Abstract:
The majority of Sri Lankan context projects were planned and developed less prioritizing the
community's actual needs. As a result of this top-down approach, when it comes to execution,
there are certain disagreements between the government and the community. Many
contemporary planning theorists acknowledge that public participation in the planning process
can produce or create credibility, trust, and commitment. Even though a fairly modest number of
landscape architectural projects have been carried out in Sri Lanka incorporating community
participation, the effective integration of such data into public landscape design and
development is yet to be explored.
Therefore, this paper investigates the effectiveness of community participation in the design and
planning process of Passaiyoor Park and Rasavinthottam Park in Jaffna, Sri Lanka. The methods
of data collection include interviews, questionnaires, documents, and project reports. The
effectiveness of public participation was evaluated by a toolkit of indicators derived from the
literature. (indicators such as Administration, Information, Objectives, Stage, Targeting,
Technique, Legitimacy, Common values, Fairness and equality, Equal power, and responsible
leadership).
The research outcomes were able to portray that the overall satisfaction level of the community
participation process is 75% in Rasavinthottam Park and 77% in Passaiyoor Park, while the overall
satisfaction level about the project outcome is 45% in Rasavinthottam Park and 22% in Passaiyoor
Park. In fact, evidence that the execution of the community’s vision in the real ground seems to
be lacking. Therefore, without putting pre-initiated projects (by the government) into action,
identify the problems that are most relevant to the public and pay attention to engage the
community early and throughout the process, not only for one stage, and make sure the process
is transparent to all the community and the outcome of the project is their real need.
