Do Participatory Approaches Spark Critical Consciousness? Inside a Village Experiment That Reveals What Development Often Misses**

 

(Acknowledgements: Dhwani Lalai, Keertan Baghel, Ramkumar, Dheeresh, Umesh and Rajesh of Foundation for Ecological Security in 2019-20)

For decades, “participation” has been one of the most overused—and least understood—words in development. From large donor programmes to grassroots NGOs, everyone claims to involve the community. But does participation really empower people? Or has it become a comfortable ritual that leaves deeper structures untouched?

Mahatma Gandhi: Google images

Paulo Friere: from shutterstock

To answer this, it helps to return to two thinkers who shaped the idea long before it became a development buzzword. Mahatma Gandhi imagined the what of a true democracy—self-governed, self-reliant communities shaping their own futures. Paulo Freire offered the how—dialogue, critical awareness and the courage to question oppression. When put together, they point toward a participatory approach that is not just about including people in projects, but about enabling them to understand and transform the systems that shape their lives.

Yet history has taken a different path. Born in the modernisation wave of the 1950s and popularised during the Green Revolution, participatory development gradually morphed into a set of tools—mapping, ranking, focus groups—widely used but rarely transformative. Critics have long pointed out its blind spots: shallow methods, romanticised notions of “community,” and a stubborn refusal to confront power. Participation often stops at diagnosis, staying far away from the uncomfortable truths of markets, governance and inequality. The result? Projects that look good on paper but leave the poorest untouched.

A recent field experiment set out to break this pattern by triggering something deeper—critical consciousness. The idea was simple but radical: instead of asking villagers what they needed, help them analyse the structures shaping their economic choices. Through repeated exercises—simulated games about wealth, village-level expenditure mapping, tax tallies and comparisons with actual government spending—communities were invited to see the bigger picture behind their everyday struggles.

The outcomes were striking. In one tribal village of Mandla district, people discovered that although their 150 households spent nearly ₹75 lakh a year outside the village—₹63 lakh to markets and ₹12 lakh in taxes—they received barely ₹4.47 lakh in development expenditure in return. Scaled up, their district was contributing more than ₹147 crore annually, with little clarity on how much flowed back. For many participants, this was the first time development had been discussed not as a list of schemes but as an economic system they were part of—and could question.

But the real achievement lay in the process. Each exercise opened new conversations. Each conversation invited another round of reflection. And across groups, people began connecting personal experiences with structural realities—from the breakdown of local circular economies to the opaque ways state and market actors extract value.

The experiment shows that participation becomes powerful only when it becomes political—not in the partisan sense, but in the Freirean sense of understanding how power works. It is not the maps or the tools that matter, but the thinking they trigger. When communities start asking why money flows the way it does, who benefits from their spending, or why redistribution feels so thin, they begin reclaiming democracy in its deepest form.

Participatory development does not need more techniques. It needs more courage to engage with structure, not just agency. More room for questions, not just answers. And more patience for processes that unfold slowly, unpredictably, and—when they work—transformatively.