Abstract
In a societally initiated development project within a rural informal settlement community, funded by a large corporate in South Africa, participation action learning and action research (PALAR) was employed as the overarching methodology. Among other community development initiatives, an early childhood development (ECD) centre was established. Despite significant gains made by the community over the six years of the project, in taking ownership of the ECD centre and driving development forward, upon the agreed exit of the development agents the project all but failed. This article proposes that underlying social and political contexts are often not overcome, but only temporarily displaced by development processes and thus, often overlooked as a reason for the failure of development efforts by large corporations to effect long-term change. Instead of scrutinizing the situation in terms of how closely and to what depth societal initiated community development efforts are aligned to participatory methodologies, more attention should be paid to the influence of socio-political dynamics within the environment on a community’s efforts to continue their development trajectory.