Participation and Poverty Reduction: An Analytical Framework and Overview of the Issues

This paper examines the relationship between community participation and the efficacy of interventions designed to reduce poverty. It outlines a simple model that identifies three actors involved in the provision of antipoverty interventions: financiers, providers and beneficiaries. This model is used to illustrate what happens when the poor move from being passive beneficiaries to being the providers of these interventions. Beneficiary participation has the potential to lower the cost of providing these interventions. It can ensure that they more closely reflect the preferences of the population that they are designed to serve. However, this benefit is contingent on the ability of communities to engage in collective actions. In fractionalised communities, or where trust and/or social capital are weak, there is a risk that community participation may result in the capture of benefits by local elites, to the detriment of the poor. Further, we argue that the failure to delegate true decision-making authority (allowing for de jure but not de facto participation), may result in beneficiaries being reluctant to act because of concerns that they will be subsequently overruled. Copyright 2002, Oxford University Press.