Participatory Approach for Community Development: Conceptual Analysis

Abstract

The community development is a long term process that focused on improving life standard of the community. The participatory approach often promote local people to involve in decision making that affect their personal and communal lives. This paper discussed on the concept of community participation and its significance for the community development. The participatory approaches have been adopted in the development projects since 1960s and 1970s, as a useful and appropriate mechanism to achieve development goals in a successful and sustainable manner. This is basically constructed as conceptual paper using secondary sources of research article, theoretical papers, reports, chapter, books and electronic data. The study denoted that participatory approach is a tool for empowering local community, poor and marginalized, and take them to the mainstream of the development schemes. The analysis of the papers stressed that local people are direct beneficiaries of all projects, rather than that of professionals or outsiders. It revealed that the PRA and RRA are also suitable models for applying within the community to improve the skills of local people and enable them to empower in decision making. The paper suggested to invite greater participation of local community in all types of development initiatives implemented by the government or donor agencies, to achieve real objective of the projects.