Within the past 10-15 years, international development has seen a dramatic proliferation in participatory and empowering interventions seeking to help people help themselves. Common to these otherwise heterogeneous efforts is a claim not to take away peoples’ initiatives and responsibilities for their own lives. Often, these types of participatory initiatives are formulated in opposition to a past development that was ‘Eurocentric’, ‘top-down’, ‘paternalist’ and even ‘arrogant’. At the same time, very little attention has been paid to the implicit notions of improvability and progress involved when target groups are classified as ‘incapable’, ‘unaware’ or ‘irresponsible’ to varying degrees. By suggesting a framework for problematising and historicising the notion of ‘participation’, this paper will demonstrate how ‘not doing the job for other people, but helping them to do their own jobs’ remains a highly normative, teleological and guided process.