| Summary: | One of the big development challenges of the twentieth century has been defining the role that poor people, the subjects of development, could and should be playing in modern development. The author, a founding father of community-driven development at the World Bank Group, sets out a personal history of how he came to apply core concepts from anthropology, history, and sociology in pursuit of the moral project of finding ways to engage people not just as individual beneficiaries or targets for development, but as social and political beings whose institutions, priorities, values, and voice matter. Beginning with the Kecamatan Development Project in Indonesia (KDP), this essay charts the author's journey, starting with the puzzle of how to enable agency for villagers when someone else holds most of the power and all of the money. Indonesia's historical interest in rural development created an opening, but it was the 1998 political and economic crisis that cracked not just the Indonesian development model but also the World Bank's strictly technocratic approach to poverty. The essay then moves from community-driven development in Indonesia to developing a model that the World Bank could work with more broadly, and the technical, fiduciary, and bureaucratic innovations required throughout. The author reflects on the mainstreaming of community-driven development in the aftermath of KDP, describing the personalities and processes that presented both inspiration and hurdles along the way
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