The Influence of Community Participation in Development Planning on Local Development Outcomes in Uganda: A Literature Review (2020-2026)

This article reviews scholarship published between 2020 and 2026 on the relationship between community participation in development planning and budgeting and local development outcomes in Ugandan local governments, set within global frameworks of participatory budgeting and adaptive governance. Synthesizing global systematic reviews and Ugandan district evidence from Bukedea and Bundibugyo, it organizes the evidence around four axes: the incorporation of community priorities into approved budgets, financial resource allocation, the implementation of local development projects, and service delivery outcomes. The review is framed by established theories of citizen participation, from Arnstein's ladder of participation to contemporary accounts of participatory budgeting and adaptive governance. It finds a consistent pattern. Participatory mechanisms reliably strengthen civic trust, procedural transparency, and community monitoring, but their translation into completed projects and improved service delivery is constrained by structural fiscal realities, chiefly weak own-source revenue mobilization, dependence on earmarked conditional grants, and operational funding deficits in the planning process itself. Fiscal capacity emerges as a critical moderating variable between participation and physical outcomes. The review identifies gaps in causal evidence, in the analysis of fiscal-capacity moderation, and in implementation-gap tracking, and it calls for longitudinal and quasi-experimental designs that follow community priorities from consultation through to completed service delivery.