Community Participation in Urban Local Administrative Decision-making

This dissertation explores community participation at the grass-root level of decision-making with reference to urban local governments in the Gambella region of Ethiopia. The dissertation aims to study the nature and extent of community participation at the grass-root level decisionmaking process in the Gambella region of Ethiopia. It also analyses how participation can be enhanced from the perspective of decentralisation policy. We found that unclear participatory committees, the negative influence of the governing party, the dominance of bad traditions over women, lack of knowledge of the community on participation, lack of strong leadership that coordinates participation, and weak implementation of decentralisation are impediments to participation. All these factors jointly created negative implications on the performance of the region's journey towards good governance, democratization, and development process. Thus, corrective unfolded iterative strategies such as conducting community dialogue that allows people to discover commonalities, generating shared identities, activism for social change, and building a collective identity should be materialized into action.