Involvement: A bidirectional perspective on participatory approaches for development and social change

ABSTRACT

Empirical evidence supports local participation in improving the attainment of development and social change goals for communities. Nevertheless, debates about whether participation should aim to create access and interaction among participants or redistribute power through local empowerment remain unsettled. The current disciplinary and context-informed typologies of participation, with varying conceptions of participation, create a possible theoretical confusion. Hence, this paper labels desirable participation as involvement. Involvement reflects a two-way endeavour of (i) project initiators’ willingness to make space for local participants, and (ii) local participants’ efforts to gain control and leverage their influence as equal decision-making partners. Partial involvement and pseudo-involvement represent less desirable forms of participation. These uniform labels reflect a conception of the forms of participation as a continuum in which local influence improves progressively. Thus, the involvement continuum model is offered as an organising framework that synthesises and harmonises the diverse but complementary conceptions of participatory development.

KEYWORDS:

• Participatory development
• social change
• typologies of participation
• local participation
• involvement continuum model

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Correction

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Correction Statement

This article was originally published with errors, which have now been corrected in the online version. Please see Correction (http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09614524.2024.2363007)

Notes

1 External actors in this study include all officials of governmental and nongovernmental (including international development) agencies who are involved in planning and executing development and social change initiatives for local communities. Although some of these officials may be natives of the local communities where the initiatives are implemented, external actors, as used in this paper, refer to persons involved in development and social change initiatives in their official capacities (see Koomson 2023b).

2 Local actors, in this paper, refer to citizens or individuals who are involved in development initiatives in their personal capacities or as leaders of community-based local groups (see Koomson 2023b).

3 Mitigators are adverbs of degree that reduce or weaken the intensity of a word or expression. The mitigators “pseudo” and “partial” are used in the ICM to depict the relative weakness of the modes of participation before “involvement”.

Additional information

Funding

This study did not receive funding from any source.