The Contradictions of Pro-poor Participation and Empowerment: The World Bank in East Africa

ABSTRACT Participatory approaches remain central to development practice and the World Bank continues to espouse them with the promise to make its aid more pro‐poor. Yet participation's (in)effectiveness has become the focus of renewed, polarizing debates, and assessments of the form and function of the World Bank's participatory paradigm are still contested and unresolved. Through extensive field data collected in East Africa, this article seeks to move the debate forward. It presents three interrelated arguments: (1) the World Bank's participatory approach remains largely circumscribed by a Post‐Washington Consensus neoliberalism; (2) the approach, nonetheless, pro‐actively supports pro‐poor gains, and creates space for more alternative initiatives; (3) however, its effectiveness in fostering pro‐poor empowerment is undermined by deep inequalities and political economy dynamics on the ground. Two implications are discussed, which challenge conventional wisdom. First, the World Bank's approach could be seen as a hierarchical system of elements in which certain aspects, but not others, are insulated from popular deliberation. Second, participatory development should be (re)imagined as an open‐ended process rooted in the politicization of inequality and embedded in the dynamics of capitalist development, which also points to the critical role of a developmental state.