Participatory Community Development Planning And Assessment Of Its Impacts

This paper systematically presents the steps and methods of participatory community development planning based on the authors' experiences made in a poverty alleviation project. By summarizing the experiences, the authors developed a participatory planning procedure including 6 steps, such as participatory community survey, participatory poverty analysis, participatory ranking, etc.The process of participatory planning has enhanced the knowledge integration between the insiders and outsiders, identified development interventions reflected the real need of the community and rural poor, enhanced the community development capability and built a good pre-condition for achieving sustainable development. The authors also discussed some important issues related to applying participatory methods in practice, such as how to reduce the costs, how to flexibly use the participatory tools in order to enable villagers' effective participation; how to avoid the bias in decision-making; how to develop the indicators for follow-up Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E), etc. Issues, such as how to involve vulnerable groups; how to simplify the methods; how to apply participatory planning in large areas and how to sensitize the gender difference in the practice, have been also discussed in the paper.