Today, the credibility of the international development community is increasingly being called into question. At the root of the problem are the extremely unequal nature of recent growth, the end of the Cold War, economic recession in the North, and the lacklustre record of foreign aid in reaching those left behind. By the 1990s, the notion of Sustainable Human Development (SHD) or what is sometimes called People-Centred Development (PCD) was being hailed as a possible framework for building a newly-invigorated system of international development cooperation based on genuine North-South partnership, holistic, equitable, participatory, empowering and sustainable development. This thesis explores the implementability and transformational potential of the SHD/PCD paradigm by analyzing how a multilateral development agency (UNDP) and an international NGO (Action Aid) put it into practice both globally and in Uganda. Its main argument is that despite both agencies' contributions to service-delivery and training, and their genuine efforts to reorient their work towards SHD/PCD approaches, in the final analysis neither UNDP or Action Aid realize the more transformative goals of the SHD/PCD agenda or seriously challenge the status quo. This is partly due to the excessively abstract, unfinished, ideologically confused and contradictory nature of the SHD/PCD paradigm itself, (i.e., the Baroque Science Phenomenon). However UNDP and Action Aid, both of which adopted SHD/PCD to enhance their profiles, must assume much of the responsibility blame for subordinating core SHD/PCD goals to their own organizational interests (i.e., the River Pollution Phenomenon) . The thesis also demonstrates how both agencies undermine their effectiveness by making a series of fallacious assumptions about both poor communities' and their own catalytic potential in an effort to reconcile the gap between their agencies' SHD/PCD aspirations and the real-life constraints facing their goals.

In South Africa, citizen participation is regarded as an integral part of all social, economic and political activity. There is always an attempt to either involve citizens/communities in different programmes or at least to pretend to have involved people. Community participation is a constitutional prerogative that the broader masses should meaningfully participate in issues affecting their lives. Thus overgrowing concern by development practitioners to utilize participatory methods has become notable in recent years and participation has become an established orthodoxy within the development discourse in South Africa. The practice of participation has become embodied in what is popularly known to be people-centered development in which it is favored that community needs take precedence over those of other stakeholders when designing and implementing development projects. This study explores community participation in income generating projects at the Tembisa / Kempton Park Development Center. Using a case study as a qualitative inquiry method, the researcher sought to establish the evidence of community participation and the extent to which participants in income generating projects were involved as the main role players. The research sample constituted of 15 participants; ten were beneficiaries of income generating projects, three were staff members at the Tembisa / Kempton Park Development Center and two participants where drawn from the main funders of the Tembisa / Kempton Park Development Center. The different categories of the participants drawn into the sample enabled the researcher to holistically capture how the development process unfolded. The findings of the research indicated that the development model used at Tembisa / Kempton Park Development Center is largely participatory. The model allowed community members to have more say and control in the initiation, design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of the projects. However this model has challenges that are institutional, social and structural of nature and barriers which hinder effective and meaningful community participation. Government intervention was recommended to address some of the challenges to community participation on a macro level.

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