Hickey and Mohan Relocating Participation within a Radical Politics of Development Seminario Línea II Ma Antropología Alexandra Urán C.

History of Participation in Development Distinction 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 development Critique 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 participation Conditions: 1. Being part of a broader socio-political project 2. An engagement with the underlying (immanent) processes of development 3. Focus on citizenship as against the establishment of patron-client relations 4. 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 2 1. 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