Paper short abstract:

The paper reviewed the Kirtipur Housing Project's participatory approach to understand political capabilities. It shows how poor amends the link with state and causes changes in planning form. It concludes that local initiative must offer space and ways for expression of poor's knowledge in debates.

Paper long abstract:

In the Global South context, the strategies for access to urban infrastructure systems must bring forward the political capability approach and focus on governance structures and resources that empower the poor to participate in political action. The political capability approach makes a closer examination of the normative components of political engagement that contributes to the poor's mobilisation and sustained political action and unveils the knowledge that facilitates them to negotiate. With participation as a prominent aspect of the political capabilities, the paper explores how participation can improve poor's knowledge, reshape their political networks, and impact the planning patterns. This paper made the retrospective study of the Kirtipur Housing Project's participatory approach during the project's initiation, operation, completion, and post-handover. The essential data sources were the interviews and narratives of participating stakeholders. Secondary data sources were newspaper articles, project documents, and different peer-reviewed articles. The paper discusses how the poor unveils and builds the knowledge that enables them to understand the local rules of planning and appropriate strategies and networks and triggers the local governance structures' adaptation to include the poor in the planning process. The paper further explores grass root-level organisations' roles that facilitate the poor in building and reshaping the links beyond the local level to the state and global levels. The paper concludes that for political capabilities, the participatory approach requires to develop methods that enable the poor to express their values and preferences as planning-comprehendible knowledge and then muddle through the political space of debates and negotiations.