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The participatory principle in development projects: the costs and benefits of cooperation
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In this article, the authors examine the relevance of assumptions of self interest, opportunism and bounded rationality in such solidaristic organizations, and then use them to calculate the costs and benefits of using participatory systems.Abstract:
Many development theorists and practitioners, including those in key agencies like the World Bank and UNDP, now see participation as critical to successful project implementation, and strongly support cooperative organizational systems. This article cautions against undue optimism about such forms of organization, and attempts to explain their limited success when they compete with private firms by applying rational choice theory to behaviour in cooperative systems. It examines the relevance of assumptions of self interest, opportunism and bounded rationality in such solidaristic organizations, then uses them to calculate the costs and benefits of using participatory systems. It shows that these costs are likely to outweigh the benefits in large organizations unless participatory processes are effectively associated with managerial autonomy, appropriate incentives, sanctions and hierarchies. © 1996 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.read more
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Paradoxes of Participation: Questioning Participatory Approaches to Development
TL;DR: In this article, the authors argue that despite significant claims to the contrary there is little evidence of the long-term eAectiveness of participation in materially improving the conditions of the most vulnerable people or as a strategy for social change.
Journal ArticleDOI
Participation and accountability in development management
TL;DR: In this article, the role of participatory theory in managing development projects and programs in poor countries is reviewed and empirical evidence is considered to evaluate the effectiveness of these methodologies, using long-standing insights of social science theory.
Journal ArticleDOI
Participatory Governance Reform: A Good Strategy for Increasing Government Responsiveness and Improving Public Services?
TL;DR: In this paper, a literature review shows that the evidence on these claims is positive, but limited, and indicates that enabling and motivating citizens and public officials to make participatory governance arrangements work as effective accountability mechanisms is a challenging enterprise in most developing countries.
Journal Article
Designing Participation Processes for Water Management and Beyond. Synthesis, part of a special feature on implementing participatory water management: recent advances in theory, practice and evaluation
TL;DR: In this article, the authors address the question of how to design participation processes in water management and other fields and present a preliminary outline for such a guide, as well as numerous partially iterative steps.
Journal ArticleDOI
Straddling the Divides: Remaking Associational Life in the Informal African City
TL;DR: In this article, the authors treat informalization as a dynamic process related to new challenges faced by urban citizens in their attempts to access opportunities and, at the same time, maintain social coherence.
References
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Journal ArticleDOI
Production, Information Costs, and Economic Organization
Armen A. Alchian,Harold Demsetz +1 more
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Production, information costs, and economic organization
Armen A. Alchian,Harold Demsetz +1 more
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors present a set of reprint articles for which IEEE does not hold copyright. Full text is not available on IEEE Xplore for these articles, but full text can be found on the Internet Archive.
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Markets, Bureaucracies, and Clans.
TL;DR: The transactions cost approach provides such a framework because it allows us to identify the conditions which give rise to the costs of mediating exchanges between individuals: goal incongruence and performance ambiguity.
Journal ArticleDOI
The New Economics of Organization
TL;DR: The work of as discussed by the authors provides political scientists with an overview of the "new economics of organization" and explores its implications for the study of public bureaucracy, which is perhaps best characterized by three elements: a contractual perspective on organizational relationships, a theoretical focus on hierarchical control, and formal analysis via principal-agent models.