One of the big development challenges of the twentieth century has been defining the role that poor people, the subjects of development, could and should be playing in modern development. The author, a founding father of community-driven development at the World Bank Group, sets out a personal...

Local governance arrangements often reflect culturally charged struggles for power as well as culturally motivated efforts to gain access to power. Yet current discussions around community-driven and decentralized development pay little attention to this nexus, at best reducing power to...