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Based on participatory research with two community groups with a Christian spirituality, which are a Melanesian settlement and parish in Fiji and a women's church-based group in Tanzania, this article hopes to express particular embodied spaces of hope. The articulation of these spaces is drawn from our exploration of the interconnection between community development and Christian spirituality; both of which implicitly seek to engender and realize hope. The hopes expressed and the expressions of hopes realized within the communities, require an understanding of eschatology and embodied subjectivity within Christian spirituality to appreciate the embodied spaces of hope here articulated. Combining this theological contextualization of hope with the "visceral philosophy" of Irigaray and Deleuze provides a richer vision of these embodied spaces of hope. In particular, insight is given into the messianic character of both embodiment and hope and consequentially the way this messianic spatiality informs the character of the hoped for community development.

This paper explores the cross-cultural production of knowledge within participatory development. Drawing on in-depth interviews, group discussions and participant observation with stakeholders in the first phase of the New Zealand Official Development Assistance (NZODA) participatory impact assessment pilot (PIAP), we explore how stakeholders participated and perceived their participation in the knowledge produced within the PIAP. This case study followed one stream of the stakeholders participating, which incorporated representatives from NZODA and their evaluation consultants, a New Zealand nongovernment organization (NGO) and their Indian partner NGO, the communities with which the Indian NGO works, and a facilitator of this pilot. The information generated illustrates how different frameworks and methodologies of participation enable and constrain the inclusion of culturally different expressions and constructions of power/knowledge, and how participatory development faces ongoing challenges to facilitate the inclusion of 'alternative' and 'indigenous' knowledges without their simultaneous subordination.