Left to their own devices? Community self-help between alternative development and neo-liberalism

Abstract

It is now widely agreed that the poor are not passive in the development process. Participation, once radical and controversial, is now mainstream management theory. Harnessing self-help potential is the order of the day. Properly ‘empowered’ or at least ‘enabled’, the poor are assumed to be able to overcome deficits of infrastructure and services and exhaust their tremendous entrepreneurial potential. Without altogether denying the validity of the self-help approach, the paper scrutinizes both its practical assumptions and ideological underpinnings. Does it work for all urban poor communities, and critically, for all people in such communities? And is it its efficiency, or rather the implicit justification of cutting subsidies and transfers, which make it so popular with governments and international financial institutions?