Evaluating participatory development: tyranny, power and (re)politicisation

Abstract

Ever since participation entered mainstream development discourse, critics have attacked it as form of political control. If development is indeed an ‘anti‐politics machine’ ( Ferguson, 1994 ), the claim is that participation provides a remarkably efficient means of greasing its wheels. But do participatory practices and discourse necessarily represent the de‐politicisation of development? This paper aims to provide an answer in two distinct ways. First, it examines the ‘de‐politicisation’ critique, arguing that, while participation may indeed be a form of ‘subjection’, its consequences are not predetermined and its subjects are never completely controlled. Second, it investigates participatory development's ability to open up new spaces for political action, arguing that celebrations of ‘individual liberation’ and critiques of ‘subjection to the system’ both over‐simplify participation's power effects. To re‐politicise participation, empowerment must be re‐imagined as an open‐end and ongoing process of engagement with political struggles at a range of spatial scales.

Notes

Glyn Williams is in the Department of Geography, King’s College London, Strand, London WC2R 2LS, UK. Email: [email protected].

Paul Francis (2001) has traced the development of participatory approaches within the World Bank, noting that their growth owed much to the recognition within the Bank that the ‘social’ element of their own analyses of development had been extremely weak before the 1990s. The linkages between the spread—and failures—of market liberalism and the Bank's renewed interest in this social element (through related debates on participation, social capital and democratisation) have been noted frequently in the literature (Fine, 1999; Harriss & de Renzio, 1997: Harriss, 2001).

The World Bank's Social Funds and Poverty Assessment Programmes have become key mechanisms through which this institutionalisation has taken place.

Rahnema's essay criticises not only the appropriation of participation by ‘mainstream’ developmental discourse, but also the more radical interpretations of participation proposed by Paulo Freire or by Participatory Action Research. Here he argues that ‘highly ideologized “agents of change” or “vanguards” ’ (1997: 168) often downgrade those elements of people's knowledge or aspirations that are not in tune with their own understandings of political action—an important theme I return to in the concluding section of this paper. It is worth noting at the outset that his suggestions for moving ‘beyond participation’ through forms of micro‐level resistance and personal spirituality are less convincing than his critique.

Within wdr 2000/1, direct quotations from the poor often appear as disembodied voices at the beginnings of chapters, or carefully contained within case study boxes. As such they do much to add ‘ethnographic interest’, but in contrast to the stated intentions of pra they do little to interrupt the ‘expert’ voices that dominate the main text.

Throughout the rest of this paper, I make reference to ‘positive’, ‘radical’ and/or ‘transformative’ versions of participation interchangeably. In doing so, I explicitly recognise that political choices are present within any version of development, and that these choices embody both ontological beliefs and ethical values. With respect to both, my vision of radicalised participatory development would accord with Mohan and Hickey's reading of critical modernism (2003), and recognise the ethical and practical importance of avoiding extreme cultural relativism (cf Corbridge, 1998a; 1998b).

For a practical example of this, see his critical assessment of wdr 2000/1 (Chambers, 2001).

Ironically, in this retreat to personal values Chambers' views are echoed by some of participation's anti‐developmentalist critics. For example, Majid Rahnema's alternatives to ‘teleguided participation’ are to be found within a personal spirituality. While the ‘perennial qualities of love, compassion and goodness’ may well be ‘under constant assault in economized societies’ (Rahnema, 1997: 174), I assume from the outset that they were also under similar pressures within pre‐developmental ‘vernacular societies’. The struggle to get these—or indeed any other—values recognised within a definition of development is therefore always political as well as personal.

Cornwall devises a typology of the spaces participation creates, the axes that divide her categories being space inside/against the state and spaces that are institutionalised/ephemeral. More broadly, her work directs us to a context‐specific reading of the value of particular forms of participatory practice, rather than uncritically celebrating participation as an end in itself, a theme I return to below.

Recent research by Janet Townsend, Emma Mawdsley, Gina Porter and Paul Oakley is showing how a ‘knotting or congealing of power’ is also occurring within the globalised ngo profession. Their work suggests that here forms of bureaucratic non‐state power—which we could at the risk of apparent contradiction describe as ‘ngo governmentality’—act to discipline smaller ngos across the South. Within this governmentality, a central concern is a particular form of ‘professionalism’ expressed through procedures of reporting and accounting: their work ably illustrates the power this holds to shape ngo activities, and limit the range of valid projects, actors and activities within the ngo sector (Mawdsley et al, 2001; Townsend et al, 2002).

Mike Parnwell (2003) shows how flawed this research was in Thailand, although as Bradshaw and Linneker (2003) note, reaction to participatory poverty assessments can themselves create sites of political struggle and alternative visions of development.

David Mosse's work on pra in Western India indicates a range of these tactics well, from refusing development facilitators access to a village to the second‐guessing by participants of what to say within a pra exercise to extract maximum benefit from this (Mosse, 1994; 2001).

When Arturo Escobar wrote one of the first papers on the relevance of Foucault's work to the Third World, he both prefigured the ‘participation as incorporation’ critique described above but also saw participatory action research as one way in which counter‐hegemonic discourses of development could emerge (Escobar, 1984: 391–392).

Alongside studying participatory development initiatives in their institutional context, I have argued elsewhere that it is also important to understand the roles that participatory development programmes might play within the wider social networks of their grassroots (non‐)participants (Williams et al, 2003a).

Chambers' own forward to the volume restates the primacy of personal attitudinal change (1998: xv): the case study material presented in the book also considers institutional structure and culture.

In the editorial evaluation of the collection, there is a broad generalisation that states committed to democratic governance reform are more likely to provide a supportive context for participatory development (Blackburn, 1998: 168). More specific analysis is lacking, and questions of how and when participatory development could itself engender a commitment to governance reform remain unanswered.

As Andrea Cornwall has made clear (Cornwall, 2002), the rapid spread of participatory development is reshaping political space inside and outside the state, sometimes in dramatic ways: political capabilities thus become essential in navigating, defending and extending the new democractic spaces thus created.

They—and Whitehead and Gray‐Molina (1999)—argue that far too often, ‘politics’ is invoked as a reason for policy failure: it becomes an external, negative and residual category within a narrow technocratic assessment of poverty alleviation measures.

Whitehead and Gray‐Molina suggest that their arguments are relevant to a sub‐section of developing countries where there are ‘reasonably stable boundaries, and relatively coherent systems of public policy‐making and implementation’ (1999: 5), because the long‐term construction of political capabilities explicitly requires constituencies of the poor (national or sub‐national) involved in interaction with a responsive (or ‘democratic’ in a loose sense) state. Whether political capabilities are relevant within extreme cases of authoritarianism or state failure is open to empirical question: James Fox's work on Mexico does however suggest that these capabilities can survive periods of repression (Fox, 1996).

This is not to suggest that the poor are ignorant of the former, and certainly not of the latter. Their experience and knowledge—as with that of outside analysts—will, however, be both situated and partial. The importance of a such as process of political learning would be to collaboratively discuss both how power works and how things could be different—to engender a process of political imagination between researchers and researched alike.

It is perhaps here that the assumption that politics is a negative force most severely misreads local realities. The motives behind lower‐level bureaucrats' reinterpretations of development policy, or local politicians' management of the spaces of participation are often far more complex than discourses of rent‐seeking would suggest (Srivastava, et al 2002; Véron et al 2003). Instead, these brokers and patrons are key mediators of the power of participatory development, involved in a series of acts of translation that are not simply self‐seeking in their intents or consequences.

This analysis would aim neither to uncritically celebrate local political culture, nor to completely replace it with a standardised set of ‘universal’ (ie Western) political values and practices that ignore the very particular social and historical bases of their production. Again, the process would be one of understanding why particular elements of political culture are valued, and imagining how things could be different.

As Moore and Putzel argue, ‘It is useful to think of empowerment in terms of increasing the political capabilities of the poor…It is the political capabilities of the poor that will determine whether they can employ social capital…constructively or create social capital where it is lacking’ (1999: 13)

To clarify further, I am not proposing an analysis of participatory development that only examines its influence on the formal political system in a narrow sense. I recognise the critical importance of both discourse and everyday practice in the reproduction of participatory development's power, elements that the Foucaultian analysis so successfully draws our attention to. Rather, I want to retain this sensitivity to the various sources of the power of development, in Jonathan Crush's (1995) sense, while avoiding the sense of political helplessness accounts of participation's ‘tyranny’ may engender.

Although there are some strong examples of comparative work (Migdal et al, 1994; Crook & Manor, 1998; Heller, 2001), ethnographies of state power often develop separately within different global regions. In the South Asian context, important recent collections include those of Partha Chatterjee (1997); Chris Fuller and Véronique Bénéï (2001); Atul Kohli (2001); and Andrew Wyatt and John Zavos (2003).

The adjective needs explicit emphasis if we are not to blind ourselves to the fact that political capabilities, like social capital, have a ‘dark side’. For accounts of how extremely capable agents are able to generate political capital from mobilisation around religious or caste hatred in India see, inter alia, Brass (1997); Jeffrey (2002); Williams (2001).

Moore and Putzel (1999) note that a much under‐valued resource within current understandings of anti‐poverty programmes is the ability of political leaders to broaden the ranks of such allies considerably. They can act as skilled agents in brokering compromises, and ‘spin’ the presentation of anti‐poverty programmes to ensure their appeal to sections of the poor and non‐poor alike.

Such public promises are useless without these elites being held accountable in some form, and should therefore be part of a process of building pressure, not an end in itself.

It should come as no surprise if these ideas of political rights are expressed in negative terms. For example, a discourse of corruption may help to make plain some of the actually existing relationships between citizens and the state (cf Gupta, 1995; Parry, 2000) that a radicalised participatory practice would then aim to transform.

Chambers argues that more radical forms of participatory development suggested by Friere are unattainable and rely on party ideologues practising a radical ‘crypto‐paternalism’ that is insensitive to the true aspirations of the poor (Chambers, 1994a: 954). While ‘vanguardism’ remains a potential problem, the failure to bring progressive—or indeed other—political values into the sphere of public debate is, I would argue a far greater danger.

If populist developmental visions tend to celebrate ‘the local’, there is perhaps a contrasting trend for political scientists to privilege the national scale and the ‘commanding heights’ of the state. This is one point where I would diverge slightly from the ‘state‐in‐society’ approach favoured by Joel Midgal: his work is ultimately concerned with states' struggles to achieve ‘integrated domination’ over their subjects. A networked view of power would recognise that a multiplicity of spaces of empowerment can be created, and that contesting or re‐drawing the existing spatial hierarchies of the state can be an important part of their production.

It is important not to discount the strategic value of routinised power for many among the poor, when for them the reliability of power holders can be a key concern. The poor know only too well the limitations to their own participation and power: for them secure access to known power‐brokers (who, ideally, could be held accountable to a benign higher authority) may be a much more attractive scenario than Chambers' ‘flux’.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Glyn Williams

Glyn Williams is in the Department of Geography, King’s College London, Strand, London WC2R 2LS, UK. Email: [email protected].