This paper takes a critical look at the popular issue of participation, and suggests that a major weakness in the literature of participation is its failure to deal with the realities of statism in the modern world, and particularly the Third World. The paper argues that while many proponents of participation theory claim a commitment to socialism and marxism their views in fact derive from a blend of individualism, populism and anarchism, ideologies which incorporate a basic distrust of the state. In effect the impact of this is that participation theory has an implied distrust of state sponsored development. This distrust, the paper argues, is not necessarily a fair reflection of the current state of affairs in the Third World.
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