image: Brent Metz, professor of anthropology, leads a community discussion in 2012 about a water project in Matazano, Guatemala.
Credit: Ben Rufenacht
LAWRENCE, Kan. -- Good intentions are not enough to make community-based international development work; it needs a facilitator who can literally translate but also figuratively bridge the gap in power dynamics between the two sides of the equation.
That's the gist of a new book chapter by Brent Metz, who is a professor of anthropology and director of the Center for Latin American & Caribbean Studies at the University Kansas.
The book is titled “Community-Led Development in Practice: We Power Our Own Change” ------ link to: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003377917 ------------ (Routledge, 2025, ed. Elene Cloete and Gunjan Veda), and Metz’s chapter deals with the difficulties faced by a Kansas-based Engineers Without Borders group trying to bring clean water to a small group of indigenous people in the hinterlands of Guatemala.
Metz, who is also affiliated with KU’s Department of Indigenous Studies, has studied and regularly visited the Ch’orti’ Maya people of Guatemala since 1991, so he was positioned to act as one of the necessary go-betweens. But he writes that even that was not enough to see the project through to even a partially successful conclusion. An Engineers Without Borders facilitator on the ground and a local partner organization affiliated with the Catholic church was needed, Metz said, “to get the project over the finish line.”
This is because of numerous intersecting social dynamics, Metz said -- from the legacy of colonialism that leads to distrust of outsiders (or even those within the Indigenous group who step outside or get ahead of others) to a penchant for gossip and jealousy, to a rapidly climbing population -- that undermine the Ch’orti’’s preferred method of operating by consensus.
“Indigenous societies ... like to do things by consensus, not by democracy” Metz said. “Not 51 percent say one thing, and the other 49 percent feeling excluded ... so they try to avoid or prevent conflict. Well, their communities have grown in the last few generations from hundreds to thousands, and try getting consensus among thousands of people! It is really hard, but they insist on it, and they don't have any alternative. Sometimes they say ‘We wish we had a strong man or a chief who would just order us to do something.’ And then other times they say, ‘We give up. Let's just vote on it, and 51 percent wins.’ But then, you know, those same simmering problems are there.”
The article states that conflicts over the installation and operation of the water project even led to death threats among the disputants. Metz recommends as a best practice regular, community-wide meetings to raise and knock down rumors about a project whenever possible.
“Our section of our book was on how to garner participation,” Metz said. “Participation sounds like a great word. They throw it around in development all the time. They also throw around ‘collaboration.’ But what does that really mean on the ground? So my article shows how challenging it is to garner participation when people weren't used to working on projects like this.
“And it's not just about the indigenous people. It's about the engineers, too. They don't know who the Ch’orti’s are and how they live and what their concerns are, and what they can and can't manage. So a lot of it had to be training both sides about each other. “
It turns out, Metz said, that “organizing people is the hardest part. These engineers were amazing. Their work is straightforward. ... But if we did another project like this ... the first thing I would ask is ‘Where are the conflicts in this community? Who might not work with whom?’ Because every community, Indigenous or not, has these issues.”