People and Panchayat Participation, Awareness and Perception

Successful decentralisation is not just about building good political institutions, it is also essential to improve overall governance at the local level. This includes meaningful participation of the local population and their inclusion into decision-making processes to foster transparency, accountability and responsiveness, and to guarantee efficient and effective policyimplementation. Meaningful inclusion of all relevant actors at the local level is decisive for successful local development, to ensure that different local power structures work with each other (George Lutz & Wolf Linder, 2004:1). Theoretically, decentralised governance was expected to promote development when it presents necessary conditions. The present paper proposed to examine one important condition i.e., the dynamics of peoples’ participation, awareness and perceptions.