By Yossef Ben-Meir, Marrakech
The commitment of Kamala Harris’ U.S. Presidential campaign to create an opportunity economy—one that lowers costs and strengthens opportunities for working families and small businesses—has established goals that are consistent with observed outcomes of participatory approaches to community development around the world.
The participatory approach to local development is an umbrella term for community members to collaboratively analyze their needs and opportunities and determine life-enhancing projects that meet both individual and shared goals.
These interactive dialogue methods for identifying and designing local private and public initiatives that enhance livelihoods, education, health, the environment, and other priorities of the people rest on the most determining factor for sustainability and overall success: the beneficiaries decide the development path that impacts them the most and become its managers.
The essential characteristics of an opportunity economy and participatory development approach are immediately apparent. They both focus on full inclusion where everyone is invited and encouraged to participate and succeed, and the unit of action is a local community where the enterprises that emerge meet both individual interests and shared needs.
In addition, participatory economic development and an opportunity economy alike emphasize the creation of local jobs with local people who build their capacities to create positive change and adapt to ever-evolving conditions. These people are the drivers of what ultimately becomes a broader economic transformation that enhances self-reliance.
In participatory development and an opportunity economy as described, self-reliance does not always entail that investments in building the best future come from within the community itself. Rather, investment and support, by necessity, must come from external sources, including state and federal levels with private sector participation, toward meeting the community’s own self-described priorities and needs. This is to say that self-reliance utilizes partnerships across the whole of society to instill upon local communities the capacity to achieve their aspirational and developmental potential.
Both the opportunity economy and participatory development recognize that when concentrated at the small business and community enterprise level, there will be an unimaginable range of outcomes due to the vastly diverse conditions in which they occur—social, economic, political, environmental, and so on.
Each participatory development experience is unique in that participants in one community have their own life experiences and outlooks of the future. They operate under situations that are never entirely the same as another location. So, outcomes will vary from surpassing all that was thought possible to initiatives that ultimately may not see the light or achieve what the people had hoped for.
However, both participatory development and an opportunity economy offer commitment to inspiring and supporting people in defining their most sincere and viable opportunities, and assisting them as best as possible toward their own implementation, providing at least that level of dedication for those who seek it. The focus on communities rather than the individual, on the group rather than the one, means that children stand to gain, the lives of the elderly will be part of the intention to enhance lives, and all members of all backgrounds have the chance to contribute and grow.
Housing figures highly into the Harris campaign's notion of an opportunity economy with their objective to build millions of affordable new homes. An important lesson gained in participatory experiences is found within the architectural planning world, where future residents are integral to the actual design of not just homes, but of neighborhoods and the overall layout of their community. By doing so, this will powerfully enhance their commitment to maintain and seek the most positive versions of homes and neighborhoods that they desire. Community building begins within the initial stages of plotting and mapping where they will spend years of their lives.
The participatory approach to housing is not only directly relevant to the construction of new locations, but also to the restoration of existing ones, which too is part of the opportunity economy. This refers to the revitalization of existing neighborhoods and important places in a community as determined by the local people themselves. Their participation in decisions that affect their renewal is as important as finance in the successful implementation and management of their initiatives.
Entrepreneurship also figures highly in both models, which seem to share an expanded version of what constitutes entrepreneurial innovation and the initiatives that follow. An entrepreneurial enterprise is not necessarily based on the idea of a single individual but rather the integration of multiple points of view on a project or business design that is able to then consider multiple factors that may affect the future of that project or business. Through that collective approach to project development, entrepreneurship becomes a reflection of a single development idea born from the interaction of numerous members of a community and technical consultants who support that process.
Resources, policies, and energy can be dedicated at the community level for a collective of people who share a neighborhood and workspace and overtime develop social relationships and local institutions that reflect their values and dreams for the future. The opportunity economy and participatory development approach are ultimately both committed to a similar pathway toward alleviating poverty and fulfilling these deeply held dreams of the people.
The lessons of participatory development, having been applied around the world very significantly since at least the 1950s and certainly in the past 30 years, suggest certain key factors for success. First, members of communities do not typically spontaneously plan a future together, achieve opportunities in joint action, or fulfill the potential of their neighborhoods, towns, and cities. It requires facilitation to help organize such meetings and gatherings where people are completely free to express themselves and build coalitions around investments that bring about the broadest and most enduring benefits for a community and those around them.
Facilitators apply methods or activities that help guide people through their own discovery experience toward an action plan based on projects they want most of all. Thus, trained facilitators—who may be school teachers, members of local government, business owners, religious leaders, members of civil groups, or students—can all be stellar catalysts of community dialogue and development. Training at education centers, for example, along with experiential learning in real community situations, is a helpful part of obtaining the number and efficacy of facilitators needed to achieve these goals on a wide scale.
In addition, we also learned from past participatory experiences that merely providing the freedom to participate does not ensure people actually feel free to participate as openly as they could. We all carry doubts and fears, and many of us have never been asked about our most sincere vision and long-held goals nor taken the time and consideration needed to determine what those goals are.
Therefore, empowerment of the people is the necessary first step in the beginning of establishing an opportunity economy. Our confidence and self-beliefs need to be strengthened, particularly for people who have been historically marginalized or uninvited but also for people from all walks of life who have their share of fear and uncertainty. In order for communities to decide on the future they intend to pursue, they must first build their resolve around goals that they have determined for themselves.
Another key lesson shown over time and across the diversity of places around the world is that finance mechanisms need to be flexible to accommodate the variety of dreams that communities hold. Funding mechanisms need to have that flexibility in order to accommodate the people’s collective will whether that be in food growing or processing, clean water, improved public health clinics and schools, business innovations, tourism, environmentalism, or any of the different possible ways that groups of people may wish to create their sustainable livelihoods.
Finally, just as the outcomes are rarely, if ever, the same in any two places as people and the dynamics and opportunities surrounding them are determined by infinite variables, opportunity economies and participatory development approaches from launch to transformative conclusions will not fit nicely in just four-year terms.
Yes, with several years of full investment and dedication toward transformation, we will see generational benefits, but these processes, formations of partnerships, trial-and-error phases, and rises and falls of shocks and unpredictable events all necessitate time in order to realize a fuller potential.
To give people the best likelihood of continuity and essential resources that carry forward, we must build into institutions the enduring premises upon which an opportunity economy is built, not based on any political term or cycle but based on the natural timeline that transformation actually requires.
Oct. 21, 2024
Dr. Yossef Ben-Meir is a sociologist and President of the High Atlas Foundation, a U.S.-Moroccan non-government organization dedicated to sustainable development.