ABSTRACT
In recent years it has become an accepted idea that development agencies should work in partnership with local communities. Decades of failure of projects in the top-down, scientistic mode – where the people who actually lived and worked the land were marginalised as ignorant and incompetent if not downright destructive – prompted a change of approach. Development projects moved through a phase of attempting to co-opt local participants towards the ideal of full partnership, where local people would take over the planning as well as the management of their own resources.
