Beyond Participation: Subsidiarity and Social Transformation in Community Development: A Systematic Review

Abstract

Community participation is widely promoted in community development as the pathway through which interventions become locally owned and sustainable. However, participatory practice frequently stalls at information sharing and consultation, and participation ranges from tokenistic involvement to citizen control without reliably shifting decision-making authority to communities. This persistent failure of current participation models motivated a systematic review of community participation, subsidiarity, and social transformation in community development practice and local governance. The three concepts are examined together because subsidiarity specifies where decision-making authority should reside, and may therefore explain why participation does or does not lead to durable change. Following PRISMA 2020, Google Scholar was searched for English-language records published between January 2023 and September 2026, and full texts were read on the publishers’ platforms. The search was completed in September 2026. Of 19 records identified, 15 sources formed the review pool and were synthesised thematically. Foundational texts and earlier reviews served only as baselines and comparators. Five themes emerged. Participation is graded. It is authorised as an invitation or as an entitlement. Social capital yields agency through collective institutions. Subsidiarity relocates decision-making to the community, keeps wider-scale actors supportive, and creates resourced intermediary bodies. Transformation is more durable where these arrangements are embedded. The pool is small and largely qualitative or conceptual, so the findings are associations, not causal effects. Subsidiarity should be embedded as a founding principle of community development, not added as a procedural step.