Practices of participation in coastal area management: Experience from Kenya

This paper explores a development intervention, discourses involved and people's encounter at the interfaces during interaction and negotiation processes in everyday project life. It aims to get insight in the participatory intervention; how participatory is it and what is the intention behind the concept? This ethnography of an ongoing program in Kenya concludes that creation of participatory projects is a strategy of development practitioners to have high-rated evaluation of the project for donor funding but, in practice, the concept of participation is used by actors according to their interest and need.