Social mobilisation, community engagement and the power of elites in rural development

ABSTRACT

This paper presents an analysis of social mobilisation and community engagement in contexts where traditional relations of power are elite-based and exclusionary. Informed by contemporary critiques of community development, it takes the Pakistan-based Rural Support Programme Network’s (RSPN) “three-tier social mobilisation strategy” as a case study and asks whether and how it has transformed traditional relations of power. The study reveals that despite a strategic focus upon transforming community relations and reducing social inequities, RSPN’s specific mobilisation strategy, in practice, enables traditional elites to exploit newly formed community organisations in ways that reproduce traditional, exclusionary, elite-based relations of power.

KEYWORDS:

• Civil society – Participation
• NGOs
• Aid – Development policies
• Social sector

Acknowledgements

The authors acknowledge valuable feedback from Adil Khan and Lynda Shevellar, School of Social Science, The University of Queensland.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 RSPN (www.rspn.org) is a development network of ten member Rural Support Programmes (RSPs), operating independently, espousing a common approach to development centred upon social mobilisation. Throughout the paper, we distinguish between RSPN (the organizational network) and individual or multiple RSPs, as appropriate.

2 A union council is an administrative unit covering multiple villages at the level below tehsil, sub-division and district, in progression.

3 To preserve participant anonymity, abbreviated identity tags – P1, P2, etc., are used throughout as pseudonyms.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Shahzad Khan

Shahzad Khan is a research higher degree candidate at The University of Queensland, Australia. He is a community development professional with over ten years’ experience working in national and international non-profit organisations in Pakistan.

Patricia Short

Patricia Short holds an honorary appointment in the School of Social Science, The University of Queensland. Her research is focused upon household capacities and relations of access in diverse global contexts.