One of the most important lessons development agencies claim to have learned over the pastdecades is that the absence of local participation at various stages of project planning andimplementation leads to what at best can be termed “inferiorresults.”1 The conclusion that community participation is necessary (if notsufficient) for project success has developed concomitantly with the belief in the halls of powerthat the state is not the ideal executor of a variety of tasks previously deemed its proper realm.Both of these changes in development thinking converged in practical terms beginning in the1980s in the emergence of a greater stress on the role of non-governmental organizations(NGOs). Not only were NGOs and other civil-society actors (including the private sector) seen asuntainted by the rent-seeking behavior attributed to state bureaucracies; they were also seen asproducts of more local or community-based and -interested organizing, a critical vehicle for localparticipation that so many development projects had lacked. Some of this literature also regardedsuch institutions as the forerunners of and central to democratic transitions.2