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Column H – March 05

Participation in Development: From Rhetoric to Practice

Surveying the world of development today, it is not difficult to find evidence of participation making the transition from rhetoric to practice. Observe the World Bank, which has mandated senior staff to undergo training in participatory development, complete with overnight village stays. Or the ADB, which uses PRA-based methods to undertake nation-wide Participatory Poverty Assessments. Closer to home, AusAID has adopted the highly participatory Partnering Approach with government counterparts in Fiji, China and the Philippines. This shift is the result of a historical path that can be traced back to the roots of modern development.

In the early post-war decades, the dominant view saw development as the largely economic endeavour of transforming traditional agrarian states to modern industrialised ones. Development possessed a top-down, paternalistic character, strongly infused with Weberian logic and rationalism. In the view of a minority of decision makers, development was a technical problem requiring a technical fix. This approach excluded the very people it was intended to benefit, producing actions that were poorly matched to the needs and contexts of local communities.

By the late 1960s, this approach had begun to produce deep disillusionment, sparking a counter-movement in search of a better paradigm. Over the next two decades, there emerged a wave of new, experimental development approaches, much of it grassroots in nature. A broadly bottom-up approach emerged, characterised by a flourishing of NGOs, a shift from macro to micro (“small is beautiful”), and the broadening definition of development beyond the realm of economics. Key figures such as Paulo Friere, Edward Schumacher and Robert Chambers, were instrumental in putting participation firmly on the development agenda.

The 1990s saw a new set of forces as shaping the world with unprecedented pace and dynamism: globalisation, the rise of market capitalism, political liberalisation, and more recently, the security agenda. Governance also came to prominence, and with it, the role of the State in development. Amidst these currents of change, participation also underwent a transformation. PRAs successfully spread not only geographically, but scaled institutionally upwards into the bureaucracies of governments, donors and development organisations. And as we observed earlier, the notion of participation is today firmly lodged in the rhetoric of the development community. In short - participation has shifted from the periphery to the centre of development orthodoxy.

Thus, participation in development has come full circle in an inaugural ‘action learning cycle’ that has lasted some 30-odd years, and now stands at the edge of a new era. As development practitioners, the challenges we face ahead center firmly on how to effectively translate this rhetoric into practice. According to Chambers, there are three key entry points for tackling this challenge: methods and procedures, institutional change, and personal behavior and attitudes.

Methods and Procedures: Participation has as many definitions and purposes as the number of people that are involved in it. This brings valuable diversity, but also complexity. The ability of development practitioners to facilitate a spectrum of viewpoints in a way that can be manageably analysed and acted on by organisations remains a challenge. The improvement of PRA training and practice, and organisational procedures continue to be crucial issues in this regard. Imbedding meaningful participation into the entire activity cycle, rather than at intermittent points (eg: appraisal or post-evaluation) is also a major ongoing challenge.

Institutional Change: Beyond sound participatory methods and tools is the critical but often neglected dimension of empowerment. Participation is an inherently political process, and even more so recently with its ‘scaling up’ into the donor and state bureaucracies. Empowerment of one group may also entail disempowerment of another, presenting natural resistance to change. Even where the political will exists, the close link between politics and its institutional instruments (eg: laws, policies, structures, decision-making processes, etc) means that introducing and sustaining participatory development has major institutional implications. It is no surprise then that claims of empowerment are often treated skeptically with good reason – it’s no simple task! However, tools such as the Spectrum of Participation (see figure) can help break down our understanding of the term from ‘one size fits all’ to something more nuanced and meaningful. The higher the intended level of empowerment, the greater the institutional implications are likely to be. Honest recognition of this fact may help practitioners to be better aware and prepared for the ‘ripple effects’ of participation.

Personal Behaviours and Attitudes: Underpinning both of the previous points is the importance of personal behaviour and attitudes. Whether we know it or not, the reality of today’s development industry and its paradigms means that realising the goal of participatory development must begin with us - ordinary development practitioners. But are we ready? Do we possess the personal behaviours and attitudes needed to practice the rhetoric that we preach? Can we learn respect and humility? Can we learn to listen and see a different point of view? And in the words of Chambers, are we now willing to ‘hand over the stick’ to the people and communities we seek to serve?

The final words are best left to Chambers himself: “The final frontier remains personal. In earlier decades, it was local people who had to change. Now the imperative has been reversed. The finger now points back at us – development professionals, the sort of people most likely to read these words. The experiences [of past development practices] drive us to an uncomfortable truth: the quality of development depends on what sort of people we are and what we do. [This] poses the question, Who Changes? The answer is inescapable. It has to be us.”

This article draws on a paper, “Turning Participation Rhetoric into Practice: A Chinese Case Study” written and presented by the author at the recent 4th DevNet Conference on International Development Studies, Auckland, December 2004.

1 pp. xvi, Blackburn, J., Holland. J., Who Changes? Institutionalising participation in development, Intermediate Technology Publications, 1998

1 pp. 25, Kumar, S., Methods for Community Participation, A Complete Guide for Practitioners, ITDG Publishing, 2002

1 See Footnote 1

Warin Nitipaisalkul
Regional Development Coordinator
East Asia Region

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