Empowerment through participation? The effectiveness of participatory methods in clientelist societies

International development NGO's changed their intervention strategies and policies over the past decades following outsiders' criticisms and internal reflection processes. The traditional top-down approach made way for a bottom-up approach with a focus on identifying and supporting local initiatives through participatory methods. Yet when looking closer at the roots of the very concept of participation as well as the way it is operationalized in a West African socio-cultural context, unexpected findings turn up. Despite formal structures designed to guarantee the free participation of all individuals to decision making processes, whether at the national or local level, West-African cultural logic appears to prescribe men and women to comply with the existing inegalitarian power relations of their communities. This paper argues that concepts used in development approaches are very much culture-laden and that their meanings tend to change according to context. The application of participatory methods developed to ensure the empowerment of marginalized groups may lead to results quite different from those initially intended.status: publishe