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In Madagascar, for about ten years now, centralized management practices have been replaced by participatory approaches. These are founded on simple principles directly inspired from systems prevailing in Western democracies, including: the right to speak for all, equal access to information, decisions taken by majority voting. Noble principles indeed, nevertheless they are foreign to the idiosyncrasy of rural Malagasy communities. Yet participation is recommended from all sides and the donor organizations no longer support a project that does not consider that element as a priority. In many cases, it is still highly probably an illusion. This situation carries the risk of repeated failure of participation-based projects and operations, even if such setbacks undoubtedly prove less crushing than before. It could be hoped that participation becomes less illusory because it is also a component of a decentralization process which is instigating new types of governance and management of natural resources. A further objective of shared management is to accord village communities a real autonomy, particularly in issues of environmental protection. The current situation marks a particularly delicate transition in the context of a drive to establish institutional conditions making such shared management possible. The novel character of the procedure is much more pronounced than it seemed at first sight, in communities where participative democracy is still perceived as an oddity that people cannot not really get used to.