Participatory Development

Participatory Development was first formulated in the mid 1970’s amidst a growing awareness that the post World War II international development efforts were having little impact on global poverty. Up until then, the dominant development methodologies had been based heavily on a colonial mindset: top-down planning, centralized control, outside experts mandating the “correct” paths to development, and the plowing over of complex diversity to make way for controllable uniformity. Participatory development, or “participation” by the very people being “developed”, was seen as a way to overcome the stark failures of the previous paradigm. These new paradigms were popularized by a number of important pioneers, including Gordon Conway and Robert Chambers, and had a number of core tenets: increasing the power of poor people in the development process; enabling learning & action by the poor people themselves; and transforming the role of outsiders from experts and dominants to facilitators and participants. Today, a whole host of participatory development practices exist, most notably Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA), Rapid Rural Appraisal (RRA), and their various derivatives and offshoots.

It's interesting to note that many of the initial forays in the BoP by multinational companies have still appeared to follow the old paradigm of international development, as if the decades-worth of painful learning by the international development community had been ignored. Today, many companies still seek to provide expert solutions or technologies, they look for opportunities that promise large scale from the start (encouraging uniformity over diversity), and most notably, they seek to transform the poor with little transformation to themselves. However, so-called BoP 2.0 processes like the Base of the Pyramid Protocol were designed to overcome these shortcomings in business, employing participation as core tenet in conceiving and growing new businesses with poor communities.