Participatory management of public facilities provided for communities through community based organizations

Abstract

Immediately after independence, Sri Lanka has made an attempt to improve the quality of life of people by way of implementing multi-sectoral development programmes adopting conventional type of " top down " strategy which has been similarly implemented during the colonial era. The " top - down " development strategy is a bureaucratic method in which the decision making mechanism is in the hands of higher authorities comprising of personnel of the central agency. The significant feature of this strategy is that the beneficiary communities have been isolated from the implementation and the maintenance process of development activities. With the lapse of time it has been identified that strategies of this nature have not helped to address the issues pertaining to the country's development as expected . This situation encouraged the Government of Sri Lanka (GOSL) to change the development scenarios and to introduce participatory management concept for its various development programmes , in which overall responsibility of managing development activities are to be under taken by the beneficiary community, as an alternative strategy. During last decades, the GOSL has implemented several multi-sectoral development programmes adopting the new concept. The problem in this regard is that there is no proven evidence to show that such development programmes introduced under the new strategy have been able to reach the goals expected by development agencies. Furthermore no acceptable participatory management model has been developed to explore its strengths and weaknesses even in future implementation of development programmes in the country.