This book is an edited volume that replies to Participation: The New Tyranny? by Bill Cooke and Uma Kothari. It is not as strong as the work it responds to, but does take the tyranny critique seriously and looks for ways to undertake a democratic, locally-designed development plan.
"The collection is divided into six sections, the first of which reviews how contemporary debates and thematic challenges surrounding debates over how participation might be (re)established as a transformative approach to development, while also offering a scepitcal note on the dangers of continuing with any participatory project. The second section seeks to rethink the concept of participation through theoretical engagement with space, political capabilities and citizenship. The next three sections analyze case studies of different actors and processes engaged in participation. Section III continues the theoretical debates over participation in relation to the links between participation and popular agency as embedded practice, and focuses on the complexities of 'indigenous' decision-making. Part IV focuses on civil society and the local state and the synergies and conflicts between them while Part V examines participatory initiatives by international development donors. The final section comprises short reflections by key commenters based both on a selection of chapters from the collection and wider debates on participation.
As will become clear, an underlying theme in all the contributions is that 'politics matters' within international development. We believe, and most contributors confirm, that understanding the ways in which participation relates to existing power structures and political systems provides the basis for moving towards a more transformatory approach to development; one which is rooted in the exercise of broadly defined citizenship." (4-5)
Cause this book didn't particularly flip my skirt, I'm going to provide the bibliographic data for the essays, and then follow with an annotation of the ones I liked.
Section 1: From tyranny to transformation?
Hickey, Sam and Giles Mohan. "Towards participation as transformation: critical themes and challenges."
Gaventa, John. "Towards participatory governance: assessing the transformative possibilities."
Cooke, Bill. "Rules of thumb for participatory change agents."
Section 2: Rethinking participation
Mohan, Giles and Sam Hickey. "Relocating participation within a radical politics of development: critical modernism and citizenship."
Cornwall, Andrea. "Spaces for transformation? reflections on issues of power and difference in participation in development."
Williams, Glyn. "Towards a repoliticization of participatory development: political capabilities and spaces of empowerment."
Section 3: Participation as popular agency: reconnecting with underlying processes of development.
Vincent, Susan. "Participation, resistance and problems with the 'local' in Peru: towards a new political contract?"
Masaki, Katsuhiko. "The 'transformative' unfolding of 'tyrannical' participation: the corvee tradition and ongoing local politics in Western Nepal."
Henry, Leroi. "Morality, citizenship and participatory development in an indigenous development association: the case of the GPSDO and the Sebat Bet Gurage of Ethopia."
Section Four: Realizing transformative participation in practice: state and civil responses.
Hickey, Sam and Giles Mohan. "Relocating participation within a radical politics of development: insights from political action and practice."
Mitlin, Diana. "Securing voice and transforming practice in local government: the role of federating in grassroots development."
Florisbello, Glauco Regis and Irene Guijt. "Participatory municipal development plans in Brazil: divergent partners constructing common futures."
Kelly, Ute. "Confrontations with power: moving beyond 'the tyranny of safety' in participation."
Waddington, Mark and Giles Mohan. "Failing forward: going beyond PRA and imposed forms of participation."
Section 5: Donors and participation: caught between tyranny and transformation.
Brown, David. "Participation in poverty reduction strategies: democracy strengthened or democracy undermined?"
Holland, Jeremy, Mary Ann Brocklesby, and Charles Abugre. "Beyond the technical fix? participation in donor approaches to rights-based development."
Section 6: Broader perspectives on 'from tyranny to transformation'
Cleaver, Francis. "The social embeddedness of agency and decision-making."
Bebbington, Anthony. "Theorizing participation and institutional change: ethnography and political economy."
So without question, my favorite article in this collection is Bill Cooke's. He remains deeply opposed to "participatory" methods, and sets out rules that do more to highlight the deficiencies of the method than they do to provide a roadmap for effective engagments (they entail, for instance, that international workers work at local rates, which, assuming the international workers are going to return to their country of origin is a recipe that guarantees noone would ever become a participatory developer, as doing so would be a recipe for pauperization later in life. But his first rule is classic, and is reproduced here in it's entirety (emphasis added by me).
"Rule I: Don't work for the World Bank.
Instrumentally, credible change agents are prinicipled change agents; and principled change agents know who they won't work for, and why. If not the Bank, then who? According to Schein, inventor of the idea of process consultation: 'any time we help someone we are in effect allying ourselves with the goals and values they represent. We cannot later abdicate responsibility for the help we have provided if that turns out to have had bad effects on other groups (Schein 1978a:127).
What follows is to state the obvious. Greater impact on people's empowerment -- in terms of, say, their right to life through healthcare, water and education -- is made by decisions taken by the Bank and the IMF on debt repayment than can be made by an infinity of face-to-face participatory events which have no power over debt. And, bluntly, one of the reasons why that debt accumulated was through loans to corrupt and criminal regimes kept in power to sustain a particular world order. Loans were also made by private sector banks to private sector organizations in the Third World. When these creditors defaulted, Third World governments were forced to take the debts on. In an otherwise neo-liberalizing world, private sector debt is nationalized and its repayment extorted from individual, poor, taxpayers (e.g. Chossudovsky 1997).
It is participatory development's institutional groupthink (Cooke 2001) that requires the restatement of these basic facts so baldly. Organizations such as the Bretton Woods Project (2003- ) produce rigorously researched account of the Bank's dysfunctional behavior, and Griffiths (2003) produces an insider accounts of its ideological infliction of famine; and the opposition of worldwide anti-globalization movements is widely reported. Yet the participation establishment seems to have no qualms (to put it mildly) and, at least in some cases, has supported the Bank's appropriation of participatory discourse and methods. More basic facts: the World Bank is an organization that sees more neo-liberalism as the remedy for the problems it has visited on the world's poor; and, to the point here, it uses participatory methodolgies and practitioners to enforce that agenda (see Brown, this volume). Those participatory practitioners are taking an ideological stance. And, to be fair, there are some practitioners who know this, and will not work for or with Bank.
Otherwise, though, why do practitioners who might be assumed to be liberal rather than neo-liberal continue to work for the Bank material interest aside (see Rule V)? Publicly espoused justifications are often along the lines that it is possible to make a difference through a specific Bank project, or more generally that there is the space for alternatives within the Bank, which is not a homogenous monolith.
A retort to the first of these is that given all the participatory interventions which might be made, why is so much effort dedicated to the Bank's. Moreover, it is breathtaking vanity for participatory practitioners to suggest that they can succeed in changing the Bank from within when others better qualified have not been able to do so, from Nobel prize-winning Joseph Stiglitz through to World Development Report author (or not) Ravi Kanbur (Pincus and Winters 2002). Perhaps, rather, participatory practitioners are allowed through the door precisely because there is no danger of them challenging neo-liberal hegemony, or, worse, because they sustain it.
The point about the Bank not being a monolith works the other way. There is enough in political and organizational theories to show that institutions present different faces to different people the better to incorporate them, to legitimize themselves in society, and to buy critics off (of which more in Rule II). Participatory development also does a more directly neo-liberalizing job for the Bank. A study by the World Development Movement (Marshall and Woodroffe 2001) of country Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs) found that, pro-poor rhetoric aside, the actual changes they proposed, in every country, were neo-liberal prescriptions identical with both previously discredited Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs), and with one another. This monolithic homogeneity would be logically surprising if the clams for participation in their production held true, suggesting that participating poor people from countries as diverse as Ghana, Bolivia and Cambodia all chose privitization and user fees, but not redistribution, as the solution to their problems.
Perhaps participator practitioners are particularly prone to this form of vanity because of what controlling participatory processes does to their self-image. Studies of some of the earliest versions of organized participatory face-to-face groups, known as T(raining)-groups, from the 1950s onwards have shown how they generate euphoria in both participants and facilitates, so the latter sense they have in their gift some magical power capable of engendering profound personal transformation (Kleiner 1996). Addition to the sense of well-being that they are apparently able to create can lead practitioners to commit to the cause which permits their participatory practice, oblivious to what that cause it, its consequences, or to the fact that what they are doing is simply a matter of social-psychological technique." (43-45)
In Rule 2 "Remember: co-option, co-option, co-option", Cooke writes:
"Sadly, there is yet a third form of co-optation -- of radical participation by the orthodoxy (symbolized by even the World Bank [2003b] claiming to host an 'Empowerment Community of Practice') - which is perhaps the most problematic for the purposes of this book. In the work of participatory theoriest -- Friere (1972) par excellence -- for whom participation is about changing consciousness, emancipation rather than just empowerment has been around for some time. However, there is a longstanding analysis in organization studies which identifies a dynamic in which such radical ideas are co-opted, reduced to technique, and applied for non-emancipatory end. Ironically, the metaphorical term used to describe this process is 'colonization' (Prasad 2003). A specific example is the work of Saul Alinsky (Cooke 1998). Alinsky's model of participatory grassroots organizing, discussed in Reveille for Radicals (1948), was part of a programme which included bringing the means of production into the common ownership, and critiqued the US labour movement for racist collusion with monopoly capital. But his method (along with that of others) was appropriated, neutralized and transformed by Lippitt et al. (1958), in their standard work which produced a generic model of change interventions and, in passing, brought the term 'change agent' to prominence." (46-47)
This essay dovetails nicely with Duffield's "Global Governance and the New Wars", which suggests that development continually reinvents itself in order to obscure the underlying dynamics of powerful states maintaining their hegemony. Thus, "failure" is not a structural dynamic, but is just a problem of method.
To their credit, most of the authors in this volume "perceive inequality as a form of asymmetric conflict: a conflict that is located at the structural rather than the interpersonal level, and a conflict in which power is unevenly distributed." (213) And, given that political recognition, propose various radical schemes to challenge those power arrangments and build a more empowered citizen. However, as Cooke observes, the method of doing that called "participation" has been co-opted already, and perhaps the only way to prevent disempowering institutions from using it as cover is to begin the cycle anew and develop a new vocabulary for collective consciousness raising.
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