*These five principles will ensure best results if applied jointly and in sequence. If not possible to apply all 5 principles, project teams are advised to use the World Bank Social Inclusion Assessment Tool (SiAT) to address social inclusion and gender equality issues
Treat individuals and groups at risk of exclusion as partners: ensure that their voice is heard.
A critical way to foster inclusion during project implementation is by inviting groups at risk of exclusion into consultations & decision making as much as possible. In line with WB guidance around citizen and stakeholder engagement, groups at risk of exclusion should be given space to provide feedback, voice concerns and advise on project design and implementation. If local populations are treated as partners with equal say and their contribution is given equal value as that of the technical experts, the project design can respond to any barriers that marginalized groups may face, there is greater local ownership and likely better sustainability of the project interventions.
Applying the step
Respecting the voice of all project stakeholders means that their views and knowledge are given equal consideration as the knowledge presented by formal institutions.
E.g. climate change has been impacting nomadic pastoralists around the globe and they have been adapting to it over decades relying on their traditional indigenous knowledge (IK). There is a need to integrate traditional knowledge with current scientific findings. Yet, projects should ensure that they do not neglect the value of local knowledge and that participatory processes are designed to allow local populations to be heard.
Due to patriarchal social norms women’s voices are often not heard in decision making processes. This may happen because women cannot attend meetings (due to time, location etc.) or are not given the opportunity (or even permission) to speak in such meetings. To ensure that their voices are heard, the key is in the application of steps 1-3, which identify how and why women are excluded. Projects can introduce sets of principles of inclusive communication for all stakeholder events and hold participants accountable to them. They can ensure translation to indigenous languages, childcare services and also transport to and from the meetings to ensure women are able to participate on equal footing with the men.
In the case of large-scale industrial livestock interventions, ensuring that workers’ unions and other similar civil society groups have access to the discussion table are key. If the majority of workers are from migrant groups with limited language skills in the dominant national language, translation to other languages should be ensured by the projects.
Trade-offs
With any of the 5 five steps for promoting social inclusion in SIL, the main trade off is the resource cost of the activity. The resource cost includes allocation of qualified staff, time to carry out the exercises at the right moment in the project cycle, and material resources needed for completing the activities in each of the 5 steps.
While there may be a push back about the cost of this work, it is important to remember that the cost of not doing this work - that is - the cost of inequality and social exclusion for broader society is much more substantial, encompassing economic, social, and psychological dimensions. Economically, it results in reduced workforce participation, lower tax revenues, and increased public expenditure on welfare and healthcare. Socially, it leads to higher crime rates, health inequities, and educational disparities, undermining social cohesion and trust. Psychologically, it exacerbates mental health issues and erodes social capital, perpetuating cycles of poverty and inequality across generations. Ultimately, this hampers societal stability, equity, and overall prosperity.
While the participation of diverse stakeholders in decision-making processes is the ‘right’ approach, some community members may opt out from participating due to a variety of constraints. These may include, but are not limited to, all of the following: lack of physical access to decision-making spaces (e.g. due to lack of safe or affordable means of transport, because of disability, due to lack of permission from a senior member of the household or community, etc.); linguistic barriers (e.g. meetings held in a dominant national language that excludes speakers of minority languages; use of technical language that excludes non-expert users); conflicting obligations (women in particular opt out of attending meetings due to a high workload in the household); and negative past experiences with participation (if processes are not socially inclusive, participants may decide that their engagement is not valued and opt out).
Understanding the local power dynamics and how different levels of society will be impacted by a given project is an essential component of project design and implementation. Applying a social inclusion lens to the project design, through a variety of diagnostic tools for understanding power dynamics, can lead to more inclusive and sustainable decision-making processes. Through this process, project teams can better distinguish between meaningful forms of participation that allow all stakeholders to truly engage in decision-making and the more tokenistic approaches that limit the space given to (or even silence) the voices of the less powerful members of the society. Unless they are designed with an understanding of such power dynamics and the politics of decision-making processes, and an active effort is made to make them more inclusive, projects risk not only exacerbating existing inequalities but also eroding social cohesion.