Community empowerment for the sustainability of community driven projects in Pakistan

Abstract

Research accords the significance of decentralization, community empowerment and alternate initiatives employed by several development agencies in West, but there is scarcity of empirical evidences in literature pertaining to sustainability of community driven projects implemented through the community in developing and under-developed countries like Pakistan signify the need to initiate research. The purpose of current research is to examine community empowerment relationship with sustainability of community driven projects in Pakistan. This study has undertaken ‘sense of community’ as the moderator to test the relationship between community empowerment and sustainability of community driven projects The Government of Pakistan had initiated community driven development through Citizen Community Boards after the announcement of the Devolution Plan in 2001. Using proportionate stratified sampling, data was collected from 393 Citizen Community Boards’ members from six districts of Khyber Paktunkhawa Province in Pakistan. The correlation of community capacity building and community participation with sustainability yielded high and positive correlation coefficients. Furthermore, the results of hierarchal regression demonstrated that individuals with an improved sense of community are more0likely to believe that they have greater access to resources and their membership meaningfully contributed towards the development of a local area. The result of semi-structured interviews revealed that sense of community is a major predictor of sustainability of community driven projects and not the political and elite control. Although, few Citizen Community Board’s projects are affected by the political interference as well as elite control, but overall results revealed that the community benefits from the projects. The findings would serve as the guidelines on ways to sustain community driven projects for developing countries like Malaysia, India and the local government in Pakistan.