The need for enhanced community participation

With the overall goal of contributing to enhancing the participation of grassroots level people, communities and villages, and also sometimes even macro-level institutions, this chapter discusses the many meanings of participation, emphasizing the importance of and need for genuine participation; explores the participation of people in goals and target-oriented development; and suggests seven strategies aimed at ensuring that genuine participation occurs in social development practice. It also argues that, to enable and enhance community participation, national and international institutions need to participate in a non-oppressive and non-exploitative way by improving governance systems at all levels that empower communities and facilitate participation in their own development. In that sense, both bottom-up and top-down participation, with perhaps a different emphasis to that commonly made, are crucial in future social development.