CITIZEN PARTICIPATION AND COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT: THE MODERATING ROLE OF CULTURE IN SELECTED STATES IN NIGERIA

Abstract

The development of communities has been associated with the involvement of citizens in transformational programme design and implementation and which culture is perceived to be apposite. The inherent assumption is that citizens’ interest in participating in the development of their community can be linked to the kind of culture that the people practice. Based on this, some communities tend to be backward than others due to lack of initiative and interest in generating development-oriented projects and working cooperatively with the governments to accomplish them. Therefore, the purpose of the study was to examine the moderating effect of community culture on the relationship between citizen participation and community development in some chosen states in Nigeria. The study adopted a cross sectional survey research design which involved a chosen sample from a population. The population of the study included all the 5,641 total membership from the chosen States; Anambra and Kaduna as registered community associations who live within the different communities in the local government areas of both States. Simple random sampling technique was adopted to arrive at 918 as the sample size for this study. Validated questionnaire was used for data collection. The study found that community culture has no moderating effect on the relationship between citizen participation and community development in Anambra State (R² change = 0.002, F_(3,204) = 11.536, p>0.05), and Kaduna State (R² Change = 0.002, F_(3,599) = 104.696, p > 0.05).The study concluded that community culture has no moderating effect on the relationship between citizen participation and community development. This means that the strengthening and motivating power that the citizens need in order to participate actively in development issues is not predicated on community culture.  This further explains that there are other variables that are not within the purview of this study that are responsible. The study recommended that citizen enlightenment and public advocacy can be explored in order to ascertain whether they can successfully moderate the participation of citizens in community issues.