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Abstract
Critical analysis of participatory community development has claimed that such approaches serve as a vehicle for social control and co-option by external actors. Drawing on a case study from Southern Thailand, this article argues that we need to take a less deterministic perspective, and pay more attention to the ways in which community members themselves manipulate or subvert participatory processes. The article shows how this may result in hybrid participatory practices and institutions that contain elements of both local and external interests, and which play a key role in defining the way power is constituted in local participatory spaces.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank the anonymous referees for constructive comments, as well as Narumon Hinshiranan, Jawanit Kittitornkool and Soeren Lund for their valuable insights. Chulalangkorn University and the Prince of Songkhla University in Thailand provided kind support, as did Roskilde University in Denmark.
Notes
1. It is beyond the scope of this article to engage in a deeper discussion of the work of Bourdieu and how it may be relevant for participation studies. A discussion of this is provided in Funder (Citation2007), which also contains a detailed step-by-step description and analysis of how the CZM project unfolded in Singhala (available from the author on request).
2. ‘Singhala’ is a pseudonym used in order to avoid exposure of the actors involved. The actual name of the village has been provided to the Editor. Sathing Prah District is correctly named.
3. See, for example, Hajer's work on discourse coalitions (Hajer, Citation1995, Citation2006). Although not applied to participatory development as such, the emphasis on environmental discourses in Hajer's work is of particular interest in relation to the somewhat understudied discourse of community based natural resources management, which has been a significant factor in community development in recent decades.
