Fostering popular participation in development

Participation that does not recognize the public as an equal stakeholder in the deliberative and final decision-making processes is categorically rejected. Full and meaningful participation is fundamentally comprised of access to information, access to decision-making and access to justice. Access to information means that the public should have access to information with only limited, explicit exceptions. Access to decision-making means that the public has the right to participate in the decision-making process and that this participation is taken into account in the final decision. Access to justice means that the public should ultimately have access to an independent and binding review process for infringement of its rights or to challenge a wrongful substantive decision.

Popular community participation must form the basis for planning of NGO assistance and activities. Furthermore, the community's development priorities must override the project demands of donors and NGOs with respect to funding.

People in the Global South – women and men, the young and the old, but above all the poor – are often relegated to the status of subjects. Recognition of this lies behind the call for greater popular participation in development. Broadly-based development of this type is most likely to succeed when the various groups in poverty are well organized. Participation, or the opportunity to participate if one wishes, is of course an end in itself, but participation also has a number of instrumental values which makes it an important feature of human development.

First, participation in representative community-based organizations can help to identify local priorities, to determine which needs are essential or basic and which of secondary importance, and to define the content of development programmes and projects so that they reflect accurately local needs, aspirations and demands. Next, having identified priorities and designed the programmes which incorporate them, participation in functional organizations (service co-operatives, land-reform committees, irrigation societies, women's groups) can be used to mobilize support for national and local policies and programmes and local projects. Last, participation can be used to reduce the cost of public services and investment projects by shifting responsibility from central and local government (where costs tend to be relatively high) to grass-roots organizations (where costs can be low). In some cases, for example, it may be possible to organize the beneficiaries of an investment project and persuade them to contribute their labour voluntarily to help defray construction costs. In other cases some of the public services (clinics, nursery schools) can be organized, staffed and run by local groups rather than by relatively highly paid civil servants brought in from outside. Thus in an appropriate context, participation can flourish and in so doing contribute much to development.