By Ghazala Mansuri and Vijayendra Rao of the World Bank
Community development projects, and interventions that attempt to improve the “demand side” of governance, are premised on the belief that public participation will necessarily solve failures in governments and markets. The problem in the design of these interventions, however, is that civic capacity is either assumed to be high rather than something to be nurtured or is developed in a manner that does not realistically deal with the challenge of encouraging participation.