Participatory Approaches (PRA) In The Design Of Community Development Projects

Participatory approach(PRA) is a new community development concept and methodestablished and developed at the late of last century which encourages and promotes publicparticipation. Stressing the participation of the relevant development entities in the projectdecision-making, implementation, management and the fairly share of interests actively isit’s distinguishing feature during the whole link of a project’s occurrence, development,resource allocation, distribution of the interests and impact evaluation. Compared withthe traditional “top-down” way of development approach, the participatory approach is away of “bottom-up” which incarnates the development wishes of the community peopleexactly. In fact, it reflects a process of being empowered of the grass-roots.At present, the approach has been applied in lots of international cooperation projectson planning, designing, implementation and evaluation. Through the applied practice of theparticipatory approaches on the Gladin community development projects planning anddesigning, the article proved out that the launch of the participate community developmentproject planning promote the integration of outside and local knowledge. So as to thecontents of developing projects that finally confirmed can meet the desires of thecommunity people. The approach can not only help to improve the rationality of the projectdesign while ensure the effectiveness and quality of the project implementation activities,but also can acquire the understanding, support and cooperation of the relevant interestsgroups easily that benefit the self-development of the community, accordingly promote theachievement of the sustainable development of the community.