Integrating participatory practices to development governance in the Maldives: the Shaviyani Atoll experience

Abstract

While the premise of participatory development is to make development more relevant to the realities of the people, actual participatory projects continue to be criticised for failing to take into account the wider structures barriers and power inequalities. Recent developments in the paradigm attempts to address these shortcomings by politicising and broadening the scope of participation beyond a simple project based approach. Contemporary discourse on participatory governance recasts participation as a right and proposes making governance bodies more participatory. This research looks at the broader impact and outcome of a participatory governance project conducted in the Shaviyani atoll of the Maldives, examines how the local governance bodies coped with a decentralised participatory approach and what followed the intensive Project Phase. The research focuses on six islands and explores the factors that were conducive to achieving positive outcomes and identifies the constraints that affected the sustainability of the participatory processes established by the project. The findings show that the initiative suffers from some of the shortcomings of a localised project approach. It also indicates that project related factors such as community consultations and the training provided, and non project factors such as the level of community cohesion and facilitative leadership impacted on the extent of which each of the islands benefited. Based on the findings. the research recommends ameliorating action be undertaken under four main broad strategies. These include, building and facilitating local capacities; strengthening an atoll based body to drive development in the atoll; promoting facilitative and accountable leadership; and. creating better upward linkages between island, atoll and central level decision making.