Participatory development, complicity and desire

Abstract

This article is an attempt at rethinking participatory development (pd) in terms of empire, undertaking a postcolonial and psychoanalytic reading. Postcolonialism helps point out that our discursive constructions of the Third World say more about us than the Third World; while psychoanalysis helps uncover the desires we invest in the Other. Thus, to the question, ‘why do neo-imperial and inegalitarian relationships pervade pd?’, the article answers, ‘because even as pd promotes the Other's empowerment, it hinges crucially on our complicity and desire’; and ‘because disavowing such complicity and desire is a technology of power’. The argument, in other words, is that complicity and desire are written into pd, making it prone to an exclusionary, Western-centric and inegalitarian politics. The article concludes with possibilities for confronting our complicities and desires through pd's radicalisation.

Notes

This article is based in part on an earlier work (2004a), in which I sketched but did not develop my arguments about self-implication and ‘transference’. Thanks to my students and colleagues at the Faculty of Environmental Studies, and especially Leesa Fawcett, for their support and friendship; to Michael Bach for his insightful comments; and to Kent Murnaghan, as always.

There are undoubtedly several variants and hybrids of both institutional forms. But, in any case, part of my argument here is to problematise the differences between them: for, if complicity and desire are integral to each, then they are all equally ‘engineered’. As a result, a claim that, say, the pra approach is bottom-up, while the ‘country ownership’ approach is top-down, appears unconvincing. The same is true, in my view, of more politicised forms of participation such as Freirian pedagogy or Participatory Action Research: while perhaps more ‘critical’, they, too, depend on a convenor/facilitator, and hence are accompanied by the attendant complicities and desires.

I mention Mouffe because, like Žižek, she draws on Lacanian psychoanalytic theory to criticise liberal democracy. She is highly skeptical of ‘consensus’, taking Habermas to task over the notion (cf Mouffe, 2000).

This is Habermas's answer to the problem: he advocates an ‘ideal speech situation’, that is, a set of fair, inter-subjective rules and procedures governing public deliberation (cf Kapoor, 2002a).

Žižek is referring in this passage to ‘postmodernism’, but it applies well topd.

I am inspired here by Hardt and Negri's historically specific definition of empire, which they distinguish from imperialism: ‘Imperialism was really an extension of the sovereignty of the European nation-states beyond their own boundaries…In contrast to imperialism, Empire establishes no territorial center of power and does not rely on fixed boundaries or barriers. It is a decentered and deterritorializing apparatus of rule that progressively incorporates the entire global realm within its open, expanding frontiers' (2000: xii). On the relationship between participation and colonialism, see Cooke (2003). His genealogical analysis links Action Research to colonial forms of indirect rule.

I am twisting Arundhati Roy's line about democracy becoming a ‘euphemism for neo-liberal capitalism’ (2004: 56).

Although, as the next section argues, regarding them as pawns does not necessarily mean they will conform to our expectations.

I refer here to ‘us’ as change agents within academic or development institutions. It is, in many ways, these change agents to whom this article is primarily addressed. It is we who can exploit the institutional possibilities that I refer to in the first three sections above. If so, we may be able to take advantage ofpd's instabilities and contradictions (perhaps in collaboration withpd's subjects). For example, we could push for our own institutions to face up to such contradictions and call for the extension and deepening of participation in decision making both ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ these institutions.