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