An Alternative Approach to Participation and Sustainable Rural Development for Sri Lanka

The purpose of this paper is to highlight the constraints on participatory rural development in Sri Lanka, and formulate an alternative participatory approach to resource poor villages through literature surveys on main participatory projects of the country, and intensive village studies and my experiences from the University of Colombo-Japan International Cooperation Agency (UC-JICA) Joint Study Project on Participatory Rural Development and several field studies conducted in Japan. Under the UC-JICA Project, constraints on participation and other information were received from the project activities but also my experiences as the Field Manager especially from the participatory research activities, which were carried out by me in the project villages. In addition, the above constraints and other information were received not only from the mid and final evaluations carried out by JICA but also from the several evaluations were carried out by me. According to the above objectives, this paper has two sections. Section one summarizes the constraints on participatory rural development while Section two presents an alternative approach to participation and sustainable rural development