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

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.