Community-based Planning and Poverty Alleviation in Oaxaca, Mexico

Abstract

T he field of international development planning has slowly moved from centralized, rational-comprehensive, and top-down forms of planning to decentralized, incremental, and bottom-up strategies (Escobar 1992;Scott 1998;Tendler 1997). The shift is demonstrated by the proliferation of community-based resource management programs, decentralization policies, and participatory approaches to project planning, implementation, and evaluation (e.g., Agrawal and Gibson 2001;Manor 1999;Mansuri and Rao 2004). Arguments in favor of the shift rest on certain assumptions embedded in the planning and development literature. One common assumption is that local actors are capable of collective action that results in such meaningful developmental outcomes as improvements in household welfare, protection of scarce natural resources, and the reduction of social exclusion and inequality (e.g., Chambers 1997; Ostrom 1990). A second assumption is that the process of community-level collective action empowers local actors and establishes more democratic decision making (e.g., Fung and Wright 2003;Heller, Harilal, and Chaudhuri 2007;Sandercock 1998).A similar shift has occurred in the study and practice of poverty alleviation. It is characterized by a movement from top-down strategies of conceptualization, measurement, and beneficiary targeting in favor of more participatory, community-based approaches. This shift is evident in work like Voices of the Poor: Can Anyone Hear Us? , in the recent focus by development agencies on understanding livelihood strategies, in the widespread use of participatory rural appraisal methods, and in locally managed microfinance programs (e.g., Beall and Kanji 1999;Chambers 1994;Weiss and Montgomery 2005;Yunus 1998). Echoing the shift within planning is a new emphasis on the experiences of the poor and their contextual knowledge: the poor are seen as key actors in conceptualizing poverty, identifying priorities, and helping to design local strategies of poverty alleviation (e.g., Chambers 1997; Rakodi and Lloyd-Jones 2002). This work has contributed to a broader understanding of poverty. This new understanding goes beyond economic deprivation and includes issues related to basic human needs, access to infrastructure and services, capabilities, and social exclusion. One assumption inherent in much of this work is that "the poor" in a given context or in smaller subsets of the population (e.g., women, squatters, or ethnic minorities) share similar hardships, difficulties, and interests. The "people-centered approaches" to poverty reduction also imply that the poor not only AbstractIn response to the growing critique of decentralized and participatory approaches to development, the article develops a theoretical framework for analyzing the relationship between community-based planning and poverty. Building on contributions from research on collective action, social capital, and social movements, the framework identifies a series of variables that are theorized to affect a community's capacity to alleviate pove...

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