The chapter is based on the framework contextualizing ‘participation as a development tool’ for community engagement, inviting the possibility of ‘self-organization’ through mobilization, resistance and participation in governance and decision-making, claiming rights, and so on (Cornwall 2000; Cornwall and Eade 2010; Cornwall 2011a). Following this perspective, this ethnographic study draws evidence on the collective efficacies of gendered otherness, generating a form of ‘protest participation’ that focuses on facilitating ‘citizen-to-citizen’ deliberations. This emphasizes collective action to form a specific movement-based politics, or a radical political manoeuvring (Newman and Clarke 2009; Lee 2010; Cohen and Uphoff 2011: 35; White 2011: 59; Hilmer 2010). Andrea Cornwall (2011a) recalls ‘invited participation’ that foregrounds issues of ‘power’ and radical democratic tenets giving space to marginalized and ‘subaltern voices’ (Fraser 1997). This further determines the mobilization and articulation of citizens with a meaningful engagement of the marginalized to challenge the trajectories of ‘usual’ development politics on the one hand (Mohanty 2011: 268; White 2011: 58), and to claim participation by the community's self-construction of social networks, organizations and its competence on the other (Barnes and Mann 2011; Haque and Kusakabe 2011; Franklin 2014). In the wake of the economic restructuring around the globe and the so-called ‘transformative project’ of the North‒South, donor‒recipient dynamics since the 1960s and 1970s, followed by neoliberalism from the 1980s, a ‘participatory development’ agenda has emerged that strongly resembles the re-institutionalization of the colonial flavour and exclusionary mechanism, sidelining the ‘local’ political or cultural factors of the community's engagement (Leal 2011: xiv; Cornwall 2011a).

This chapter digs deep into the different dimensions of community development and participation so as to explore issues of shared experiences, knowledge, language, speech, acts and performances ‒ a tool and a creative practice to identify the possibilities of social change (Butler 2010). This performative magic constitutes ‘dialogue’ which has again a performative dimension and a certain kind of speech which are necessary for actualizing politics, and delves into the ‘performative lens’ of the politics of interaction. The symbolic metaphor that is generated thus highlights a particular language of participation which in a way builds a specific form of cultural image for community mobilization, and strategies for self-empowerment and claiming rights and citizenship (Ibrahim and Alkire 2007; Niemi and Plante 2008; Dean 2009; Palacios 2015).