There is little need to rehearse the by now almost traditional critiques of development policies or to re-emphasise the importance now given to participation as a central feature of present thinking about development. The problems are what do we put in the place of strategies which seem to have resulted in growing levels of inequality, alienation and unemployment. Established explanations no longer hold weight. IN this complex environment it is important to construct a dialogue at all levels in order to collectively search for meanings and establish benchmarks which will identify the next step in the development process and avoid the pit-falls of yesterday.
This is a two-sided struggle. On the one side it is a struggle to secure basic needs and worthwhile employment for those who are denied them and to provide value to existence and viable explanations for processes over which people feel they have little control. On the other side it is a struggle to avoid cooption and control by forces which imply increased rigidity and decreased creativity and flexibility because they commit people to narrower, more dogmatic and often more oppressive forms of standardisation. There is a constant tension between these centrifugal and centripetal tendencies. In this struggle, 'participation' occupies an uneasy space. As the nature of the struggle changes, so do the forms which participation takes. It is thus a normative concept whose meaning changes with the changing explanations of social processes.
There appears to be an increasing consensus that participation is essential for any effective development. From this presupposition arise the attendant questions of how best it can then be operationalised, on the dubious grounds that more of "it" is beneficial. Can participation be perceived in this way though - as an ingredient to be injected into target groups as though they were ill and as though this was somehow the panacea? Can participation ever be institutionalised, or legislated for? Or must it perhaps be forever on the margins of official policy prescriptions and in that way provide the vehicle for countervailing explanations and organisations that are so necessary in the struggle against entrenched orthodoxy?
In these latter terms, participation provides a potentially powerful tool, together with communication, education and conscientisation as other attendant normative concepts, by which an entrenched orthodoxy might be confronted and 'space' provided for alternative explanations and actions. It is a peg on which to hang a wide variety of forms of organisation and confrontation, and a lever with which to roll back the frontiers of those taken-for-granted explanations of the world which perpetuate relationships or inequality, whether these are to be found within the family or in relationships between nations.
Participation is fundamentally about power and is concerned with the process of empowerment. Such a process will of course, be perceived in different ways depending on the explanations of poverty and inequality that are adhered to and according to who is seen to have a monopoly over assets and explanations. Guidelines for its operationalisation are a two-edged sword. They can be used to sow the seeds of change but they can also be used to programme responses in an uncritical and uncreative way. Steering a course between the Scylla of cooption and the Charybdis of 'liberation' is indeed a very tricky operation if we are to do anything other than devise utopias. It is an operation which is not helped by recourse to a compass, because the direction of 'true' north not only differs in the particular environments in which we operate, but also at the time in which we search for direction.
What can one therefore say about this 'thing' over which there is no agreement and about which so much has been written? The analysis of obstacles to participation might itself be a place to start. It is assumed that once the obstacles have been correctly identified they can be more easily removed. But what if the questions that we ask and the obstacles that we thereby identify are the wrong ones? Competing explanations of poverty for example, on the one hand isolate the individual as the obstacle and on the other hand isolate the 'system' as the obstacles. According to which one accepts will depend the nature of the chosen remedy - education of ignorant people, or structural changes in the system.
The Organisations supposedly designed to provide the answers are themselves, inevitably, part of the problem. How do we overcome the contradiction that while bureaucracies attempt to be the chief sponsors of change and participation, they are perhaps their chief opponents?
Maybe the future will demonstrate that the more important initiatives did not come from, nor could come from, the establishment, precisely because it is such. But rather from incipient organisations which occupy the 'margins' of society. The dangers of actually trying to identify such projects and establish their legitimacy are obvious. The exercise is rather to put the many competing explanations on the table in order to initiate a dialogue and through an understanding of the complexities of social interaction reach a partial and relative compromise which has as its foundation the search for a more equitable distribution of assets and a more tolerant world order. If we don not question the base from which we start, we can only confront other explanations and courses of action with, at best, a patronising tolerance and, at worst, a hostile derision. The search involves an insecurity and a flexibility which only those at the margins may be capable of providing because they have nothing to lose. Those margins are widely interpreted, but they include an increasing proportion of the population and more particularly women and the rural poor. To give them a more central voice is to perhaps coopt them and diffuse an often intolerable tension, but it can also change the nature of the questions asked and thus the structural conditions for action. A search which implies the occupation and expansion of a 'space' in which those who have nothing have an opportunity to gain something is at the heart of concerns about participation.
Present concerns with participation are rooted in a complex historical context. In this respect the currently fashionable limitation to a particular process (participation) and a supposedly distinct 'target group' (the rural poor) should not blind us to the fact that these are 'nested' in a much wider reality. To lose sight of this implies the elaboration of ungrounded explanations and unrealistic policies.
Participation has been a constant theme since the beginning of the industrial age and the rise of societies based on liberal democratic values. The 'alienation' and 'dehumanisation' of the industrialisation and urbanisation processes prompted a search for alternative modes of livelihood which, in their more extreme forms, rejected both industry and cities and advocated a 'return' to the simple, but fulfilling benefits of country life.
This debate has been couched in terms of the nation state as the 'natural' unit for the execution of development policies. The 'myth' of national autonomy and independent development is reflected at different levels in present calls for autonomous development, self-reliant and endogenous development strategies, within national boundaries. In the post-war era one begins to see concerted attempts being made to use participation as a tool for national construction in the form of community development programmes. Participation in this sense is associated with strategies for the integration of often diverse populations into a national framework. Present debates about participation of the rural poor are still largely constructed in these terms - the enhancement of national capacity. But there is also a rapidly emerging counter-debate, which is international in its perspective. Recognising that the boundaries erected by nation states are to some extent artificial and inhibitive, and that the 'world economic system' is no preserver of such frontiers, non-governmental organisations of one sort or another, while constrained by national legislation, are looking for more 'appropriate' ways to push back the often restrictive and destructive weight of national government programmes.
The search for more appropriate styles of development is fundamentally lined with a 'dependency theory' which is becoming a new orthodoxy in development thinking. This reflects a shifting paradigm in which explanations of poverty in inequality are seen in a different light. This is, of course, not new but represents a fundamental shift in the ways in which solutions are elaborated.
It can be argued that this shift has its roots in the history of colonial conquest and the attendant subjugation of peoples and of values. The colonial relationship has provided the foundation for a post-colonial reaction against forms of exploitation and subordination and a distrust of 'outsider', both foreign 'experts' and foreign capital in the form of multi-national corporations. A manifestation of such suspicion is the call for self-reliant and autonomous development strategies, and the indigenization of the development process.
But the subordinate and marginalised role of dependent countries within the world economy is not the whole story. Dependency theorists have argued that the ruling classes in such countries have cooperated with international capital to obstruct an autonomous and independent development and encouraged an 'unbalanced' development in which attention is focused on capital-intensive luxury consumer goods industries, and unequal terms of trade ensure that surpluses are transferred out of the country, thereby stunting the development process.
It is thus not just the question of international relationships of inequality that needs to be analysed, but also intranational, inter-regional and local relationships. This cuts through the holistic arguments for unified development, based on the development of so-called 'communities' and 'nations' which somehow assume that everyone is, or should be, pulling in the same direction. It points towards the recognition of particular groups within society (local and national) who are enriched or impoverished by the relationships of inequality that characterise that society.
In the 1950s, and arguably into this present decade, arguments for participation were couched within concerns for a more central consideration to be given to the 'social' aspects of development. These were based on the assumption that it was the largely economistic development strategies which were at fault.
The notion of disability incorporated into a traditional welfarist approach was gradually extended as the disabling and dislocating features of development policies became more obvious. Attention turned to the notions of 'social development'. A neglect of the "social factor" was deemed to be at the heart of the imbalances produced by industrialisation and modernisation programmes. But initial concern, at least; with this 'factor' was largely remedial to ease the transition and prevent radical dislocation. The focus was on maintaining a balanced development within a national framework, with the preservation of harmony as an underlying aim. If only people could be convinced of the benefits of modernisation then they would cooperate with the nation builders. The rural areas, characterised as bastions of conservatism, had to be coaxed out of their traditionalism if they were to 'catch up' with the modern, urban, industrial sectors. The incorporation of the 'social factor' was aimed at rectifying this imbalance and convincing people of the benefits of rapid radical change. 'Participation' took the form of mobilising people to build infra-structural prerequisites for development and extending information about new techniques for more ready adoption.
Such an interpretation of development, and the role of participation within it is based on an unreflexive interpretation of the processes involved and leaves the role of the planners and the governments out of the analysis, as if they were somehow outside history, not occupying active positions within the societies about which they were talking. The tool that dependency theory has given to an analysis of development is the ability to locate these so-called 'neutral' outsiders.
Questions of empowering those excluded from development, while increasingly central to the debate, significantly excluded those who had power and influence and who, quite naturally, were unwilling to negotiate any diminution of their influence or any change in the status quo. The debate gave rise to ever more radical propositions for the irradication of inequalities based on the naturalisation of explanations which recognised the causes of poverty as lying at the feet of the enriched. These were incorporated into resolutions, publicly proclaimed and sometimes ratified by governments but were increasingly distanced from the often repressive and coercive policies pursued in reality. The distance between public rhetoric and private reality grew.
In this context it was not unnatural for people to withdraw from involvement with what were perceived as the instruments and agents of cooption or at least distance themselves from involvement, in their search for alternatives. Some of these alternatives such as guerilla movements are outside the realms of 'official' and 'legitimate' thinking and planning, and are regarded as subversive by those who have a monopoly, over assets and explanations. Others have the status of an 'official' opposition whose 'legitimacy' is guaranteed under a liberal democratic ideology which allows for competing forms of explanations.
Questions of participation straddle this boundary between legitimacy and illegitimacy. The struggle to gain increased participation is a struggle to enhance the rights of the excluded and confront the bases of established privilege. It is essentially concerned with the construction of a dialogue which explores the parameters of the taken-for-granted world which maintains that privilege. This can be attempted on a whole variety of fronts, through a critical educational process, rooted in particular forms of action, and makes the underprivileged aware of their negotiable place in a changeable system over which they may exercise increased control.
This involves the recognition of competing values and explanations of cause and effect as well as of means and ends and a determination to make them the subject of analysis in a manner which will aid the construction of acceptable courses of action; to provide fora in which alternatives might be openly explored and conflict translated in to a constantly negotiated compromise; to create spaces for such endeavours and guard against the closure of options - to create, what have been termed centres of 'countervailing' power. Conflict in this sense is part of the creative tension.
In the final analysis participation must involve an exploration of the unspoken - disentangling the myths of the taken-for-granted world which ensnare creativity and formalise interpretations of that world. Changing the appreciative framework within which problems are perceived may do more than any other act to affect future events. (As long as the dominant view maintained that the world was flat there was little room for certain sorts of explanation.) Participation is then about changing that appreciative framework, that 'world view'. It is about what Kuhn has termed "paradigm shifts". In other words, it is perhaps necessary to change the nature of the questions asked rather than expect explanations from existing questions.
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David Marsden