Community participation in development projects: the World Bank experience
Paul, S.
World Bank Discussion Paper 6: 37
1987
Document Number: 352372
This paper reviews the experience of World Bank projects with community participation (CP) in the urban housing, health and irrigation sectors. A sample of 40 projects with potential for CP and 10 sucessful projects without CP were selected from these sectors for detailed study. The study, based on project documents and interviews, addresses the objectives, approaches and outcome of CP in Bank projects, the lessons offered, and the implications for Bank policies. The objectives of CP are identified as: empowerment, building beneficiary capacity, improving project efficiency and effectivness, and project cost sharing. Primary organizational devices used to ellicit CP in Bank projects are: user groups, community workers and field extension workers of the implementing agency. Lessons learned show that CP is appropriate where the objective of a project is empowerment of the people and frequent dialogue with beneficiaries is demanded. It is difficult to incorporate CP into project strategies if the country/sector does not have a social tradition supportive of CP. Further, indiscriminate use of CP in all types of project is unwarranted, although its potential in projects which deal with vast masses of beneficiaries for service delivery should be recognized.