Community-Based and -Driven Development: A Critical Review

Community-based and -driven development projects have becomean important form of development assistance, with the WorldBank's portfolio alone approximating $7 billion. A review oftheir conceptual foundations and evidence on their effectivenessshows that projects that rely on community participation havenot been particularly effective at targeting the poor. Thereis some evidence that such projects create effective communityinfrastructure, but not a single study establishes a causalrelationship between any outcome and participatory elementsof a community-based development project. Most such projectsare dominated by elites, and both targeting and project qualitytend to be markedly worse in more unequal communities. A distinctionbetween potentially "benevolent" forms of elite domination andmore pernicious types of capture is likely to be important forunderstanding project dynamics and outcomes. Several qualitativestudies indicate that the sustainability of community-basedinitiatives depends crucially on an enabling institutional environment,which requires government commitment, and on accountabilityof leaders to their community to avoid "supply-driven demand-driven"development. External agents strongly influence project success,but facilitators are often poorly trained, particularly in rapidlyscaled-up programs. The naive application of complex contextualconcepts like participation, social capital, and empowermentis endemic among project implementers and contributes to poordesign and implementation. The evidence suggests that community-basedand -driven development projects are best undertaken in a context-specificmanner, with a long time horizon and with careful and well-designedmonitoring and evaluation systems.