"Best practices" in practice: a critical reflection on international cooperation and participatory urban development in Cairo's informal areas (Egypt)

Praised as the solution for emancipating poor and marginalised groups and for fostering good governance at the local level, participation has emerged in recent decades as the feature sine qua non of development interventions. But how feasible is it to promote participatory forms of development in authoritarian contexts such as post-Socialist Egypt, where patronage networks permeate the whole process of socio-political negotiation? Is it possible for an international cooperation agency promoting a people-centered approach to urban management to overcome the anti-participatory attitude of governmental authorities and civil society organisations alike? Searching for an answer, this article analyses a participatory urban development programme sponsored in Cairo's informal areas (Egypt) by the German Technical Cooperation (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Technische Zusammenarbeit – henceforth GTZ). Both contextual elements connected to the Egyptian state-society relation and contingent factors linked to the planning and implementation of the programme seem to have affected negatively the success of the development initiative in its emancipating aims.