​COMMUNITY-BASED PARTICIPATORY METHODS

Case-Studies & Approaches
​
by Dr. Nan M. Greer

Introduction:

In terms of economics, development usually means progress, growth, getting bigger, etc.  However, to take a more personal definition, it means a coming into one’s own.  Impact investing is based on the value of social impact at a community level.  Promoting community development is envisioned as encouraging individuals and communities to ‘come into their own’, to become as fulfilled as possible.  In this sense, assistance can help a community to reach for its own, self-realized, or self-defined potential.  

Assistance however, does not ideally come from outside of the community, rather it is something which comes from within the community’s existing assets.  Communities utilize their capacities and assets to assess their present and plan for a future.  Historic evidence indicates that significant community advancement takes place only when local community members are committed to investing themselves and their local associations and institutions in the effort.  As such, communities build naturally from the inside out.

As we come to understand that community assistance can only truly come from within, we may be lead to question, what then, is the role of outsiders?  Many communities are blinded by the straps of their poverty; they may be hopeless or unmotivated.  Outsiders can bring to them the knowledge of how to become motivated again, and to return to building from within.  Each community, no matter how poor or marginalized it may appear, boasts a unique combination of assets upon which it can build its future.  Resources from outside are much more effectively utilized and sustained when local communities are mobilized and invested; and if they define their own agendas for which additional resources must be obtained.  The keys then to community assistance are the community assets and capacities, when assistance is internally focused it is relationship driven and sustaining.

To truly empower a community and to ensure the continuous benefits of working together to build community, self-sufficiency must be a goal.  A local program that is self-supporting financially and administratively will stand the test of time when outside support is not always consistent.  In this sense, we take the role of facilitators, not financial crutches, who help enable local communities to reach the opportunities they deem important.  The program is then a local program which does not crumble when project workers and impact investment finish and go on to something new.

A sustainable program is one that lasts future generations and in its legacy, supports and promotes community-generated improvement and restoration as a healthy entity.  The ultimate goal of a sustainable program is the strength as a self-supporting structure in local people’s interaction and dynamics.  Programs which rely on constant assistance by donors are dependent and run the risk of failing if such assistance is cut or reduced.  A sustainable program is designed to promote independence and local ownership to not only further the chances of its existence in the future, but foster local participants to have a clear stake in what happens to the program - this encourages locals to place strong value on their own program.  Non-sustainable programs run the risk of excluding the locals or beneficiaries of the program from participation.  This leads to: systems and portions of the program to be ill-adapted to local conditions and realities, poor development and outcome of the programs services, and general disinterest in maintaining the programs and their success. The following are obstacles to implementing participatory and sustainable programs: (1) organizing to operate and make decisions from the top down, not appreciating and valuing the key of the participation of locals, (2) participatory programs often have a longer time-frame than many donors are willing to accept and support, and (3) organizations which have poor development of its administration and group infrastructure.  

The key to beginning a sustainable program with participation at its heart is to help locals to identify their assistance desires.  They must take into consideration their own assets, capacities, and needs .  Because organizations and locals can often times be on different levels in terms of power, knowledge and skills, there must be a goal of creating equality between the two.  Through active involvement and participation in their own programs, community members can, ensure their own security and protect their community, their culture and their family.  Along these lines, we must seek local community participation with the planning and designs of each program’s structure.  To begin, we should use local leaders, organizations and associations as a vehicle for promoting local participation and cooperation.  The program would be more efficient and humanly profitable (to use business terms) if they are organized and directed by locals themselves.  These locals would be helped to set up their own service orientation.


Goals of sustainable participation programs:
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1. Public Awareness - community members and organizations are informed how their participation helps them;
2. Policy Design - the policies of the community organization are designed to demand local participation;
3. People’s Organization - decision making and organization takes the form of “bottom-up” building participation;
4. Decentralized Decision Making - decision making based on a local community level;
5. Collaboration - collaboration between communities, organizations, associations promoting success and support;
6. Operational Procedures and Methods - community administrative arrangements promoting participation; and,
7. Monitoring and Evaluation - evaluation and monitoring assessing success and community participation.

To empower someone is to encourage  a person to see the power they did not realize they already had.  The kind of power we encourage is the power to control one’s own life-situation.  Communities and people need the power to plan and shape their own futures.  They have a right to manage their own affairs and to look after their own interests - for this, they must have control over their own destiny.  Having power also requires having authority and responsibility to maintain that power.  While to encourage the recognition of greater power among communities is monumental, consciousness-raising is required to maintain the power over their own lives.  To empower a people or a community they must be supported to decide their own goals and visions of what they would like to become, while sharing with them the opportunities they have available in their the world.  In this sense AI help's people in communities to help themselves. Also important to keep in mind: a group which gains new power is challenging to those who held that power in the past.  To empower a people may be challenging to an old authority.


Development

Foreign aid and community assistance has transformed over the past 100 years. Originally supporting colonial economic and political interests, foreign assistance began to incorporate not only a promotion of secondary economic market development, but also a genuine focus on poverty alleviation. With colonial history came a structuring of nations of the globe into “worlds”, where Third-World underdeveloped countries were dependent on Second and First-World nations for both poverty alleviation and development they were determined to need. Multinational financial institutions such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, among others, became keystones to underdeveloped countries working toward financial security, raising living standards, and reducing poverty. Foreign aid, multinational financial assistance, and development became synonymous with poverty alleviation in Third-World countries. Over time, however, an awareness grew of what was termed dependency theory, whereby Third-World countries found themselves further in debt and dependence on First-World nations, with the World Bank covering up to 65% of some of the poorest nations’ annual spending. While dependency theory related in part to an unrecoverable debt to investing financial institutions, its core was due to the assumption of the need to instruct poor countries and its citizenry how not to be poor. 

While development still maintained this colonial approach, in the 1960s, a new form of global assistance emerged called “participatory” or popular education. This was a revolutionary form of working with populations in poverty.


Community-Based, Participatory, Autochthonous Methods

The historical roots of Community-Based Participatory Development trace back to popular education methods such as those developed by Brazilian specialist, Paulo Freire, known for his works, such as Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970).  

Participatory Methods (CBPM) initiate with the community participating in all aspects of project development.  CBPM encourages collaboration of formally trained project workers partnering with the local community as a support of expertise seen as necessary by the community and project partner. Establishing equitable partnerships among community and project organization encouraging an autochthonous development with promise of lasting assistance and sustainability.  

Pre-1960s development approaches, now termed “dependency-approaches”, ultimately deemed unsuccessful and dependency inducing, were transformed worldwide into new appropriate community-based methods.

In the 1970s, “community-action” projects were born with a focus on participation and inclusion of communities in their self-determined development. As these methods developed, so too did the efforts to democratize knowledge (spread of knowledge) and participation as a way to address real community needs and learning. While Third-World development projects were focusing on community problems and needs, action-learning and participatory approaches transformed problem solving to capacity-building methods encouraging the strengthening of individuals, communities, and their social institutions. 

New appropriate roles were constructed for non-national organizations, where a focus turned from a “needs-based” approach to “capacity-building”, where local social institutions were strengthened as was their role in supporting the local community, as autonomous stronger communities and territories. This was deemed to be the true goal of foreign aid - a lasting autochthonous (grassroots/indigenous) sustainable development on the peoples’ own socio-cultural terms - or, as the United Nations has come to promote, ‘self-determination’.


Climate Change

As information sharing increased in the 21st century, numerous scientific models appeared, among them was the theory of climate change. While a small margin of scientists remain skeptical of the human cause of this change, international multinational agencies have begun to examine the phenomena, related causes and methods of reversal. Interestingly, as scientists examine biological hotspots around the world, it became clear those at the front lines of environmental conservation were in fact poor and indigenous communities. As such, these communities became a focus of worldwide initiatives to both stabilize poverty while reversing ecological destruction. Projects such as the Green Climate Fund and the UNREDD+ were seen as methods to achieve both environmental and economic stabilization.

While these initiatives, and others found in the fields of renewable energy generation, community-owned clean water projects, and even community revolving income generation addressed reducing global dependence on depleted world resources, they lacked any sustainability without a focus on community-based participatory methods. In fact, many assessed projects lacking this dimension were found to have failed, resulting in wasted aid dollars, and making even foreign assistance questionable. 


Support for Community-Based Participatory Approaches

As foreign assistance and development have gained years of experiences, methods have improved, focusing on achieving the goal of alleviating poverty and protecting threatened species, ecosystems and biomes - as mutually interdependent and sustaining.  With this, came an insistence on goals of poverty reduction, environmental protection (including the use of renewable energy), and sustainability.


                                                     Case Studies of Community-Based Participatory Methods


Case Study: European Union Cattle-Ranching in Rainforests, Nicaragua

In the 1990s the European Union financed projects encouraging farming and ranching, including cattle in areas known as buffer-zones to ecological hotspots. One such project, located near the BOSAWAS Biosphere Reserve in Central America encouraged the deforestation of what was then referred to as the “buffer zone” of the Reserve, an area that has now been denuded of rainforest edge areas. As common in development, project workers were instructed to disperse funds for specific purposes (animal husbandry), and little regard had been paid to community concerns, agendas and capacities. As thousands of Euros poured into projects then deforesting critical habitat areas, not only was money wasted in the long run, but an eventual destruction of the rainforest occurred also spurring conflict among adjacent communities then struggling over limited forest resources. Ultimately the project was terminated, rainforest was destroyed, and the local populations were left in a threat of increasing violence - the opposite of what was desired by those funding the activities.


Case Study:  Imagined Communities of the Niger Delta

In 2009, militants in the Niger Delta agreed to lay down their arms in exchange for benefits associated with community assistance. Community assistance was initiated with common dependency methods - the distribution of services to beneficiaries who would benefit from outside induced change.  While the projects were envisioned as supporting a devastated and abjectly poor population, cash payments were initiated and quickly enshrouded projects in corruption and inequality. Ultimately, the lack of community-based approaches of those hired by outside resource extraction corporations, led to problematic perceptions of the community as dependent on outsiders for development, funding, and direction in a paternalistic mode whereby local communities lacked the ability sustain themselves. Horribly, this scenario has caused an unraveling of social institutions and survival, apparent with the constant danger of war in the Delta. 


Case Study: Norwegian Forestry Group-Inter-American Development Bank

In the early 2000s, the Norwegian Forestry Group combined efforts with local communities to assess, monitor and protect pine forests from pests such as beetles. As communities brought the diseases to the attention of specialists, a combined effort of scientists with local community members knowledgeable of their forest lands drove project success.  In a process of co-management and continual monitoring and eradication of forest pests, pine forests around the world are increasingly protected by communities at the front line of the dangerous potential of pine forest die off, a scenario ultimately feeding back to climate change.


Case Study: Co-Management of Protected Parks in Australia
Kakadu National Park has become famous for their groundbreaking work in establishing a co-management effort between the state and aboriginal communities where gains from park activities were returned to indigenous communities and the park management proved successful in protecting critical habitat and supporting the local community with permanent income-generation. Gaining multiple awards in tourism, ranger management, environmental protection and indigenous land management, Kakadu’s community-based participatory methods utilized at project inception proved to lead to its well-known success.


Case Study: Community-Based Toursim Myanmar

Recently, community-based participatory approaches have been introduced to areas of Myanmar. An area of Burmese and Bhutanese refugees, the implementation of community-based tourism projects has lead to a surprising successful development of over 30 successful Myanmar community initiatives. When polled, community participants overwhelmingly identified community organization and management support as critical to their success with failures coming only from top-down approaches where the ideas of the communities are not considered or driving project activities.

Success Factors and Challenges Faced Across Sites

Success Factors across Sites                                                                                   Challenges Faced across Sites
Many factors contributing to the success of the                                                    Challenges ranged from strong opposition of 
case studies examined were unique, and context                                                 powerful outside economic interests, to problems
specific. However, several factors emerged in                                                       posed by funding cutbacks mid-project, and issues
a cross-site analysis. These include:                                                                         related to insensitivity to local cultural variations.
                                                                                                                                        Some challenges were nearly universal, mentioned
-The presence or facilitation of a strong,                                                                by all or most partnerships as impeding efforts for 
autonomous community partner organization                                                      lasting and sustainable affects. These include:
prior to the development of the formal 
partnership                                                                                                                  -Differences in the project timetable of the community
                                                                                                                                        and non-community partners, with the former often
-A high level of mutual respect and cooperation                                                   anxious for quicker execution of planning and project
among the partners, and an appreciation of the                                                   execution
complimentary skills and resources that each 
partner brings to the table                                                                                        -Funding constraints and/or termination of funding or
                                                                                                                                        changes in sources of project support resulting in 
-Appreciation by all partners of the need for solid                                               delayed or changed projects
scientific data     
                                                                                                                                       -Perception among partners lacking an understanding
                                                                                                                                        of the process and avenues for change

Approaches

1. Building leadership and a strong base of support as genuinely community driven: beginning where the people are by having the community and its population base determine the issues to which they are committed
2. Using approaches and processes that reflect the local community culture and ways of doing things (even if it slows down the process)
3. Remembering that “development” includes not only the participation of communities, but also the subsequent assistance of communities in achieving the change they seek
4. Training, capacity-building, and institutional strengthening, where local communities are best served, supporting their self-determined future
5. Planning  for sustainability by seeking new funding streams, sustainable options for income generation, and including those who actively support and encourage community-partnered action