Development and Participation: Whose Participation? A Critical Analysis of the UNDP’s Participatory Research Methods

Abstract

Participatory development became a new development orthodoxy during the early 1990s. However, many researchers have criticised that its implementation often fails to live up to its original transformative roots. Since 1992, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) has published national and regional Human Development Reports through ‘highly participatory research techniques’. This article analyses the participatory research methods promoted by the UNDP, its epistemological foundations and the knowledge–power dynamics within them. The inquiry finds that the local experts hired by the UNDP play a central role in articulating the top-down authority of the UNDP with the bottom-up legitimacy of the local perspectives. Rather than promote ‘development by the people, for the people’, the UNDP promotes ‘development by the experts, for the people’.