Localizing Development: Does Participation Work?,
a new Policy Research Report analyzing community development and
decentralization projects, shows that such projects often fail to be
sensitive to complex contexts – including social, political, historical
and geographical realities – and fall short in terms of monitoring and
evaluation systems, which hampers learning.
Citing numerous examples, including projects and programs supported by
the World Bank, the authors demonstrate that participatory projects are
not a substitute for weak states, but instead require strong central
support to be effective.
|
|
“Mansuri and Rao give the
best existing treatment of the successes and failures of participatory
approaches to development. At the heart of this extraordinary study is
the recognition of a reality that will be uncomfortable for many: the
key challenge of many participatory development interventions is not
finding out how best to respond to grassroots pressures, but how to
induce them in the first place. Building on a long tradition in
political economy the authors draw attention to the presence of a
“civil society failure” in which, contrary to the claims of optimists,
representative voices do not emerge organically. Synthesizing and
developing a rapidly growing literature, Mansuri and Rao provide an
encyclopedic account of the state of knowledge on top-down attempts to
generate bottom-up pressures.”
MACARTAN HUMPHREYS, Professor of
Political Science, Columbia University
|
