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Community-based Planning and Poverty Alleviation in Oaxaca, Mexico

Department of Urban Planning at the University of California at Los Angeles

Victoria A. Beard

Department of Planning, Policy and Design at the University of California at Irvine

In response to the growing critique of decentralized and participatory approaches to development, the article develops a theoretical framework for analyzing the relationship between community-based planning and poverty. Building on contributions from research on collective action, social capital, and social movements, the framework identifies a series of variables that are theorized to affect a community's capacity to alleviate poverty. Using this framework, three community-level case studies in Oaxaca, Mexico are analyzed. All three communities are characterized by a decline in subsistence agriculture, increasing out-migration, and the use of remittances to finance community-based planning projects. The article documents each community's capacity to alleviate the material manifestations of poverty. It concludes that only the community with the strongest capacity for community-level collective action was capable of planning independent of the state, and thus in a position to take incipient steps toward addressing poverty's structural causes. The findings call into question the often assumed desirability of collaborative planning and support the need for a more nuanced understanding of the strengths and limitations of distinct forms of community-based planning interpreted within broader socio-political contexts.

Key Words: community-based planning • rural development • citizen participation • poverty • collective action • social capital • social movements • migration • decentralization • remittances • Oaxaca • Mexico

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