Participation

From Tyranny to Transformation: Exploring New Approaches to Participation in Development

Samuel Hickey, Giles Mohan, Samuel Hickey, Giles Mohan

• Publisher: Zed Books
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9781842774618
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781848137486
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Economic Theory
• Index: Economics

Participation has established itself as a significant approach to project implementation, policy-making and governance in developing and developed countries alike. Recently, however, it has become fashionable to dismiss participation as more rhetoric than substance, and subject to manipulation by agencies and social change agents intent simply on pursuing their own agendas under cover of community consent. In this important new volume, development and other social policy scholars and practitioners seek to rebut this simplistic conclusion, while addressing the problems of power and politics which have beset some approaches to participation. They describe and analyse new experiments in participation from a wide diversity of social contexts that show how, far from being a redundant and depoliticizing concept, participation can -- given certain conditions -- be linked to genuinely transformative processes and outcomes for marginalized communities and people.

This volume is the first comprehensive attempt to evaluate the state of participatory approaches in the aftermath of the 'Tyranny' critique. It captures the recent convergence between participatory development and participatory governance, and spans the range of institutional actors involved in these approaches - the state, civil society and donor agencies. It places participatory interventions in a political context, and links them directly to issues of popular agency. The volume embeds participation within contemporary advances in development theory and proposes theoretical and practical ways forward for relocating participation as a genuinely transformative approach.

Scholars and practitioners alike, and from a diversity of disciplines and community and development agencies, are likely to find this volume a theoretically illuminating and practically useful source of ideas about how participation can achieve concrete liberatory outcomes.

Index

Page references in italics refer to boxes and tables. An ‘n’ after a page reference refers to a note.

ActionAid 164

Africa: citizenship 14–15, 68, 120, 142, 145, 272, 273; gender issues 71n, 145, 273; participatory development 14–15, 71n, 149, 223 see also South Africa; West Africa; individual countries

agency: citizenship relationship 9, 65–6, 67, 70–1, 271–6; in development 3, 10, 14–15, 60–1; as participation 3–4, 13, 62, 65–6, 67, 69–71, 86, 271–6; in participatory governance 10, 12; rules for practitioners 43–53

aid organizations 220, 238, 249 see also donors

Alinsky, Saul 46–7

APAT, Brazil 198, 199–200

Araponga, Minas Gerais, Brazil 191, 195, 196–203

‘Arizama’ initiative, Ghana 224–30

Bolivia 20, 31, 176, 261

Brazil 31, 32, 35, 162, 163, 190–203

Cambodia 49

Cameroon 246–8

Centre for Alternative Technologies, Brazil see CTA

Chambers, Robert 11–12, 159, 161

citizenship: agency relationship 9, 65–6, 67, 70–1, 271–6; civic republicanism 66, 67, 68, 78, 145; civil society relationship 120, 169; defi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Dedication
• One | From tyranny to transformation?
• Two | Rethinking participation
• Three | Participation as popular agency: reconnecting with underlying processes of development
• Four | Realizing transformative participation in practice: state and civil responses
• Five | Donors and participation: caught between tyranny and transformation
• Six | Broader perspectives on ‘from tyranny to transformation’
• Contributors
• Index