A LADDER OF COMMUNITY PARTICIPATION FOR UNDERDEVELOPED-COUNTRIES

Much past analysis of community participation, in programmes designed to produce either housing or infrastructure, is incomplete as a guide to governments and nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) in terms of th e approach required to achieve success in this area. There are two mai n problems to consider when analysing this issue: one is whether commu nity participation is practised at all, the other is how. This paper f ocuses on the former, aiming at providing some basis of understanding on the latter. Here, community participation is not seen as being just a means to enable the people to get, through mutual-help initiatives and possibly with outside help, the basic needs which, otherwise, woul d not be available to them, but also as a means to influence decisions in the political arena about issues that affect them. Existing models of community participation, such as Amstein's ladder of citizen parti cipation, although adequate for analysis in developed countries, provi de misleading results within a development context. A tentative classi fication for the evaluation of participation within underdeveloped cou ntries is suggested, based on the degree of the external institutional involvement in terms of facilitating/carrying out community mutual-he lp projects. These levels of involvement are arranged in the form of a ladder composed of the following rungs: empowerment, partnership, con ciliation, dissimulation, diplomacy, informing, conspiracy and self-ma nagement. Examples are used to illustrate these concepts. Cases of emp owerment and self-management, at the opposite extremes of the ladder, demonstrate that basic needs can be achieved with or without governmen tal support. Copyright (C) 1996 Elsevier Science Ltd.