Search

Impact assessments usually precede project or program implementation and are a decision tool for policymakers. They provide information on expected consequences of a potential project or program to serve three policy needs. First, they help determine whether a project should be implemented or not. Second, they can guide the design of the project to make it more effective and better fit its natural and social environment. Third, they can lead to the development of mitigation measures that minimize negative impacts. In this article, a set of 40 post-project impact assessments for the U.S. Agency for International Development are utilized, in order to derive lessons for policymakers by comparing them to the pre-project impact assessments.

Criticism of development projects is widespread, and blame for disappointing results is cast in many directions. One line of criticism which has become quite strong in the recent development literature is that development projects are too top-down and need to be more bottom-up (e.g. Maguire, 1981). Projects should involve more participation by beneficiaries. In fact, some would argue that real development, by definition, must involve beneficiaries in their own improvement (e.g. Gran, 1983a,b). Without participation the people may benefit but not develop from a project. Thus participation has intrinsic value. As the recognition of the value of public, popular, beneficiary, or community participation has increased, so has the range of what is meant by participation. Some authors have expanded the concept to mean empowerment and capacity-building, sometimes including institution-building. In this paper we do not attempt to redefine participation per se, but aim instead to make an inventory of the principal concepts that have evolved in the literature so far, elicit a general model of participatory development projects, deduce the central implicit hypotheses from this literature on the relationship between participation and project effectiveness, and statistically test these hypotheses from the empirical evidence provided by AID's series of 52 Impact Evaluation Reports. Our major question is how much does beneficiary participation contribute to project effectiveness? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Development projects have had disappointing results despite the acknowledgment of past mistakes and significant evolution in development strategies. A major disappointment has been the failure of most development projects to benefit significantly the poor majorities in developing countries. Criticism against trickle-down aid strategies gained official acceptance during the mid-seventies. The New Directions legislation governing the U.S. Agency for International Development (AID), and the enunciation of the Basic Human Needs (BHN) doctrine by the International Labor Organization, the World Bank, and other international organizations were explicit efforts to redirect bilateral and multilateral aid toward the poor and to increase the participation of beneficiaries in projects aimed at their own development. The philosophy behind these changes is that real development must be people-centered instead of production-oriented. In fact, some critics define beneficiary participation as integral to authentic development. Joining in the chorus of those supporting increased participation are bilateral and multilateral aid agencies, private voluntary organizations, grassroots organizers, global-humanist scholars, and development management consultants. In sum, the call for participation comes from a broad spectrum of those concerned with development and for a wide variety of reasons. In this article we use a set of 52 AID development projects to examine several theses about whether and how participation contributes to project success and what conditions encourage participation. We begin by describing our methodology and sources of data. The second section establishes the benefits of participation by summarizing the major findings of a previous article we wrote on this issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]