Participatory Development

Participatory development is a process of taking into account peoples’ agency in development by involving people in decision-making over planning processes that affect their lives. This permits people to achieve basic human needs but also to exercise their ability to challenge the established values and institutions that reproduce the monolithic enterprise of capitalism. Against de-territorialised and universal solutions put forward by development experts, participation raises the central issue of reflexivity, while suggesting how different forms of knowledge, power and agency relate to one another in actors’ diverse spheres of life to achieve degrees of social and environmental justice; this configures the notion of participation in processes of development.