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About 3ie The International Initiative for Impact Evaluation (3ie) promotes evidence-informed, equitable, inclusive and sustainable development. We support the generation and effective use of high-quality evidence to inform decision-making and improve the lives of people living in poverty in low-and middle-income countries. We provide guidance and support to produce, synthesise and quality assure evidence of what works, for whom, how, why and at what cost. 3ie impact evaluations 3ie-supported impact evaluations assess the difference a development intervention has made to social and economic outcomes. 3ie is committed to funding rigorous evaluations that include a theory-based design and that use the most appropriate mix of methods to capture outcomes and are useful in complex development contexts. About this report 3ie accepted the final version of the report, Rebuilding the social compact: urban service delivery and property taxes in Pakistan, as partial fulfilment of requirements under grant DPW1.1005 awarded through Development Priorities Window 1. The report is technically sound and 3ie is making it available to the public in this final report version as it was received. No further work has been done. The 3ie technical quality assurance team for this report comprises Francis Rathinam, Neeta Goel, Kanika Jha Kingra and Deeksha Ahuja, an anonymous external impact evaluation design expert reviewer and an anonymous external sector expert reviewer, with overall technical supervision by Marie Gaarder. The 3ie editorial production team for this report comprises Anushruti Ganguly and Akarsh Gupta.

The importance of community participation in projects in the developing and developed world is widely recognised, despite considerable debate regarding what participation means in practice. In the developing world context, there is a distinct debate on how participation can achieve its stated goals of creating 'ownership' among targeted beneficiaries without becoming susceptible to elite capture or excluding marginalised groups. Projects that involve engineering analysis present a further challenge: to incorporate external technical expertise in decision-making so that project outcomes are improved, without compromising the participative process. The paper sets out a practical framework that reconciles the critical importance of early, meaningful community involvement in decision-making with the active role of the engineer as a technical adviser and facilitator. It is targeted for application in communityscale infrastructure development projects, where the community is the primary targeted beneficiary. The framework draws a parallel with a traditional engineer-client relationship, in which the client's (in this case the community's) needs and preferences drive the design process and in which final design approval rests with the client, but where the engineer plays an active role in helping to understand and interpret the client's needs and develops engineering responses through an iterative, responsive design process.

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