Issue 02 | The Participation Trap

Designing Otherwise

A newsletter for people who design social impact programs and services and want to do it differently

I've been sitting with a word this week: participation. It's everywhere in our sector. And the more I sit with it, the more I think we need to be really clear about what we actually mean by it.

Let's be honest about something the sector rarely says out loud.

Most of what gets called "participation" in program design is consultation in disguise. Communities are invited into a process that has, in most meaningful senses, already concluded.

The theory of change is drafted. The funder is identified. The budget is sketched. And then — at the end of that chain — someone facilitates a focus group and calls it co-design.This isn't participation. It's legitimation. And the difference matters enormously, not just ethically, but practically. Because programs built on performed participation tend to fail the communities they claim to serve, expensively and repeatedly, while the people who designed them move on to the next proposal.

Where the trap is set

The trap isn't usually malicious. It's structural.

I've worked in international development, humanitarian and the UK's charity sectors for years.  When it comes to program or service design, we often start with a "needs assessment". You might know it by other names — a baseline study, a community survey, a situational analysis, a scoping exercise, a rapid appraisal, or simply "going out to talk to communities." The tool changes. The logic underneath it rarely does.

When a needs assessment arrives in a community, it is rarely asking an open question. Many times, the questions have been written after the program logic was already sketched. The indicators are shaped by what the funder agreed to measure. The consultation is structured to produce a particular kind of answer — one that validates what was already planned.

And here's the deeper problem: when you walk into a community asking what is missing, what is broken, what is not working — you are not just gathering data.

You are teaching people how to present themselves to you. You are rehearsing a story of deficit that strips away history, context, resistance, and existing solutions.Communities learn quickly what gets funded. And so they learn to describe themselves in the language of need rather than strength. Not because that's the truth of who they are. Because that's what the system rewards.That is not a neutral process. That is a political one.

What's actually there — that we keep not seeing Scholar Tara Yosso names at least six forms of capital that structurally marginalised communities carry every single day — aspirational, linguistic, familial, social, navigational, and resistant capital. The knowledge people develop sustaining hope against systemic barriers. The skills built navigating institutions not designed for them. The intergenerational wisdom, mutual aid networks, and organizing traditions that have been functioning long before any external actor arrived.

None of these appear in a standard needs assessment. Not because they aren't real. But because the needs assessment was never built to see them.When we enter with a deficit lens rather than a historical, cultural, and political one — we are not just missing information.

We are building our response on a fiction. And then using that fiction to design programs, allocate resources, and claim legitimacy.

One thing you can do this week

Before your next program design conversation — whether that's a team meeting, a community session, or a proposal planning call — try shifting the opening question.

Instead of: What are the gaps/needs/problems here?

Ask: What is already working here that we don't fully understand yet?

Then: Who are the connectors and knowledge-keepers in this community that we haven't spoken to?

Then: What would it look like to resource and amplify what already exists — rather than import something new?

You don't need a new methodology to start this shift.

You need a different first question.

Notice what that question opens up — and what resistance it meets inside your own organization.That resistance is data too.

Going deeper

I've written at length about why needs assessments need to be retired — and what asset-based approaches actually require of us if we're honest about power, not just methodology. It's a longer read but worth it if you're sitting with these questions. Read it on Substack

→Coming in the next issue: The budget is the design — why community participation that doesn't extend to resource allocation is still extraction.

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