systems and as resources from salaries to food parcels and reconstruction materiel are delivered. With no awareness of social or political context it is never certain if an intervention is warranted at all. And when there is blind engagement, ignorance of context makes each choice a round of roulette, potentially explosive and liable to overrun the self-development potential of the target population while undermining the effectiveness of assistance delivery in the first place.[4] At worst, we aid and abet the violence and become accomplices to adversity. Participatory methodologies, as part of political development programs or not, increase awareness of the social and political context and better the odds this will be avoided.
Other Benefits
Improved common sense about the political footprint of an intervention aside, there are other advantages to employing participatory methodologies. Separate appraisals by The World Bank, the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), USAID and the International Relief/Development Project (IRDP) have examined participatory approaches and numerous case studies. Their findings are compelling and remarkably consistent. Each review independently concluded that while participatory methodologies may require greater up front investment in staff training and operations expenditures (up to 15%, on average, according to the World Bank study), throughout the life of programs overall costs average lower than in programs that do not rely on local capacities. Not surprisingly, each study concluded that participatory development programs are invariably more relevant and effective at addressing local needs. Moreover, the gains made during an intervention are more often sustained using participatory methods and chances are higher that the engagement of local women and youth in the intervention process will improve their status as well. In the end, the ability of local participation programs to leverage other national or foreign resources extends the overall reach of general assistance in most cases.[5]
Four separate studies of participatory programming have found that such methods often cost less in the long run and are consistently more effective at getting assistance where it needs to go. Such methods were also found to be unmatched in fostering sustainability, strengthening local self-help capacities and in improving the status of women and youth. Finally, by establishing platforms where organizations may access and involve citizens in their programs, participatory development methods often extended the reach of traditional development approaches by leveraging local resources with national and foreign assets.
Cautions and Recommendations: The Disclaimer
With such inherent advantages, why isn’t participation the sine qua non of development practice? Dominant biases in conventional humanitarianism and development affairs still favor immediate results and rarely question whether an intervention should be avoided on ethical grounds. The index of care for a people in crisis is measured in how many millions they receive in aid. Efficiency and effectiveness are still commonly defined in the abstract, as a comparison of what was delivered to how much it cost to get it there. How assistance is rendered, whether it reaches legitimate beneficiaries, what is its political and social impact and whether assistance contributes to stability or further misery are variables dropped from most assessment formulas and planning documents. Ironically, small, targeted participatory interventions that account for such measures are often criticized as being inefficient and irrelevant because large quantities of aid are not transferred. Some of the best efforts to calibrate levels of assistance to local absorptive capacities and to collaborate with disaster victims and local communities rebuilding their lives in a sustainable
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