01| Bottom-up, community-led, locally led, participatory, community-driven. Five words for the same claim, and the claim carries weight: work described this way is presumed better than work described as top-down. Funders ask for it, applicants promise it, evaluations record it. Before arguing about whether it works, there is a prior question almost nobody asks. What does the label actually certify? 02| The field is not short of instruments for answering that. It built two of

01| An inter-agency review of community-based child protection, led by Michael Wessells, worked through 160 documents across 60 countries to find what makes such mechanisms work. The answer was not money, technical design or expertise. Community ownership was the strongest determinant of effectiveness. 02| Its second finding is the one to sit with. Most NGO-established child welfare committees were top-down and achieved low ownership, and the evidence for that was not a metri

01| Whether communities can be handed control of development money is not a question anyone needs to speculate about. The experiment has been run, at a scale that dwarfs everything else in the field, by an institution that then paid its own researchers to assess it. 02| Between 1999 and 2011 the World Bank spent $54 billion on community-driven development. It did not retreat afterwards: the Bank currently supports around 400 such projects in more than 90 countries, worth clos

01| "Bottom-up" bundles at least four separable things: who holds decision rights over money, who employs the frontline workers, who the implementer answers to, and whether anything survives donor withdrawal. Two programmes described identically can differ on all four. A community that votes on which project gets built but cannot move a budget line, staffed by outsiders, reporting to a donor, funded for three years, scores local on one dimension and external on three. 02| Bec

01| Every model in this field runs on people — local, mostly unpaid, mostly uncounted, and mostly assumed to behave the same way at ten thousand as they did at ten. Three bodies of evidence say otherwise. What happens to a programme when it grows. What happens to knowledge when people teach people. And what happens to unpaid work when money arrives. The voltage drop 02| The failure of successful pilots to survive expansion is not an impression. It has been studied and named.

01| Everything so far has been about what fails and why. There is a shorter list of things that did not, and it is worth assembling because nobody has assembled it. 02| Three conditions, applied together. The people affected control the organisation — its decisions, its leadership, where possible its money. It has run for at least twenty years, long enough that founders have handed over and funding cycles have turned several times. And it is still operating today, not a histo