Section 5 provides a description of the potentials and limitations of direct participation in the planned development process that occurs through detailed projects and programs at the local level. People should be given a chance to be involved at some stage of the planned development process. Participation based on the territorial principle (village or district councils) will in most cases strengthen the position of the local elite.
Providing a theory of participation would involve integrating most of the theories related to participation in these sciences. This section attempts to arrive at a provisional classification of the different forms of participation that are possible. III) Participation classified by involvement in the different .. stages of the planned development process.
The classification based on this principle relates to the stages of the planned development process which are discussed in more detail in section 4. There is full participation when a person is involved, directly or indirectly, in all six steps of the planned development. process. There is partial participation when a person is not directly or indirectly involved in all six phases. in 5 or fewer stages of the planned development process is partial participation.
A more detailed discussion of participation in the planned development process follows in section 5. IV) Participation classified by organizational level. The principle of the organizational level is identical to part of the. Participation classified based on effectiveness Based on this classification principle, two extremes can be distinguished. It is clear that assessing the effectiveness of participation is always subjective.
The members of the different categories can be organized (induced participation) or can organize themselves based on two principles. In the developing countries, the organization of participation on the basis of the territorial principle is well known. As in local development, the spread of participation among a target group is one of the important goals.
When all possible participation types based on the nine classification principles are collected, it will lead to thousands of participation types, which would be very impractical. The different descriptions of the participation process and its steps and stages (Figure 8) make it clear that they relate to different styles of participation. Based on a characterization of the planning profession, it is possible to distinguish between three categories of planning.
The content of the various relations depends on the forms or styles of planning practiced in a given socio-political situation.
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5 PARTICIPATION IN THE PLANNED DEVELOPMENT PROCESS AT LOCAL LEVEL 5.1 Selected inputs and limitations of the analysis. In the previous sections an attempt has been made to a) classify the different types of participation, b) distinguish categories, types, forms and styles of government planning. The following is an assessment of the possibilities and limitations of participating in the six phases of the planned development process.
This can lead to frustration at the local level, can reduce interest in cooperation and damage the legitimacy of the government in the eyes of local residents. How to acquire, translate and use the available knowledge of the local population is something that is often overlooked. One of the problems is often the comprehensive view of local people on their own situation.
For local people, it is often difficult to understand the meaning of the technicians' fragmented messages. But community self-survey is not just a collection of data if it is to lead to a better knowledge of the potentials and limitations for the development of a particular situation. Whether this is good or bad depends on one's understanding of the objectives of inducing participation.
It can also lead to actions that destroy a socio-economic system aimed at exploiting the poor. This makes it difficult to ensure that all those who participated directly in the preliminary steps of the planned development process will also participate in all the more demanding steps of the implementation phase. Next to direct participation in the formulation of objectives, evaluation is one of the steps in the planned development process that lends itself best to direct participation.
In this case, the assessment will have little effect on the better performance of the group that directly participates in the planned development. This makes it difficult to obtain information useful for improving the current or next cycle of planned development through evaluation, however organized. A lot of work needs to be done in adapting the structure, processes and procedures of the administration and its planning units and the mentality of its staff before there is room to introduce effective direct participation in planning at the local level.
The ingenuity of the elite (whether old, new or potential) to manipulate participation is very great. By emphasizing that the power of the authorities is legitimate, this legitimacy gives their decisions authority.
