Increasing communities' participation in development processes has been the subject of both policy aspiration and scholarly critique. This paper explores the implications of a critical perspective on the ‘elusive goal’ of participation for community development practitioners. Drawing on insights from a range of scholars, this paper poses a practical challenge to professionals who work with communities: to name and challenge deeply embedded assumptions about expert knowledge and formal institutions, to recognize the role of those who ‘translate’ between community and external organizational spaces, and to integrate community knowledge and community institutions into participatory development processes.

Purpose: – The purpose of this paper is to review the growing emphasis on quantifiable performance measures such as social return on investment (SROI) in third sector organisations – specifically, social enterprise – through a legitimacy theory lens. It then examines what social enterprises value (i.e. consider important) in terms of performance evaluation, using a case study approach.Design/methodology/approach: – Case studies involving interviews, documentary analysis, and observation, of three social enterprises at different life-cycle stages with different funding structures, were constructed to consider “what measures matter” from a practitioner's perspective.Findings: – Findings highlight a priority on quality outcomes and impacts in primarily qualitative terms to evaluate performance. Further, there is a noticeable lack of emphasis on financial measures other than basic access to financial resources to continue pursuing social goals.Social implications: – The practical challenges faced by social enterprises – many of which are small to medium sized – in evaluating performance and by implication organisational legitimacy are contrasted with measures such as SROI which are resource intensive and have inherent methodological limitations. Hence, findings suggest the limited and valuable resources of social enterprises would be better allocated towards documenting the actual outcomes and impacts as a first step, in order to evaluate social and financial performance in terms appropriate to each objective, in order to demonstrate organisational legitimacy.Originality/value: – Findings distinguish between processes which may hold symbolic legitimacy for select stakeholder groups, and processes which hold substantive, cognitive legitimacy for stakeholders more broadly, in the under-researched context of social enterprise.

Interest in participatory governance recognises that communities can make valuable contributions to governance, but attempts to strengthen community participation encounter obstacles theorised as failures or incompleteness of participatory governance. This paper offers an alternative approach, drawing on ethnographic field data from a decade of work in rural Australian communities. It shows the nature of the community agency that is at the heart of policy interest in participation and how it differs from government efforts at community engagement. These insights suggest a need to rethink participatory governance, not as a single process with multiple participants, but as the juxtaposition of different ways of governing. Doing so opens up the possibility of governments and communities working together in new ways, with governments not only valuing what communities can contribute in theory, but also recognising how diverse communities work in practice.

Social enterprises are hybrid organizational forms that combine characteristics of for-profit businesses and community sector organizations. This article explores how rural communities may use social enterprises to progress local development agendas across both economic and social domains. Drawing on qualitative case studies of three social enterprises in rural North West Tasmania, this article explores the role of social enterprises in local development processes. The case study social enterprises, despite differences in size, structure, mission and age, are strongly embedded in their local places and local communities. As deeply contextualized development actors, these social enterprises mobilize multiple resources and assets to achieve a range of local development outcomes, including but not limited to social capital.