ABSTRACT
So-called bottom-up approaches in rural development are often initiated by external agents. This process happens both in the developed (the ‘North’) as well as in the developing world (the ‘South’). In the context of the European Union’s second pillar of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), for example, stakeholder participation is often understood as a means to put subsidiarity – decision-making as close as possible to citizens – into practice and to incorporate rural peoples’ needs, concerns and aspirations into bureaucratic procedures for regional development. In the South, many aid agencies and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) promote bottom-up approaches and participation in rural development. The guiding assumption for fostering popular participation is that decisions taken with the active involvement of the concerned stakeholders are better suited to local conditions and are more sustainable, because participation is expected to trigger local ownership (see Chambers 1994, 1997). On this basis, most practitioners – and scholars – implicitly assume that this also provides sufficient legitimacy to conduct such external intervention in a local community or group.
