between organic participation (endogenous efforts by civic activists to bring about change) and induced participation (large-scale efforts to engineer participation at the local level via projects) is key, and focuses on the challenges of inducing participation. The report provides a conceptual framework for thinking about participatory development and then uses this framework to conduct a comprehensive review of the literature. The framework develops the concept of “civil society failure” and explains its interaction with government and market failures. It argues that participatory development, which is often viewed as a mechanism for bypassing market and government failures by ”harnessing” civic capacity, ought to be seen instead as a mechanism that, if done right, could help to repair important civil society failures. It distills literature from anthropology, economics, sociology, and political science to outline the challenges for effective policy in this area, looking at issues such as the uncertainty of trajectories of change, the importance of context, the role of elite capture and control, the challenge of collective action, and the role of the state. The review of the evidence looks at a variety of issues: the impact of participatory projects on inclusion, civic capacity, and social cohesion; on key development outcomes, such as income, poverty, and inequality; on public service delivery; and on the quality of local public goods. It draws on the evidence to suggest several recommendations for policy, emphasizing the key role of learning-by-doing. It then reviews participatory projects funded by the World Bank and finds the majority lacking in several arenas – particularly in paying attention to context and in creating effective monitoring and evaluation systems that allow for learning.
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“Mansuri, Ghazala; Rao, Vijayendra. 2013. Localizing Development : Does Participation Work?. Policy Research Report;. © World Bank. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/11859 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.”
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Publication Can Participation Be Induced? Some Evidence from Developing Countries(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2012-07)The World Bank has allocated close to $80 billion towards participatory development projects over the last decade. A comprehensive review of the evidence on the efficacy of the approach conducted by the authors for the forthcoming Policy Research Report, Localizing Development: Does Participation Work?, finds that while participatory projects have been reasonably effective in improving access to basic services, there is far less evidence of their effectiveness in improving household income or in building sustainable participatory institutions at the local level. A key issue is that the institutional culture in development agencies such as the World Bank lacks the flexibility and long-term commitment necessary for effective externally induced participatory development. Induced participation -- driven by large-scale bureaucratically managed processes, is quite different from more organic types of participation endogenously organized by civic groups. It requires a very different approach to development, one that pays close attention to contextual variation and to uncertain trajectories of change. In order to be effective, induced participatory projects need a strong focus on learning-by-doing; on monitoring and evaluation and a willingness to learn from failure. A review of the World Bank's practices in monitoring and evaluation, and of its incentives to learn from failure, reveals that without significant changes, including changes in the incentive structures facing management, the Bank cannot be effective in inducing participation.Publication Comunity Based Development and Infrastructure in Timor-Leste : Past Experiences and Future Opportunities(Washington, DC, 2012)This paper examines the opportunities, challenges and constraints of undertaking community-based development (CBD) programming in Timor-Leste, particularly through the lens of community-based provision of economically productive infrastructure. During an extended period of weak central governance in the aftermath of Timor Leste s turbulent independence struggle, external actors mainly foreign donor agencies and international NGOs broadly favoring a community-based approach played a dominant role in the country s reconstruction. In light of Timor Leste s political history and geographic isolation, it is not surprising that weak social capital and logistical obstacles have hampered CBD efforts, leaving Timor Leste with a mixed track record of success. Based on a longitudinal stock taking of CBD projects and face-to-face interviews with key actors in government, NGOs and the donor community, three specific initiatives are examined in detail with a view to elucidating key successes, constraints and opportunities as well as lessons learned that can inform the shifting policy environment.Publication Scaling up Local and Community Driven Development(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2009-02)Local and Community Driven Development (LCDD) is an approach that gives control of development decisions and resources to community groups and representative local governments. Poor communities receive funds, decide on their use, plan and execute the chosen local projects, and monitor the provision of services that result from it. It improves not just incomes but people's empowerment and governance capacity, the lack of which is a form of poverty as well. LCDD operations have demonstrated effectiveness at delivering results and have received substantial support from the World Bank. Since the start of this decade, our lending for LCDD has averaged around US$2 billion per year. Through its support to local and community-driven programs, the Bank has financed services such as water supply and sanitation, health services, schools that are tailored to community needs and likely to be maintained and sustainable, nutrition programs for mothers and infants, the building of rural access roads, and support for livelihoods and micro enterprise. This eBook brings together the thoughts and experiences of many of the leading proponents and practitioners of LCDD, a phrase that evolved from Community-Driven Development, and most clearly describes the process of empowering communities and their local governments so they drive economic and social development upwards and outwards. This, too many, appears as a new paradigm, though it has actually evolved over the decades, since it emerged from India in the 1950s. While many LCDD projects have taken root, the key challenge now is how such islands of success, that is, the discrete LCDD projects, can be scaled up into sustainable national programs that build skills in decision-making, management, and governance.Publication Local and Community Driven Development : Moving to Scale in Theory and Practice(World Bank, 2010)Services are failing poor urban and rural people in the developing world, and poverty remains concentrated in rural areas and urban slums. 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Pioneers in both India and Bangladesh (then a part of Pakistan) developed a clear vision of how it will be done: local development should be planned and managed by local citizens, their communities, and their local governments within a clearly defined decentralized framework that devolves real power and resources to local governments and communities. Capacity support will be provided by technical institutions and sectors and nongovernmental institutions.Publication The Social Impact of Social Funds in Jamaica : A Mixed-Methods Analysis of Participation, Targeting, and Collective Action in Community-Driven Development(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2003-02)The authors develop an evaluation method that combines qualitative evidence with quantitative survey data analyzed with propensity score methods on matched samples to study the impact of a participatory community-driven social fund on preference targeting, collective action, and community decision-making. The data come from a case study of five pairs of communities in Jamaica where one community in the pair has received funds from the Jamaica social investment fund (JSIF) while the other has not-but has been picked to match the funded community in its social and economic characteristics. The qualitative data reveal that the social fund process is elite-driven and decision-making tends to be dominated by a small group of motivated individuals. But by the end of the project there was broad-based satisfaction with the outcome. The quantitative data from 500 households mirror these findings by showing that ex-ante the social fund does not address the expressed needs of the majority of individuals in the majority of communities. By the end of the construction process, however, 80 percent of the community expressed satisfaction with the outcome. An analysis of the determinants of participation shows that better educated and better networked individuals dominate the process. Propensity score analysis reveals that the JSIF has had a causal impact on improvements in trust and the capacity for collective action, but these gains are greater for elites within the community. Both JSIF and non-JSIF communities are more likely now to make decisions that affect their lives which indicates a broad-based effort to promote participatory development in the country, but JSIF communities do not show higher levels of community-driven decisions than non-JSIF communities. The authors shed light on the complex ways in which community-driven development works inside communities-a process that is deeply imbedded within Jamaica's sociocultural and political context.
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