Post on 11-Jan-2016
Hickey and MohanRelocating Participation within a Radical Politics of Development
Seminario Línea II Ma Antropología Alexandra Urán C.
History of Participation in DevelopmentDistinction between immanent processes
and imminent interventions
Imminent: the ‘willed’ development policies underpinning interventions
Immanent: the underlying processes of development that explain the rationale of given interventions
Tansformative Participation
Participatory Governance and Decentralization
NGO’s and participatory development
Social movements
Participatory Governance
People’s Planning Campaign
Participatory Budgeting
Theory of Empowered Deliberative Democracy (a strong civil society should be supported by a strong state)
NGO’s and participatory developmentCritique of participation promoted by NGO’s: 1. Confused status of NGO’s (civic, private or
public?)2. Who do NGO’s represent?3. Power relations among Northern and
Southern NGO’s Result: often patron-client relations are
established between beneficiaries and
Beyond the fallacy of the ‘local’.
Participatory forms of NGO advocacy involving downward accountability
Adult Education, Citizenship and Radical Politics (REFLECT): Reconnecting technocratic participatory methodologies (PRA) with radical approaches (Freirian pedagogy of liberation
Social Movements
The postmodern theory of social movements (see Escobar’s article on imagining a postdevelopment era) is premised on a critique of modernity (cultural politics, against development, against the state).
However, most social movements are critical within a critical modernist position rather than advocating postmodernist post-development positions (issues of land, democracy, citizenship and development; examples MST and Zapatistas)
Transformative participationConditions:1. Being part of a broader socio-political
project2. An engagement with the underlying
(immanent) processes of development3. Focus on citizenship as against the
establishment of patron-client relations4. Existence of a ‘ progressive’ political elite
Broadening the participation agenda Civic republicanism (citizens as active
members of a political community) as against liberal notions of citizenship (formal ‘voting’ rights); citizenship within this conceptualization constitutes not only a set of legal obligations and entitlements but also the practice by which claims are made and rights are expanded
Broadening the participation agenda 21. Deconstructing the public/private divide:
broadening the notion of the ‘public’ and identifying the participatory arenas in which subaltern groups wage their struggles
2. The importance of identities for minority/oppressed groups (recognition politics and an ‘emancipatory poltics of difference’)
This means going beyond the universalist and anti-universalist debate
Critical Modernism Retaining a belief in the central tenets of
modernism: democracy, emancipation, development and progress
Modernity as heterogenous and multiple Political agency vested not in the state or
a political party but in the capacity of civic associations, social movements and political parties to form coalitions around certain forms of exclusion and subordination