This is a starting point for anyone examining how decision-making power moves — or fails to move — towards the communities a programme serves. It is organised by question rather than by discipline.
Key points
- Read the critiques of participation alongside the advocacy for it.
- Follow the money: intermediation costs shape what is possible.
- Evidence on participatory budgeting is deeper than on participatory grant-making.
- Language and translation are structural issues, not logistics.
Where does power actually sit?
Begin with the literature on participation ladders and its critiques, which distinguishes consultation from control. The useful question is not whether communities were consulted but who could have said no, and at which point.
Participatory resource allocation
Municipal participatory budgeting is the best-evidenced body of practice on communities allocating real money, with decades of studies on design choices, capture risks and turnout. Much of it transfers directly to participatory grant-making.
Intermediaries and transaction costs
Compliance, due diligence and reporting requirements are transferred down the chain and fall hardest on the smallest organizations. Literature on aid intermediation quantifies how much of a grant is consumed before it reaches delivery.
Language, translation and knowledge
Whose evidence counts is partly a question of which language it is written in. Work on knowledge equity and research translation is essential reading before designing any call for proposals.
How to use this list
We deliberately point to themes and open-access literatures rather than a fixed citation list, so the reading stays current. If you would like the specific papers our team is working from in a given cycle, contact us and we will share them.