The Seduction and Significance of Participation for Development Interventions

Through the past three decades development agencies have increasingly adopted the rhetoric of participatory development. This shift has been informed by a desire to achieve greater sustainability of initiated projects. This paper examines the relationship between participatory development and international development interventions, and focuses on the difficulty of adopting participatory strategies while maintaining existing, powerful development agencies. The significance of participatory development has, however, remained minimal as changes in the praxis of development have seldom resulted from the rhetoric.