15 Oct The Orientation of Participation: Centrifugal Urgency vs. Centripetal Transformation
Written by Liby Johnson
Not all participation holds. Some scatters outward, urgent but shallow. Others draw people inward, slower but enduring. This piece looks back at Gram Vikas’ experience and forward to the Water Secure Gram Panchayat programme, asking what it means to keep the centre intact.
Participation Takes Many Forms
Participation has long been spoken of as central to development. It is the word that signals inclusion, consultation, ownership. But participation is not one thing. It takes different shapes, and the outcomes can be very different. Over time, I have come to see two broad orientations of participation – one that pulls people outward, and another that draws them together.
Building and maintaining together created new spaces for people to speak, decide, and organise. Credit: Ajaya Kumar Behera, Gram Vikas
A Lens from Political Geography
Political geographer Richard Hartshorne used the terms centrifugal and centripetal to describe forces shaping nation states. Centrifugal forces pull apart; centripetal forces hold together. The same lens can be useful for social change. Some approaches invite people in only to align them
with ready-made solutions. Others begin from a shared centre of purpose, allowing many paths to grow from it.
When Centripetal Beginnings Turn Centrifugal for Scale
I have also seen centripetal practice turn centrifugal. The integrated water and sanitation work that Gram Vikas promoted is a case in point.
In the early years, water and sanitation was a neutral and uncontested entry point to a village. It became the centre from which change radiated. Every household had to join for the work to begin. The act of building and maintaining together created new spaces for people to speak, decide, and organise. As drudgery reduced, women found time for collective work and village institutions. Better hygiene improved children’s health and school attendance. The “all-or-none” rule reinforced solidarity. Marginalised households were included. What began with toilets and taps grew into shifts in gender roles, inter-caste relations, and collective governance. It was a centripetal practice—anchored in a centre that pulled people inward toward shared purpose realised in diverse ways.
With expansion, the orientation of the work shifted. Scaling to more villages demanded speed and wider coverage. The slow, deliberate processes gave way to delivery targets. Findings from the 2020 Status Assessment Survey show this clearly. Increase in coverage came at the cost of eventual functionality of the systems. Weaker institutions, built through hurried participation, led to lower ownership and more failures. What had ensured durability—agreement, common investment, shared responsibility—was thinned out in the push for speed. Participation became centrifugal. Facilities were delivered, but the collective centre weakened. The effectiveness of change declined.
Learning for the next phase
I reflect on this as Gram Vikas steps into the next phase of its work through the Water Secure Gram Panchayat programme. The WSGP is much more multidimensional in its design and approach than the water and sanitation work was. WSGP also envisages a scale—1,000 Gram Panchayats in Odisha and Jharkhand in the next few years. Does the understanding of centrifugal-centripetal processes help us improve how we do what we do?
Centripetal approaches need patient investment in local institutions, women’s groups, and local expertise. Credit: Ajaya Kumar Behera, Gram Vikas
Climate Urgency and Other Centrifugal Pulls
The rapid effects of climate change have driven us to imagine change as something urgent in nature. The crisis seems to demand immediate action. The impulse is to act quickly—plant trees, distribute solar pumps, run awareness sessions, launch apps. Communities are asked to take part, but usually to validate what has already been designed.
The wider development system reinforces this rushing. Funding cycles are short. Reporting frameworks favour visible outputs. Global narratives present transformation as something that can be replicated at speed. The orientation is centrifugal. Participation pulled outward toward pre-set interventions. The results are quick, but shallow. Without ownership, practices often fade; what remains is the memory of activity rather than the endurance of change.
Holding to a centripetal anchor with practices that grow from the centre
WSGP needs to hold to a centripetal orientation. We intend to begin with a shared anchor: the sustainability of aquifers, springs, and soils that secure water for generations. To this core are added the other aspects of a secure, dignified, and resilient future: the dignity of reliable water and sanitation at home, the opportunity for households to pursue livelihoods that bring prosperity, and the assurance that everyone can participate as equals in decision making and governance.
Centripetal approaches are rarely neat. They need patient investment in local institutions, women’s groups, and local expertise. They accept that a hamlet in hilly Gajapati will not move like one in riverine Ganjam. But they consolidate intent. Local governments plan differently, households build new water habits, and women and youth take leadership. This is not compliance with outside design, but collective practice woven into daily life. From this centre, villages find their own uses for the tools: groundwater passbooks to guide balanced water use, backyard gardens fed by wastewater, or hyper-local forecasts guiding cropping. Each practice looks different, yet all return to the same aspiration of dignity and security. The process is slower and less uniform, but it embeds new norms in daily life.
 Orientation Matters Most
The question, then, is not whether participation exists but what orientation it takes. Centrifugal participation can address urgency but struggles to transform. Centripetal participation, anchored in a common centre and drawing in diverse energies, has the patience to endure and the depth to shift systems. For Gram Vikas, this orientation will matter most as we work toward the ambition of a thousand Water Secure Gram Panchayats. The real challenge is not scale itself. It is whether scale can be pursued without losing the centripetal anchor that makes transformation last.