Community Participation, Social Work, and Democratic Welfare Governance in South East Nigeria: An Emancipatory Research Study

Democratic welfare governance in South East Nigeria requires community participation mechanisms that social work is professionally positioned to facilitate, yet the relationship between community participation, social work practice, and welfare governance outcomes remains empirically underinvestigated. This doctoral study examines community participation and its contribution to democratic welfare governance in South East Nigeria, generating original theoretical and empirical contributions from Enugu, Anambra, and Imo States. A critical emancipatory research paradigm employing participatory action research methodology underpins the study, combining community welfare governance action research with 12 communities, 50 community leader interviews, and co-produced analysis with community co-researchers of welfare governance outcomes before and after social work-facilitated participation interventions. Participatory action research analysis, critical discourse analysis, and democratic deliberation theory are applied. The study's original theoretical contribution is the Democratic Welfare Participation Model, which theorises the conditions under which social work-facilitated community participation produces genuine democratic welfare governance rather than tokenistic consultation. An original empirical contribution demonstrates measurable improvements in welfare decision-making quality, resource allocation equity, and community welfare satisfaction in communities with structured social work-facilitated participation processes. Recommendations include institutionalising community welfare governance participation as a professional social work mandate and embedding participatory governance within state welfare legislation. Keywords: community participation, democratic welfare governance, social work, South East Nigeria, emancipatory research