Community Development Journal Advance Access published August 11, 2010

& Oxford University Press and Community Development Journal. 2010

All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org
doi:10.1093/cdj/bsq033

Remaking participation:
challenges for community
development practice

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Robyn Eversole

Abstract Increasing communities’ participation in development processes has

been the subject of both policy aspiration and scholarly critique. This
paper explores the implications of a critical perspective on the ‘elusive
goal’ of participation for community development practitioners.
Drawing on insights from a range of scholars, this paper poses a
practical challenge to professionals who work with communities: to
name and challenge deeply embedded assumptions about expert
knowledge and formal institutions, to recognize the role of those who
‘translate’ between community and external organizational spaces, and
to integrate community knowledge and community institutions into
participatory development processes.

Introduction
An explicit recognition of the value (both instrumental and intrinsic) of
community participation has grown in recent years across a range of
applied disciplines. These include international development studies,
policy studies, urban planning, and of course community development,
where ideas about bottom-up, community-driven change have a long ped-
igree. Even so, coalface experiences generally only serve to highlight the
theoretical and practical contradictions of participatory development. In
July 2008, Community Development Journal’s special issue on ‘Participatory
Approaches in Community Development’ began a critical engagement
with this space, drawing on deconstructions and reconstructions of partici-
pation from international development studies. This article seeks to con-

Address for correspondence: Robyn Eversole, Institute for Regional Development, University of
Tasmania, Private Bag 3528, Burnie, Tasmania 7320, Australia; email: robyn.eversole@utas.edu.au

Community Development Journal Page 1 of 13

Page 2 of 13 Robyn Eversole

tinue the conversation and, hopefully, move it onto new ground, by describ-
ing how practitioners can re-make the idea of participation to meet the real
needs of communities.
Participation is ultimately a discourse: a way of speaking, signalling (in an
implicit binary) that we-as-professionals believe that they-as-communities
have something important to contribute to the process of social change.
The idea of participation is native terrain for community development prac-
titioners who typically seek to enable ‘change from below’ (see e.g. Ife, 2002).
Participation also has strong antecedents in the alternative ‘grassroots devel-

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opment’ approaches that challenged international development practice in
the 1960s and 1970s (see e.g. IAF, 1977; Annis and Hakim, 1988). Now,
however, mainstream policy circles have begun to see communities of
people as key agents of development. Actor-oriented social theories (see
e.g. Hinchliffe et al., 2007) confirm the idea that social change is no longer
understood as the domain of experts, big organizations, or ‘big structures’
like capitalism or modernization. Anyone can create change.
These bottom-up views are increasingly accepted, and substantial litera-
tures on participatory development and participatory governance
have emerged. Nevertheless, as some of this literature itself highlights,
on-the-ground approaches to participation in practice tend to be the
direct inverse of people-driven change. Participatory development initiat-
ives typically seat people’s participation firmly within ‘projects’ and ‘pro-
grams’ managed and funded by professionals in organizations. Whether
these are projects to empower ‘disadvantaged communities’ narrowly, or
‘citizens’ broadly, experts and their institutions are still cast as the initiators,
the developers, the agents of change. This is a subtle but important shift:
from acknowledging the reality of bottom-up social change, to framing it
in a way that is visible and comprehensible from the top down.
Many critiques now show how ‘participation’ can be used as a cloak of
words to disguise business as usual: to hide power inequities, gloss differ-
ences, and enable elites to pursue their own agendas (e.g. Cooke and
Kothari, 2001; Perrons and Skyers, 2003). While valid, such critiques tend
to assume that participatory processes never intend to be participatory in
the first place. Undoubtedly, some do not: as Cornwall (2008, p. 270)
observes, ‘Consultation is widely used, north and south, as a means of legit-
imating already-taken decisions.’ Yet in other cases, participation represents
an authentic attempt to include others in decision making. Beyond the
intent of the exercise, or even the amount of ‘real influence’ that participants
get to have over decisions made (see e.g. Lowndes and Sullivan, 2004, p. 64;
Taylor, 2007, p. 302), the problem of participation runs deeper. It is created
by a particular way of thinking about social change, one that is deeply
embedded in how formal development organizations think about
 Remaking participation Page 3 of 13

themselves (as change agents) and about development (as something that
they do).
One influential example is the World Bank’s discovery of ‘participation’
in the 1990s. At the start of that decade, social scientist Michael Cernea
was urging the Bank to pay attention to the role of people in development
processes (Cernea, 1991). In translating this insight for his audience,
however, Cernea’s narrative moved from recognizing that ‘the core of any
development process is its actors’ to re-seating this sociological observation
within the language of development intervention: ‘recognizing the central-

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ity of people in projects’ (Cernea, 1991, p. 9). This presented people and
communities’ role in development strictly in terms of their role in institutio-
nalized development interventions. As Andrea Cornwall aptly observes, ‘the
primary emphasis of institutions like the World Bank seems to be on relocat-
ing the poor within the prevailing order: bringing them in, finding them a
place, lending them opportunities, inviting them to participate’ (Cornwall,
2005, p. 78). Participation focuses on ‘bringing in’ people and communities
into the formal processes and institutions of development: the project, the
planning meeting, the advisory board, etc.
The problem with this approach is that it reflects a deeply embedded
assumption, one that permeates the identities and practices of development
organizations from the World Bank to small local NGOs: that development
is created by formal agencies of development, flowing from us to them in the
binary, depending upon the knowledge, institutions and best practice of
professionals. Thus, for instance, Turner’s (2009, p. 23) recent observation
that ‘much of existing community development practice documented in lit-
erature appears to focus on outcomes and requirements frequently estab-
lished by those with power outside the community and social context’,
highlights how formal institutional leadership continues to define desirable
development trajectories. Participation, while intended as a corrective to the
‘top-down expert-led model of development’ (see Tandon, 2008, pp. 286 –
288), subtly perpetuates it by presenting community action within a
project and program frame. Thus professional roles, structures and insti-
tutions define how we think about and action development in and with
communities (Craig and Porter, 1997; Herbert-Cheshire and Higgins,
2004; Ward et al. 2009).
For practitioners deep in conversations about enabling participation,
growing social capital, community strengthening, community engagement,
or any of the other myriad of terms for local/community participation in
development, participation becomes the problem we cannot live without:
embedded in our best practice, yet inextricable from it; a central ideal, yet
unachievable. Within the current frames of professional development prac-
tice, participation is not only an ‘elusive goal’ (Taylor and Mayo, 2008,
Page 4 of 13 Robyn Eversole

p. 264) but it is a veritable mirage: the way of thinking that creates it, also
makes it impracticable. Formal development organizations, by virtue of
their own identity and positioning as change agents, have difficulty
seeing the change agency of others. It is no surprise that governments,
with their formal policy responsibilities, both embrace participation and
resist it, while communities seem to be ‘increasingly wary of being
involved’ (Beresford, 2002, p. 267). But where does this leave community
development practitioners?
Lamenting either the unwillingness of communities to participate, or the

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unwillingness of top-down institutions to enable real participation, will not
solve the basic contradiction of trying to create bottom-up development
within a top-down frame. Nor, on the other hand, will self-help approaches
that leave communities to create their own change, while ignoring their
need to engage with, participate in, and access resources from larger
systems. As John Gaventa writes, there is a need to work on participation
from ‘both sides of the equation’: that is, to increase both the participation
of civil society, and the responsiveness of government institutions (Gaventa,
2005, p. 27). This insight applies equally to any organization that seeks to
catalyse development with (rather than against, or onto) communities: to
create change, development organizations must also change. The challenge
for the twenty-first century is to remake participation: reframing the
interactions among communities, professionals, and institutions into a
truly ‘participatory space’. For practitioners working with communities,
this requires specific attention to not only the knowledge, institutions,
and best practice of professionals, but also the knowledge, institutions,
and best practice of communities. Importantly, it also requires attention to
the challenge of facilitating the meeting points between them.

The first challenge: whose knowledge counts

The first challenge for creating truly participatory development processes
is how we think about knowledge. Knowledge frequently becomes the
justification for limiting community participation in development processes
and decisions. Citizens, communities, and small organizations are typically
characterized as having energy, legs on the ground, and opinions – even
opinions with a bit of political weight – but they are seldom characterized
as having knowledge. ‘Knowledge’ as such is still broadly understood to
come from experts: crafted from the top down in central offices of govern-
ment departments and organizations by functional and managerial experts
(see e.g. Herbert-Cheshire and Higgins, 2004; Adams 2004). This is typified,
for instance, by the widespread use of consultants and visiting experts to
inform development processes and decisions. Expert knowledge is seen
 Remaking participation Page 5 of 13

as reliable, even when the framing of the problem or issue presented to the
expert embeds biases (for instance, from dominant economic or policy
paradigms) or excludes certain kinds of knowledge.
Culturally and geographically situated knowledges (often referred to as
‘local knowledge’, ‘indigenous knowledge’, ‘community-based knowl-
edge’, etc.) have become increasingly visible in development studies over
the last three decades. A number of writers, particularly those working in
rural agricultural development and the anthropology of development,
have asserted that the knowledge of local people and communities is

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highly relevant to development processes (Chambers, 1983; Kloppenburg,
1991; Hobart, 1993; Sillitoe et al., 2002). In turn, a few subfields of develop-
ment studies, such as agricultural extension and natural resource manage-
ment, have begun to take on board ideas about ‘local’ or ‘indigenous’
knowledge and apply these ideas to on-the-ground development projects
and processes (see e.g. Warren et al., 1995). There is a broad agreement in
the literature that the knowledge and insights of ‘local people’ and ‘local
communities’ potentially complement, correct and/or provide alternative
perspectives to the mainstream ‘scientific’ or ‘professional’ expert knowl-
edge that typically informs development policy and practice.
Such situated knowledge is important: not because it is in essence differ-
ent from the formal knowledge of scientists and professionals (which, it can
be argued, is also situated in their own cultural and community contexts),
but because it tends to do a few things that the traditionally ‘expert
knowledge’ of professional or scientific communities does not do well.
First, ‘local’ or ‘community’ knowledge is situated or placed deeply in a par-
ticular landscape. This may be a geographic landscape, but it can also be
a cultural one; even a geographically dispersed community may have
culturally situated knowledge in common. The community and its
members know and respect the particular constraints and possibilities of a
given physical ecosystem or cultural value system. Thus, the farmer
knows the capabilities of her soil, and the community leader knows the
appropriate ways to suggest change without causing offense – including
whom to talk with, and what to say. Outsiders seldom have this deeply
placed knowledge, and may too easily suggest ‘solutions’ that are
inappropriate, unsustainable, or from a local perspective, clearly ignorant
(see e.g. Hobart 1993).
Next, the knowledge that ‘local people’ or ‘community members’ acquire
from their lived experiences involves an ability to see and understand the
nature of connections and interrelationships more clearly than pro-
fessionals can do working from within the conceptual frameworks of
their particular silos of expertise (see e.g. Posey, 2002; Sillitoe, 2002).
While professionals struggle to bridge their various sectoral or disciplinary
Page 6 of 13 Robyn Eversole

silos and jargons to take a more holistic approach to interrelated community

issues, community knowledge grasps such connections instinctively: based
in what the anthropologist Bruno Latour (1993) calls the ‘seamless fabric of
lived experience.’ Lived experience crosses categories and disciplines: it is
not merely about ‘health’ or ‘the economy’ or ‘infrastructure’. Rather, it pro-
vides a broader context of experiences, values, and relationships, in which
causes and influences cross over and interact. Lived experience also moves
beyond the merely ‘local’ to bridge localities, communities, and landscapes,
potentially providing a rich source of interchange among different ‘local’

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knowledge.
The result is that situated local or community knowledge is grounded, in
place and in context, in ways that the expert knowledge of professionals is
not. While it may be limited by the intellectual and social ‘reach’ of the
community in question – for instance their ability to access information
(see e.g. Schilderman, 2002) – such knowledge is eminently participatory.
People in communities may not know all the relevant information to under-
stand and evaluate their options; yet what they do know, they know in
context. Thus, while the knowledge of communities is often not sufficient
unto itself, nor is the expertise of professionals with no community knowl-
edge to ground it. Both are needed. And while the boundaries between
‘expert’ and ‘community’ knowledge are clearly permeable – experts live
and work in communities, and communities draw on the resources of
experts – their creative meeting points are complicated by the persisting
assumption that the experts are still holding the only real ‘knowledge’.
Even when community opinions are heard, even when they are noted
and respected, the knowledge that underpins them is hard to see. The
role that ‘local’ or ‘community’ knowledge can play in development is
recognized in theory, but in practice the dominant understanding of knowl-
edge is still scientific and empirical: managers and other trained decision-
makers in formal organizations typically view ‘knowledge’ as that which
can be categorized, quantified, tested, externally validated, and relied
upon to provide answers independent of local agendas and bias. What
Gaventa (1993) has called the ‘boundaries between expertise and experi-
ence’ is ultimately a divide between two different ways of looking at knowl-
edge: the codified and the tacit; the generalizable and the specific. Yet this
boundary runs even deeper: into epistemology (the study of knowledge)
and very different cultural and disciplinary views about what is valid
knowledge, and what is not.
Community narratives about what-happened-the-last-time, what-will-
work, and why-this-does-not-make-sense, are often difficult to articulate
to outsiders, and when they are spoken, they tend to translate as ‘attitudes’
or ‘opinions’ rather than knowledge: ‘anecdotal’ rather than proven, and
 Remaking participation Page 7 of 13

thus ultimately, of less weight. Community challenges to ‘established

knowledge’ and ‘hard data’ can easily be dismissed as untested and even
irrelevant to the question at hand; while agendas travelling under the
cloak of data and evidence are harder to challenge. Biases easily become
embedded simply in the way development issues are defined and the cat-
egories used (‘unemployed women’, ‘rural families’, ‘enterprise’). Yet
using scientific tools to measure the categories gives the resulting knowl-
edge a legitimacy that lived experience does not share. Thus, while partici-
patory processes may willingly seek community input or opinions, few give

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weight to community knowledge.

The second challenge: whose institutions to use

Institutions include not only the formal organizational structures but
also the informal ‘rules of the game’ that guide human interactions
(see e.g. North, 1990). Development as a field (and as a social construct)
is permeated by formal institutions from the World Bank to the local auth-
ority, and informal institutions from log frames to ‘best practice’. Commu-
nities, equally, have their institutions. The problem is that when the formal
institutions of development seek to engage with the institutions of commu-
nities in order to encourage their participation in development processes,
this engagement tends invariably to happen on the institutional terrain of
the former. Thus, not only are experts seen as holding all the relevant knowl-
edge for development; but they are also de facto owners of the institutional
terrain.
This is the key point in Craig and Porter’s (1997) critique of ‘the domi-
nance of three components – projects, professionals, and organizations’
in development work, and their telling observation that these institutions
‘involve practices and processes which are primarily instruments of
control, rather than of participation’ (Craig and Porter, 1997, p. 229). Pro-
jects, professionals, and organizations are part of an institutional context
which is often patently foreign to the communities they seek to work
with – one with a distinct language, organizational structure, and
shared assumptions and values grounded in professional knowledge and
organizational goals. Both the ‘foreignness’ of these institutions themselves
(the way people dress, speak, act, and expect others to dress, speak, act) and
their tendency to impose their own ‘rules of the game’ as given, are diame-
trically opposed to the ideal of participation. When governments attempt to
engage communities, for instance, their own institutional ‘rules in use’ con-
strain what political behaviour is possible, or not possible; acceptable, or
not acceptable (Lowndes et al., 2006, p. 546– 547). As Schech and Haggis
(2000) observe, development institutions and processes are caught up in
Page 8 of 13 Robyn Eversole

cultural presuppositions, values, and meanings – often caught up in them

too deeply for practitioners to even realize how these direct their work.
An anthropological perspective suggests that what we typically see on
the landscape of community development practice are the intersections of
different ‘cultures’ attempting to dialogue. We see local government
trying to have a conversation with neighbourhoods, service providers
attempting to work with target groups and state government departments
trying to strengthen their relationship with NGOs. Typically, one group
(generally the more powerful, better resourced group) is trying hard to

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engage the other, working from within its own organization’s institutions
and processes: for instance, through convening workshops or meetings pre-
sented in a format and language that makes sense to them, geared to achiev-
ing the kinds of outcomes that their organization values. Cornwall (2008,
p. 275) makes a useful distinction between these kinds of ‘invited spaces’
that, no matter how participatory they seek to be, are ‘still structured and
owned by those who provide them’: as compared with ‘spaces that
people create for themselves’.
Those invited to ‘participate’ on other people’s institutional turf not only
start out at a disadvantage (they do not necessarily know the ‘rules of the
game’) but they are also likely to end up disenchanted with the promise
of participation. As one board member of a participatory project in the
UK observed:

‘Empowerment is a very good idea, but what they didn’t do, they didn’t
redesign the structure to allow that to happen. . . . All they’re doing is
laying new ideas on old foundations, and the old foundations are taking
over.’ (quoted in Perrons and Skyers, 2003, p. 280)

The ‘old foundations’ are the institutional structures of invited spaces and
managed projects: the shared cultural terrain of development professionals.
Even in best-case scenarios, where institutions seek to become more inclus-
ive and participation is ‘designed in’ (Lowndes and Sullivan, 2004, p. 67),
these are still basically different from what Cornwall terms ‘spaces that
people create for themselves’: the institutions through which communities
work. These run according to a different logic; indeed, they may easily
seem ‘informal’ and ‘chaotic’ (Turner, 2009, p. 233) from the perspectives
of professionals and their organizations. The way communities actually
‘participate’ in creating social change, and the institutions they use, can
be invisible, as Tandon (2008, p. 285) writes:

‘[Through history] the ‘participation’ of the ordinary masses remained

largely disconnected with the formal system of ‘administered’
participation of the regimes. Yet, such participation was widespread,
 Remaking participation Page 9 of 13

though invisible. It evolved its own mores and methodologies of

conversation, knowledge sharing and mobilizing.’ (Tandon, 2008, p. 284)

Bottom-up change need not – and most typically does not – happen on the
institutional terrain of the formal institutions of development. When
seeking to enable communities to change, such institutions are more
likely to end up diagnosing ‘participation fatigue’ (Cornwall, 2009,
p. 280) among the communities they seek to work with, or observing the
‘strategic exclusion’ (Humpage, 2005, p. 176) of communities distancing
themselves from well-meaning social inclusion initiatives.

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At the same time, bottom-up change still needs formal institutional allies
to help overcome barriers that communities cannot shift for themselves,
and to access resources not available any other way (see e.g. Keare, 2001).
It is for this reason that community members still regularly journey onto
the institutional terrain of government departments and development
agencies. It is for this reason, also, that community members willingly
learn their language, participate in their procedures, and acculturate them-
selves, bit by bit, to their institutions. These journeys into foreign insti-
tutional terrain are difficult but potentially valuable: those who can learn
to translate their needs into the language of others may find valuable
resources and support. Such journeys, however, tend to move in one direc-
tion only: from ‘invisible’ community spaces to visible development spaces,
and only very rarely in the other direction. The challenge for community
development practice is to think about participation from the other direc-
tion: about how to become participants in other people’s processes.

The final challenge: remaking participation

The problem of participation is not that participation is impossible to
achieve; but rather, that it is impossible to achieve for others. Future com-
munity development practice is not, in the end, about meeting the challenge
of how to convince others to participate in our worldviews and institutions.
Rather, the challenge of participation is about how to become participants in
our own right: choosing to move across institutional and knowledge ter-
rains to create new spaces for communities and organizations to ‘partici-
pate’ together. Beyond the desire for participation and even formal
partnership, there is a need for translation agents who are comfortable in
the circles of both the powerful and the powerless, and who are able to
facilitate the journeys of both.
Increasing consensus is emerging in the literature that communities have
knowledge and institutions that are qualitatively different from the knowledge
and institutions that guide the work of formal development organizations.
Page 10 of 13 Robyn Eversole

Such ‘community knowledge’ and institutions are organically bottom-up

ways that communities pursue their change agendas. Yet the knowledge and
institutions of communities tend to be invisible to professionals trained to
see knowledge as expert knowledge and institutions as formal development
institutions. Old ways of thinking about development as something that pro-
fessionals initiate, persist alongside more recent assertions that communities
themselves make change: creating deep and often unacknowledged tensions
for community development practitioners. Participation as typically under-
stood and practiced retains a legacy of a top-down view of social change: it

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invites ‘communities’ into development processes and development decision-
making, it respects their voices and their presence, but asks them, in effect, to
leave their knowledge and institutions at the door.
We are left, then, with a landscape of organizations eager to work with
communities on the one hand, and on the other, a multitude of communities
eager to access resources from organizations. Yet between the two lies a
deep chasm. Those development professionals who work with-and-in com-
munities (at the ‘coalface’) may feel this chasm in their own voice: when
they apologize yet again to their fellow community members (‘I’m sorry,
we just have to do it this way’), and equally, when they try to explain to pro-
fessional colleagues (‘But no one in the community will want to do it that
way!’). This can be called the paradox of dual embeddedness: practitioners
who sit simultaneously as community members and as development
workers, trying to translate across cultural divides. Their ‘participation’
in both the culture of formal organizations and the culture of the commu-
nities where they live and work gives them both professional and local
knowledge. Equally, it gives them an ability to navigate simultaneously
within quite different sets of institutional rules. Often, these practitioners
become adept translators from one context to the other: explaining what
works and why, what would not work, and why not: providing valuable
guidance and advice. Yet within their organizational work arrangements,
they are seldom empowered to take this to the next level: to use these
skills to explore how to bring different kinds of knowledge and institutional
spaces together.
Neither the knowledge and institutions of local communities nor those of
development professionals are adequate on their own. Communities
need resources beyond their reach; development organizations, in turn,
need the embedded knowledge and networks that communities can
mobilize. ‘Participation’ to date has largely moved in one direction only:
communities have had to be willing to enter the terrain of others and
learn to play by their rules. The challenge of remaking participation is to
make it multi-directional. Truly participatory development does not
just teach, engage, and empower communities, it teaches, engages, and
 Remaking participation Page 11 of 13

empowers the organizations that work with communities, to see and do

things differently (see e.g. Eversole and Routh, 2005). Coalface practitioners
are particularly well placed to enable this process by virtue of their knowl-
edge and experience of both development organizations and specific com-
munities. If given the support and encouragement to consciously translate
across these different contexts, such translation agents can play a key role in
remaking development institutions and development knowledge in more
inclusive – and potentially more innovative – ways.

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Dr Robyn Eversole is a development anthropologist who has worked extensively with rural com-
munities across South America and Australia. Originally from West Virginia, USA, she is cur-
rently a senior researcher with the Institute for Regional Development at the University of
Tasmania, Australia.

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