Participatory Development: Approaches From the Global South and the United States

In this paper, we take some of the lessons learned from six different approaches to participatory development, drawn from both the Global South and the United States, and use them to create a set of practice principles that can be applied by nonprofit organizations interested in making their development programs more participatory. We begin by briefly reviewing each of the six approaches to participatory development. We then make some of the issues raised in this review more concrete by presenting two contrasting illustrations of participatory development projects from Thailand and the United States. In the final section, we use the lessons learned from both the review and the illustrations to develop a set of principles that nonprofit organizations can apply to the practice of participatory development.