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This thesis is a study of how community participation is understood, enacted, produced and governed in the context of an organization that promotes community participation. The contribution of this thesis is to shed light on the frequently found gap between the expectations and the reality of community participation. In examining how community participation is promoted, the thesis focuses in particular on actors such as community leaders and development workers, and the interactions between them. The thesis applies a multi-disciplinary theoretical framework, which is built through combining theoretical approaches that include discourse analysis, institutional analysis, and the actor-oriented approach. The framework accommodates the examination of the roles of various types of social factors in shaping the workings of community participation. These include the idea of community, social relations in communities, and the agency of actors who are promoting the approach. This thesis conducts a case study of the Council of Community Organisations (CCO) programme in Thailand, which is a large-scale promotion of community participation in development and governance. The case study examines the operation of the programme from national to local level, and explores several localities where the programme is being implemented. The exploration of the CCO programme illuminates pathways through which the approach’s inner mechanisms can constrain it from fulfilling the expectations. The thesis identifies how the idea of community, through its association with the sense of collective identity, tends to distort community participation from achieving empowerment. Moreover, the social relations in communities, generally characterised by inequality and diversity of interests, frequently constrain the approach from achieving effective mobilisation of collective action. Such a constraint is often accentuated by adverse incentives that community leaders face when they become part of development interventions. Finally, it is found that the deficiencies of community participation are likely to persist. This is because the actors who are promoting the approach usually manoeuvre to gain advantages from their roles in ways that reinforce the influence of the aforementioned factors.

The thesis provides a comparative analysis of the implementation of the EMPRETEC programme in Ghana and Namibia. The EMPRETEC programme is a unique entrepreneurship and business development programme developed by the United Nations Centre on Transnational Corporations in the late 1980s. Since then, it has been implemented in nearly 30 countries to support business development. The central aim of this research is to identify the major factors that influenced the implementation process of the EMPRETEC programme in Ghana and Namibia and to analyse how they afforded or constrained the achievement of seven so-called Critical Programme Components (CPCs). These CPCs are: 1) targeting high growth entrepreneurs; 2) developing an entrepreneurship training workshop that is adapted to the local context; 3) ensuring direction of the programme by a coalition of private and public sector leaders; 4) mobilising support from the private sector; 5) promote linkages among clients; 6) promote business linkages with foreign firms; and 7) establish a sustainable foundation. The theoretical concepts of the research are based on the implementation literature which emerged as part of the policy sciences during the second half of the last century. A new approach is developed to study the highly complex implementation process: in a first step, an analytical framework is developed that comprises five analytical lenses: 1) a contextual lens focusing on the context in which the entire implementation process is embedded; 2) an inter-organisational lens focusing on interactions of the involved stakeholders; 3) an organisational lens for the identification of institutional strengths and weaknesses; 4) an intra-organisational lens for the analysis of intra-agency relationships; and 5) an individual lens focusing on the individuals who were involved in the implementation of the programmes. These lenses cover the entire spectrum and levels of the implementation process. In a second step, 15 major implementation factors are derived from implementation theory. These factors and their influence on the implementation process are then assessed with the help of 100 distinct measures. The influence of the 15 factors on the implementation process and the seven CPCs is subsequently analysed and finally tested using evidence from 18 additional EMPRETEC centres. The study's contribution to knowledge is twofold: (i) The study provides insights into the underlying factors that influenced the implementation of the EMPRETEC programme in Ghana and Namibia. Overall, the implementation conditions were more favourable in Ghana as compared to Namibia. The research hints at the importance of the context and implementers' (both organisations' and individuals') characteristics as crucial factors for successful implementation. Finding the right implementers and aligning implementation objectives to existing development discourses and implementers' ideologies can help to improve effective implementation. (ii) The study proposes an innovative approach to study implementation processes across narrow cases. Based on third-generation implementation models, a unique data collection and analytical framework is suggested that allows comparing and testing various implementation factors and their influence on the implementation process. The emerging results are of high relevance to governments, donors, private organisations and other stakeholders, as many lessons could be derived to improve the implementation and effectiveness of donor interventions, especially in the area of business development programmes.

Mémoire numérisé par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal.

Mémoire numérisé par la Direction des bibliothèques de l'Université de Montréal.

Thèse numérisée par la Direction des bibliothèques de l'Université de Montréal.

Mémoire numérisé par la Direction des bibliothèques de l'Université de Montréal.

Mémoire numérisé par la Direction des bibliothèques de l'Université de Montréal.

Mémoire numérisé par la Direction des bibliothèques de l'Université de Montréal.