In October 1992, the Water and Sanitation for Health (WASH) Project held a workshop to explore how the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) could incorporate community participation as a core element in projects to improve water supply, sanitation, and other environmental conditions of peri-urban areas in developing countries. The results of the workshop and subsequent work are described in this report, which proposes a model for facilitating community involvement in management of environmental pollution (CIMEP). A CIMEP program empowers residents of peri-urban communities to investigate environmental conditions in their neighborhood, identify problems, set priorities, and plan and implement measures to address the problems that most concern them. With the CIMEP model, two processes develop in parallel: (1) the technical process of identifying and evaluating environmental health problems and developing interventions to mitigate their effects; and (2) the participation process involving a systematic program of training and communication to provide community members, local nongovernmental organizations, and local government officials with skills, information, methods, and practices they need to work together to plan and implement an environmental management program. The report is arranged into sections as follows: CIMEP defined, the CIMEP model, technical methods for assessment and planning, community participation activities in CIMEP, and towards implementing the CIMEP model. Contains 89 references. (PVD)