Introduction Participation in development has been both widely supported and harshly criticized. On the positive side, participation discourse offers more “voice and choice” to the poor in development (Cornwall, 2006), and participatory development is based on “involving ‘beneficiaries’, or more generally, ‘local people’, in development processes” (Eversole, 2003: 781). From a critical perspective, participation has often been oversimplified, decon-textualized, exclusive and depoliticized. Even a thoughtfully designed program focused on a marginalized group can still exclude people or allow for elite capture