An Assessment of community action planning process in urban development Sri Lanka : case study in Lunawa environment improvement & community development project

Abstract

Community Action Planning is a Participatory planning paradigm which emphasizes the involvement of the community at the strategic and management processes in Urban Planning.It is often considered as part of community development. Basic principal behind the public participation is democracy. Community Action Planning (CAP) is being practiced all over the world to entice peoples’ participation and their involvement for the development projects as they are the end users of considerable public investment. Though, it has not been widely practiced in Urban Sector in Sri Lanka, the studies have shown that its benefit is invaluable for the sustainability of development programmes in the country. CAP process is applied in Local Development Planning and thereby people have opportunities to empower themselves in the decision making process for Urban Planning.Therefore there should be a bottom-up approach and integrated public participation process for urban development. There are many studies, researches & proven concepts, developed techniques in relating to the participatory planning in the world. But there are less studies which emphasize clear set of guideline for the CAP Process for practitioners. However development projects and programmes have been implemented in Sri Lanka adopting community action planning techniques; the methods applied are subjective to their own perceptions. As a result, some deficiencies can be observed during the implementation stages. It is possible to trace constanc in the application of CAP. Consequently, it has not been adequately institutionalized as a mainstream practice in the urban development arena. Isolated cases with varying degrees of success can be observed. Therefore, this research attempted to fill this gap by identifying a appropriate guideline for assessing in CAP Process in Sri Lanka. An attempt has been made to study a few participatory development projects that have been implemented through the application of CAP in Sri Lanka and formulated an explicit and refined CAP process for wider application. Based on the collected information 22 key words were developed, which should be included in separate steps in the CAP process. Depending on the available data a criteria was developed to find out to what extent the activities are included in the project. Considering the proportion of activities included in the selected project marks were allocated. According to the analysis of this study and through knowledge from this theoretical analysis, a set of Guidelines for the Community Action planning process was developed and recommended to be followed in practicing the CAP process in Sri Lanka. Key words: Urban Planning, Participatory Planning, CAP Process, indicators, Participatory decision making,