Paper short abstract:

Participation in development projects remains at the rhetorical level with communities treated as both the targets and means of attaining development objectives. Shaped by a development discourse which purportedly represents the aspirations of communities, compliance within a dominant agenda makes coercion both unpalatable and unnecessary.

Paper long abstract:

Participation in development projects remains at the rhetorical level with communities treated as both the targets and means of attaining development objectives. Shaped by a development discourse which purportedly represents the aspirations of communities, compliance within a dominant agenda makes coercion both unpalatable and unnecessary. Yet development is diverted from its intended course due to the disconnected actions of its diverse agents comprising the agencies and communities involved in a development intervention. This is nonetheless circumscribed by the hegemonic agenda of powerful institutions, establishing the contours of putative consensual action, but with unintended consequences. One such consequence is the subversion by communities of this development agenda in a quest for immediate benefits. The hierarchy of agencies, including that of the communities themselves, and their competing representations of what development engenders foreclose the developmental space for a more transformational outcome.

Current attempts to qualify and quantify the results of development exemplify this trend, delinking means and ends in the process; this leads ineluctably to the transmogrification of development outcomes. The need to measure rather than bare witness to change, combined with an ever shortening project cycle, blurs the distinction between impact and indicator in attributing success.

Interwoven in this complex web of competing interests, is the assumption that development is linear, ahistorical and apolitical as agencies turn to technical instruments.

Using a case study approach, I will address these issues and suggest an alternative to current interventions which normalise compliance.