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Ideologies of participatory development promoted by development organizations in Tanzania are at odds with popular aspirations. Popular understandings of development emphasize individual achievement in a context of social differentiation, in what amounts to a recognition of the importance of individual agency in bringing about social transformation. Despite the claims of participatory development ideologies to foster the empowerment of the poor, the interventions it promotes are premised on a denial of poor people’s capacity to bring about change for themselves. Agency can only be effected through the imposed institutional structures for participation.

This article considers the potential contribution of social anthropology to understanding poverty as both social relation and category of international development practice. Despite its association with research in communities and countries now considered poor anthropology has remained disengaged from the current poverty agenda. This disengagement is partly explained by the disciplinary starting point of anthropology which explores the processes though which categories come to have salience. It is accentuated by the relationship of anthropology as a discipline to the development policy and the research commissioned to support it. An anthropological perspective on poverty and inequality can shed light on the ways in which particular social categories come to be situated as poor. It can also reveal the social processes through which poverty as policy objective becomes institutionalised in development practice and in the social institutions established to monitor, assess and address it.

Despite high transaction and financial costs participatory approaches to development are now standardised across a range of organisations internationally. Participatory planning in various forms is widely used in donor funded local government projects worldwide. This article critically explores the reasons for the continued popularity of participatory approaches. Using examples of cognate participatory processes in Tanzania I show how the outputs of participatory approaches do not justify their continued popularity for development stakeholders. Analytical frameworks from science studies on the social process of collaboration provide insights into the persistence of participatory forms. Participation operates as a boundary object enabling diverse stakeholders to temporarily align themselves around a common project for the purpose of development implementation.