Participation: The New Tyranny?

Front Cover
Bill Cooke, Uma Kothari
Zed Books, 2001 - Business & Economics - 207 pages

This book is about participatory development's potential for tyranny, showing how it can lead to the unjust and illegitimate exercise of power. It is the first book-length treatment to address the gulf between the almost universally fashionable rhetoric of participation, which promises empowerment and appropriate development on the one hand, and what actually happens when consultants and activists promote and practise participatory development, on the other.

The contributors, all social scientists and development specialists, come from various disciplines and a wide variety of hands on experience. Their aim is to provide a sharp contrast to the seductive claims of participation, and to warn its advocates of the pitfalls and limitations of participatory development. The book also challenges participatory practitioners and theorists to reassess their own role in promoting a set of practices which are at best naive about questions of power, and at worst serve systematically to reinforce, rather than overthrow, existing inequalities.

For the recipients of participatory development this book provides critical insights into the history, institutions, and day-to-day activities through which participation is 'done to' them. It provides them with a range of arguments which support the legitimate decision not to participate on others' terms.

This rigorous and provocative understanding of participatory development is one which donors, academics and practitioners will find hard to ignore.

 

Contents

The Case for Participation as Tyranny
1
Why tyranny?
3
The limits of internal critiques
4
What the book says
7
Is tyranny inevitable?
13
Peoples Knowledge Participation and Patronage Operations and Representations in Rural Development
16
Participation and bureaucratic planning
17
Operation and representation
26
The Abilene paradox
108
Groupthink
112
Coercive persuasion
116
Conclusion
120
Insights into Participation from Critical Management and Labour Process Perspectives
122
comparable dependencies?
123
Employee involvement and participation in orthodox managerial thinking
126
Radical critiques of employee participation and involvement
129

Conclusions
32
Institutions Agency and the Limitations of Participatory Approaches to Development
36
Institutionalism
39
Model of individuals
47
reassessing participatory approaches
53
Pluralism Participation and Power Joint Forest Management in India
56
Participation and forest management
57
Joint forest management
61
Village forest committees
63
Power participation and political space
68
Participatory Development at the World Bank the Primacy of Process
72
Participatory rural appraisal
75
Community and professional in the production of participation
78
Uptake in the World Bank
84
Beyond the Formulaic Process and Practice in South Asian NGOs
88
case studies of South Asian NGOs
90
Conclusion
100
The Social Psychological Limits of Participation?
102
Risky shift
106
Power Knowledge and Social Control in Participatory Development
139
Reassertion of power and social control
142
Building consensus and the reification of social norms
145
The purification of knowledge and space
146
Participation as performance and the possibilities of subversion
148
Conclusion
151
Beyond Participation Strategies for Deeper Empowerment
153
The pitfalls of participatory research
158
Alternative possibilities of going local
163
Participation as Spiritual Duty Empowerment as Secular Subjection
168
The new orthodoxy
170
Genealogies of participation
172
Participation as religious experience
175
Empowerment
178
Conclusion
182
Bibliography
185
Index
201
Copyright

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About the author (2001)

Uma Kothari is a senior lecturer in development studies at the School of Environment and Development, University of Manchester