Participation appeared in development discourses for the first time in the 1970s, as a generic call for the
involvement of the poor in development initiatives. Over the last three decades, the initial perspectives
on participation intended as a project method for poverty reduction have evolved into a coherent and
articulated theoretical elaboration, in which participation figures among the paraphernalia of good
governance promotion: participation has acquired the status of “new orthodoxy”. Nevertheless, the
experience of the implementation of participatory approaches in development projects seemed to be in
the majority of cases rather disappointing, since the transformative potential of ‘participation in
development’ depends on a series of factors in which every project can actually differ from others: the
ultimate aim of the approach promoted, its forms and contents and, last but not least, the socio-political
context in which the participatory initiative is embedded.
In Egypt, the signature of a project agreement between the Arab Republic of Egypt and the Federal
Republic of Germany, in 1998, inaugurated a Participatory Urban Management Programme (PUMP) to
be implemented in Greater Cairo by the German Technical Cooperation (Deutsche Gesellschaft für
Technische Zusammenarbeit, GTZ) and the Ministry of Planning (now Ministry of Local Development) and
the Governorates of Giza and Cairo as the main counterparts. Now, ten years after the beginning of the
PUMP/PDP and close to its end (December 2010), it is possible to draw some conclusions about the
scope, the significance and the effects of the participatory approach adopted by GTZ and appropriated
by the Egyptian counterparts in dealing with the issue of informal areas and, more generally, of urban
development.
Our analysis follows three sets of questions: the first set regards the way ‘participation’ has been
interpreted and concretised by PUMP and PDP. The second is about the emancipating potential of the
‘participatory approach’ and its ability to ‘empower’ the ‘marginalised’. The third focuses on one hand
on the efficacy of GTZ strategy to lead to an improvement of the delivery service in informal areas
(especially in terms of planning and policies), and on the other hand on the potential of GTZ
development intervention to trigger an incremental process of ‘democratisation’ from below.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:unibo.it/oai:amsdottorato.cib.unibo.it:1314 |
| Date | 12 June 2009 |
| Creators | Piffero, Elena <1981> |
| Contributors | Emiliani, Marcella |
| Publisher | Alma Mater Studiorum - Università di Bologna |
| Source Sets | Università di Bologna |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Doctoral Thesis, PeerReviewed |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/restrictedAccess |
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