The paper analyses a community development project based in Jhenaidah, Bangladesh, which evolved through broadening social capital among slum communities and formal institutions in order to bring positive socio-spatial changes in the neighborhoods. Till date, nine disadvantaged communities have formed a network for city-wide community development, have started to build and manage their own funds, built better houses for themselves, and through this process have managed to draw attention and support from the local government. Started by a small group of architects and a local NGO in 2015, and still broadening its scopes, this project can be regarded as a successful example of people-led development initiative, especially in a context where most development projects exercise limited participatory values and are dominated by unequal power dynamics. Hence issues like scaling up and economic sustainability still concern those, who can see the community-driven development process with an unbiased attitude. The overarching goal of this article is to sketch out these issues with the help of empirical understandings from the field and theoretical findings from literature on social innovation and power in planning in order to understand how to work balance between local and institutional management of projects in order to avoid perceiving bottomup and top-down initiatives in a dualistic manner.

Most The goal of this article is to analyse the participatory process of development projects. Drawing upon my professional experience in a project called Pre-Poor Slum Intergration Project (PPSIP) which was based in Comilla, Bangladesh-I argue that development projects dominated by rigid power structures inside and in-between institutions inhibits community participation that reflects the actual need of the beneficiary group; and as happened in this case, produce results that do not serve the people in real need but rather only serve the purpose of the institutions that manage the project, more so the institutions having higher degrees of power. In this article I try to combine insights gained from our field experience and literature study on post-politics and power in planning in order to sketch out the stakeholder institutions' interest, capacity and enrolment in order to understand how socio-relational dynamics as opposed to technical procedures shaped the project. In this project participation from the community was ritualisticserving only a face-value, the operational team on the field were devoid of power to take important decisions or challenge the institutional framework that they were part of, and at the same time institutions with higher degrees of decision making power were not sufficiently involved with the realities of the field. I conclude that in order to make participatory process really work, involved institutions should not limit their efforts in repetitive consensus building exercises based on preconceived ideas and traditional methods of community development.

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