The South African local government legislation provides for community participation in Integrated development planning. However, the concept of community participation suffers from conceptual imprecision and to some extent, theoretical underdevelopment. This article is an explication of how community participation can be made real in integrated development planning. Adopting participatory development as a theoretical framework and extensive literature review as a method, the article argues that participatory integrated development planning is the refocusing of the integrated development planning agenda to embrace the primacy of the people or beneficiaries in integrated development planning endeavours. Therefore, ensuring participation by poor ordinary villagers and not "village elites" is key in making participation real in integrated development planning. The following arguments are presented in making participation real.