Contribution of people's participation evidence from rural water supply projects

Field observations have led many people to believe that beneficiary participation in decision-making can contribute greatly to the success of development projects. When peo ple influence or control the decisions that affect them, they have a greater stake in the outcome and will work harder to ensure success. But the evidence supporting this reasoning is qualita tive-some would say anecdotal-so that many practitioners remain skeptical. Even when they accept that participation is important, the quali tative approach does not offer much guidance on how to promote participation in large-scale pro grams. Therefore three questions need to be addressed systematically: To what degree does participation contribute to project effectiveness? Which beneficiary and agency characteristics fos ter the process? And, if participation does benefit project outcomes, how can it be encouraged through policy and project design?

To answer these questions, researchers studied evaluations of 121 completed rural water supply projects in forty-nine developing countries around the world. Eighteen different agencies supported the projects, which employed a variety of technical approaches. The results are clear: ben eficiary participation contributed significantly to project effectiveness, even after statistically con trolling for the effects of seventeen other factors.

The results are based on quantitative and sys tematic qualitative analyses of data across projects and within the lifetime of individual pro jects, sometimes over a decade or more. The quantitative data came from content analyses done by two independent coders for each report, covering 149 variables. Intercoder reliability was high on key variables, and testing for so-called halo effects produced no significant change in the results. Preliminary correlation analyses and fac tor analyses to reduce the number of variables led to a model that applied the framework of collec tive action to management of rural water as a common property resource. To move beyond cor relations among indicators toward causality, multivariate regression analysis was used to test the collective-action framework. Additionally, the twenty projects that were scored as most effective were analyzed to determine their key design features.