Community Based Development - Participatory Development

I just finished reading this book:  Culture and Public Action, edited by Vijayendra Rai and Michael Walton 2004.  I was hoping it would give me some more concrete insights into this initiative for community based development in Nicaragua.  Unfortunately, the book tends to be very scholarly, so that it is primarily an overview of many other publications.  The actual information contained in it is pretty meager.

One chapter did stand out a bit:  Chapter 10 talks about "participatory development" or "community based development".  It was authored by Anita Abraham and Jean-Phillip Platteau.  I managed to find a publication by this pair on the WWW which has about 90% of the same content.  But the original PDF to which it refers is no longer available.  You can read it if you look here:  Google Doc on Participatory.
Google provides its stored view which you can also store as a Google Doc.

It is a similarly dense academic treatise, but it has a couple of very interesting points that I believe relate to our Nicaraguan experience.

Small Communities
On page 5 of the paper, the authors stress that this approach, community based development, almost requires a small community.  There is often a strong tendency for some participants to cheat and appropriate resources for themselves.  They see a small community as being able to control this problem by means of social pressure, which only works in a relatively small group.

“In the light of the above, the community institution can be defined as a group small enough to allow good circulation of information among its members who interact more or less continuously over infinite or indeterminate periods of time. In a repeated game, however, there exists “a profusion of equilibria” (David Kreps) and cooperation is just one possible outcome. Therefore, for a community to succeed in achieving cooperative outcomes, the expectations of its members must also converge on a cooperative strategy. This implies that they are willing to give cooperation a try in the initial stages of the interaction process, because they believe that fellow members are likely to be similarly predisposed. In short, trust must prevail among them. Then, if everyone is bent on punishing people who behave in a ‘nasty’ manner, and expects others to do likewise, an efficient equilibrium where all members cooperate continuously gets established.”

Tribal Structures Have Particular Problems
The authors glean a lot of information from some community based development projects in Africa.  My friends in Africa might gain a lot from reading those sections, but they do not appear to be useful in rural Nicaragua.  If anyone needs a copy of the original paper – I can send it. There are a number of stories in there which are very illustrative of the problem.

This Approach Requires Time and Patience
The other interesting thing I found was the judgment of the authors that this process tends to take a fair amount of time.  One must build up the capacity of the group to the point where they can function well enough to make decisions. It takes a lot of resources to get these changes in place, and the funding agencies typically must show results in a shorter time frame.   I think this is the case with our “initiative”.

I apologize for the long quote which follows – but I think the above is a brief restatement of the problem as the authors intended.  I just want to provide this for documentation in case you cannot retrieve the full paper or the book.

“In a sense, that much is reckoned by the designers of the participatory approach: in so far as endogenous processes of rule and norm evolution are bound to be slow, capacity-building programs supported by external agencies have a pivotal role to play. What seems to be harder to admit, however, is that the changes required are of a revolutionary rather than evolutionary nature. Considerable resources must therefore be engaged if significant results are to be achieved and, in a number of important respects, the changes will necessarily be slow. This is because what is at stake is nothing less than a radical transformation of deep-rooted institutions, values, beliefs and practices that have the functioning of traditional rural communities entails increasing costs as economic opportunities expand (with the result that the value of time rises and new risk diversification possibilities become available), land scarcity increases, and education becomes more widespread. Therefore, if one wants to use them as partners in a participatory approach to rural development, it is necessary to ensure that they are duly adapted for the purpose. For example, new rules and practices, such as majority voting, secret balloting, or the use of anonymous inspection or evaluation procedures, must be put into operation so that enlarged and, perhaps, more heterogeneous groups become viable and thereby apt to exploit scale economies and risk diversification opportunities, benefit from skill complementarities between different categories of persons, manage funds in a more effective manner, etc.”


“Institutional support to rural communities and groups therefore appears as an essential condition for a successful participatory development program. The key problem here is that governments and big donor agencies need rapid and visible results to persuade their constituencies or supporters that the approach
works well. To achieve these results, they have sizeable financial resources at their command that they want to disburse within a short time period. The temptation is great to spread them widely so as to reach as large a number of village communities as possible. Yet, the scarce factor is not financial capital but a particular kind of extension personnel, namely institutional organizers (sometimes called human catalysts or facilitators) who are willing and able to assist rural communities and groups without taking initiative and leadership away from them. Unfortunately, capital and institutional organizers are not substitutable factors."


"Confronted with this hard dilemma, donor agencies have the tendency to maintain their ‘diluted’ approach, which implies that they downplay the task, and minimize the cost, of institutional support to target communities. It is revealing, for example, that lack of capacity-building, especially the building of organizational skills at community level, and lack of ‘ownership’ of the projects by the beneficiary groups, are among the main limitations of the World Bank’s social funds program. As a consequence, the program remains too much driven by a supply-led approach rather than being responsive to the needs of rural people as a participatory approach should be (Narayan and Ebbe, 1997). Underlying this situation lies the aforementioned dilemma. As pointed out by Tendler, indeed, enhancing ‘demand orientation’ and community participation in social funds’ programs would require a significant increase of the social funds’ agency presence in the countryside in terms of time, personnel, resources and effort. Such a change would nevertheless compromise some of the social funds’ “most acclaimed strengths their ‘leanness’ and low administrative costs” (Tendler, 2000: 16-17). Note, however, that a heavy presence in the countryside of the separate agency that administers social funds is unlikely to be the right solution to the problem of ‘ownership’ of projects and community participation."


"The method often used by donor agencies to circumvent the problem of scarcity of institutional organizers operating at the level of rural communities actually consists of asking these communities or specific groups within them to ‘elect’ leaders. For a reason well explained by Esman and Uphoff (1984), however, such a solution is bound to produce perverse results and to be self-defeating :


“The most prominent members are invariably selected and then given training and control over resources for the community, without any detailed and extended communication with the other members about objectives, rights, or duties. Creating the groups through these leaders, in effect, establishes a power relationship that is open to abuse. The agency has little or no communication with the community except through these leaders. The more training and resources they are given, the more distance is created between leaders and members. The shortcut of trying to mobilize rural people from outside through leaders, rather than taking the time to gain direct understanding and support from members, is likely to be unproductive or even counterproductive, entrenching a privileged minority and discrediting the idea of group action for self-improvement” (Esman and Uphoff, 1984 : 249).”

AMEN.  Sorry about that.  It seemed important at the time!