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Relocating participation within a radical politics of development: citizenship

and critical modernism

Article · January 2003

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 Relocating participation within a radical politics of
development: citizenship and critical modernism

Sam Hickey, IDPM, University of Manchester

and

Giles Mohan, DPP, Open University

Draft working paper prepared for conference on ‘Participation: From Tyranny

to Transformation? Exploring new approaches to participation in development’

27-28 February 2003, University of Manchester

Abstract
In response to (and in sympathy with) many of the critical points lodged against
participatory approaches to development and governance as currently constituted
within international development, this paper seeks to relocate participation within a
radical politics of development that is analytically and strategically informed by a
notion of ‘citizenship’, and that has ‘critical modernism’ as its natural theoretical
home. It is argued that such a response can address the most persuasive elements
of the critical backlash against participation, and reconstitute participation as a
genuinely transformative approach to development. Using empirical evidence and
theoretical developments drawn from a wide range of contemporary approaches to
participation, the paper shows that participatory approaches are most likely to
succeed where they are pursued as part of a wider (radical) political project and
where they are aimed specifically at securing citizenship rights and participation for
marginal and subordinate groups. An analytical approach to citizenship is outlined
which seeks to capture the key elements of this finding. Next, the case is made for
locating participation as citizenship within a ‘critical modernist’ approach to
development, both on the grounds that participation needs to be secured within a
theoretical approach that is grounded in an understanding of underlying (immanent)
processes of development rather than of (imminent) development interventions, and
because the theoretical underpinnings and radical politics of critical modernism
resonates with the project of participation as transformation. Finally, the paper
considers the implications of this relocation for participation in both theoretical and
strategic terms.

1
RELOCATING PARTICIPATION WITHIN A RADICAL POLITICS OF
DEVELOPMENT: CITIZENSHIP AND CRITICAL MODERNISM............................... 1
ABSTRACT ................................................................................................................ 1

1. INTRODUCTION: TRANSFORMATION AND CITIZENSHIP .......................................... 3

Participation and the problems of privileging the imminent over the immanent .. 4

2. MOVING BEYOND THE ‘TYRANNY’ OF PARTICIPATORY APPROACHES TO

DEVELOPMENT .......................................................................................................... 5
The pinnacle of participation? Scaling up participation and localising policy
analysis through Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers ......................................... 6
Reconceptualising participation: bridging the gaps between participatory
development and participatory governance, and between technical participation
and popular agency ........................................................................................... 10
The radical backlash from within: a return to a golden age? ............................. 12

3. TOWARDS CITIZENSHIP: PARTICIPATION AND TRANSFORMATION IN

CONTEMPORARY DEVELOPMENT POLICY AND PRACTICE ............................................ 14
Participatory governance and democratic decentralisation ............................... 15
From social capital and civic participation to more political approaches ........... 18
NGOs and participatory development ............................................................... 20
Social movements ............................................................................................. 24
Identifying the politics of participation as transformation ................................... 26

4. TOWARDS THE RELOCATION OF PARTICIPATION: A RADICALISED NOTION OF

CITIZENSHIP? .......................................................................................................... 28
Citizenship and the politicisation of participatory development ......................... 28
Towards a radical theory of citizenship ............................................................. 29
Difference, empowerment and emancipation .................................................... 32

5. CRITICAL MODERNISM ...................................................................................... 37

Realising radical citizenship: criticisms, caveats and strategic concerns .......... 39

6. CONCLUSION................................................................................................... 41

2
1. Introduction: Transformation and citizenship
The editors of the collection Participation: The New Tyranny? (Cooke and Kothari,
2001: 7) posed the rhetorical question of “whether internal critiques have served to
legitimize the participatory project rather than present it with a real challenge”, but
added “(t)here are acts and processes of participation that we cannot oppose” (ibid:
13). Their focus was, in part, the reflexive tendency among practitioners to rethink
and modify the implementation of participatory methods in the name of
empowerment. Such critiques often focused on the micro-politics of the upper/lower
and insider/outsider dynamic, but ignored subtle reinscriptions of authority and/or the
wider structural forces shaping (dis)empowerment (Kothari, 2001). That is, it
depoliticised what should be an overtly political approach to development. In
preparing the conference and this paper we have taken Cooke and Kothari’s warning
seriously. We want to go beyond approaches to participation which deflect attention
from (ab)uses of power and to recover a discourse and practice of participation which
is both radical and transformatory. This paper is very much our take on the
possibilities of transformation, which seeks to radicalise the practice of citizenship.
This radicalised form of citizenship is premised on a project of critical modernism
(Peet and Watts, 1996) as the best means to achieve transformation.

We would argue that there remain theoretical and empirical reasons for seeking to
relocate participation within a coherent and radical approach to development theory
and practice (here, we define ‘radical’ in broad terms, as being transformative,
alternative and of the political ‘left’). From a theoretical perspective, the failure of
participatory development to either articulate or align itself with a coherent theory of
social change that is grounded on sound ontological and epistemological principles
has allowed for its co-option and subsequent depoliticisation (e.g. Francis 2001a).
This is manifested across development theory with its susceptibility to the fashions of
‘what works’ and ‘what gets funded’ (Martinussen 1997). Many of the problems in
achieving transformation stem from the fact that proponents of participation have
been concerned with how participation can be incorporated within imminent
development interventions rather than with how such interventions engage with the
underlying processes of development that actually shape the possibility and terms of
participation in a broader sense. There is a need, then, for participation to be
underpinned by a coherent theoretical understanding of underlying processes of
development. There is a also strategic imperative for participation to remain located
within a radical tradition of development theory, as to do otherwise would to be
complicit in finally emptying the concept of its transformative potential.

Empirically, there is a growing amount of evidence to suggest that where

participatory approaches to development and governance have achieved sustained
success in terms of challenging exclusion, redistributing resources and promoting
social justice, they have tended to be located within a political tradition or project that
adopts a specifically radical approach to development, rather than as well designed
institutional innovations or interventions. To the extent that this broad finding holds
across approaches to both participatory development and participatory governance
(see below), there are sound empirical reasons for repositioning participation within a
radical political approach to development.

By looking for explicitly transformatory approaches to participation we are not

implying that all existing approaches are not transformatory. Rather we have
analysed them to show what political processes have contributed to those instances
where transformation could be said to have occurred. We make this case in the
following sections. From there the paper teases out the responses to this critique of

3
participation and focuses on a series of attempts within policy and political practice.
We feel that these are welcome developments and point towards the need for active
citizenship to effect change, but what is lacking is a coherent theory which ties
citizenship to a radical developmental agenda. We begin this reformulation by
analysing the antecedents of ‘participatory’ radicalism in development, including
alternative development and liberation theology. From there we outline a theory of
citizenship which breaks with statist, clientelist and legalistic notions of citizenship.
Instead we expand the understanding of political community and the types of political
practice which constitute citizenship. These more multi-level and overlapping forms
of political practice are inspired, to a large degree, by feminist debates on citizenship.
We conclude by addressing the potential for this form of citizenship, as located within
the critical modernist approach to development theory.

Participation and the problems of privileging the imminent over the immanent
Before reviewing current attempts within development practice to achieve deeper
participation we will examine the wider relationship between different understandings
of development and participatory practices. In particular, this sub-section aims to
frame debates over participation within the context of wider debates concerning the
links between ‘immanent’ and ‘imminent’ development. We map out the current
status of participation within contemporary development theory and practice as
constituted in the aftermath of the Tyranny critique.

The relationship between ‘development’ in the form of specific interventions, and

‘development’ as an historical process of social change, is a perennial concern within
development studies. Observers distinguish between ‘imminent’ and ‘immanent’
development, whereby the former is concerned with ‘willed’ development policy and
action and the latter is concerned with underlying processes of development (Cowen
and Shenton 1996: 173-5). Imminent development, led by a belief in the ‘makeability’
of society (Schuurman 2000: 8), emerged over the past two centuries largely as a
means of managing those ‘surplus populations’ that have either been excluded from
or ‘adversely incorporated’ into processes of immanent development (Cowen and
Shenton 1996: 173). For much of this time the “development doctrine purported to
put this relative surplus population to work within the integument of the nation”
(Cowen and Shenton 1996: 153). Hence, the state provided development studies
with its key agent of development interventions. However, the past three decades
have seen this statist approach increasingly give way to a broader focus on how civic
and market actors can contribute to development interventions.

There has been an increasing tendency within contemporary development studies to

focus on imminent rather than immanent processes of development, has often
occurred in ways that obscure the underlying politics of development. This has
occurred as a result of two movements. The first is the apparent failure of ‘classic’
development theory to adequately capture and predict these historical processes
(Booth 1994, Pieterse 2001, Schuurman 1993, 2000). The second is the perceived
need for development research to become more ‘relevant’ in terms of directly
informing development interventions (Edwards 1994). However, to privilege the
practices of imminent development risks a further type of ‘irrelevance’ by distracting
from an intellectual engagement with the underlying forces of socioeconomic and
political change that shape people’s livelihoods in developing countries. To the
extent that the discourse and strategies of imminent development are largely
constructed in transnational epistemic communities that occupy social realities often
far removed from the arenas occupied by poor and excluded people, such
interventions may well be framed by understandings that account little for local
realities. The assertion that development can be willfully ‘managed’ through ‘the right
mixture’ of institutional responses (e.g. Brett 2000) has effectively ‘depoliticised’ the

4
notion and practice of development in poor countries (Ferguson 1994), rendering it a
technocratic process to be administered and planned for by agents of development
rather than negotiated with and contested by its subjects. The underlying politics of
underdevelopment, exclusion and development interventions are thus obscured from
view.

One of the challenges to this form of imminent development over the past two
decades has come from the ‘participatory development’ approach. In its current,
mainstreamed and ‘populist’ form (e.g. Chambers 1983, 1995, 1997), participatory
development asserts the importance of placing local realities at the heart of
development interventions, and of the need to transform agents of development from
being directive ‘experts’ to ‘facilitators’ of local knowledge and capabilities. The
‘power’ transformations required between ‘uppers’ and ‘lowers’, it is argued, can be
achieved through according participatory roles to the subjects of development at
each stage of development interventions.

However, this mission has proven increasingly problematic and has faced a series of
critiques. It is not our intention to revisit what are increasingly well-known
discussions, but to see, in the next section, how recent attempts have taken on board
these critiques. Very broadly the key arguments against participatory development
include an obsession with the ‘local’ as opposed to wider structures of injustice and
oppression (Mohan 2001, Mohan and Stokke 2000), an insufficiently sophisticated
understanding of how power operates and is constituted and thus of how
empowerment may occur (e.g. Mosse 1994, Kothari 2001), a bias towards the civic
and the social as opposed to the political (Putzel 1997), and a tendency for certain
agents of participatory development to treat participation as a technical method of
project work rather than as a political methodology of empowerment (Carmen 1996,
Cleaver 1999, Lane 1996, Rahman 1995, White 1996). Further critical and theoretical
concerns are related to the inadequate understanding of structure and agency within
notions of participatory development (Cleaver 1999) and the related lack of clarity
concerning how (imminent) participatory interventions relate to underlying
(immanent) patterns of exclusion and inclusion as framed by historical processes of
citizenship formation (Hickey 2002, Kumar 2002).

2. Moving beyond the ‘tyranny’ of participatory approaches to

development
Although this critique has been broadened and refined over recent years, it has
notably failed to halt the ubiquitous spread of participation as a development concept
and strategy. Apparently undeterred, and increasingly underwritten by policy and
funding support from virtually all major development agencies, the participatory turn
actually became expressed more deeply and diversely within development theory
and practice, to the extent that ‘participation’ is currently a key concept within several
sub-fields of international development, including decentralisation, social capital and
social movements (Mohan and Stokke 2000). It also features prominently in debates
on social policy in developing countries (Cornwall and Gaventa 2001, Goetz and
Gaventa 2001), poverty reduction strategy processes (McGee 2001b) and gender
studies (Cornwall 2001).

Within this context, at least three positions are discernible in relation to the charge
that participation has come to tyrannise contemporary approaches to development.
The first approach tends to dismiss the critical concerns of the tyranny agenda, and
focus instead on both honing the methodologies of ‘participation in (imminent)
development’ and ensuring that these are scaled up and diversified across all arenas
and levels of decision-making. Here, problems of power are not dealt with through

5
Foucaldian analysis (cf. Kothari 2001) but by levering participatory approaches and
methods into arenas of power. The second approach seeks to confront both the
critique ranged against participation and the broadening of the participation agenda
into new concerns, particularly with governance, through a reconceptualisation of
participation. This approach so far includes work on ‘citizenship’, political space’,
‘political capabilities’ and ‘political capital’. The third stance discerned here tends to
reject ‘participation’ in its current form as a ‘mainstream’ approach to development,
and to seek radical alternatives.1

For us, only the latter two approaches are tenable responses to the challenge of
moving beyond the tyranny critique and towards participation as transformation.
However, we argue below that neither is sufficient by itself, and that there are flaws
within the approaches currently being pursued within agenda. Our attempt is to both
resolve the problems within each and then unite them into a more thoroughgoing
response. The first response remains highly problematic, both in practice and in
theory, as argued through an analysis of PRSPS which shows that such approaches
to participation are tied to a limited conception of participation as transformation and
may in practice actually short-circuit more genuine attempts at participation and
transformation (e.g. PRSPS vs. decentralisation in Uganda; MTEF vs. alternatives).

The pinnacle of participation? Scaling up participation and localising policy

analysis through Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers
In terms of intentional development and the mainstreaming of participation, the use of
participatory poverty assessments (PPAs) to inform poverty reduction strategy
papers (PRSPs) might be said to form the apex. They represent Chambers taken to
a higher plane and demonstrate how participation has been ‘scaled up’ from the
project to policy level (Blackburn and Holland, 1998). As such, at a technical level
they stand at the cutting edge of multilateral thinking on participation. However, they
are ‘transformatory’ only in their insistence upon a neo-liberal development trajectory
and a form of disciplinary inclusion (Craig and Porter, 2003).

In the early 1990s the participatory turn hit home within the World Bank at around the
same time that it announced it would be carrying out Poverty Assessments as a key
piece of analytical work in all borrower countries. This came in response to criticisms
about heavy-handed conditionality and sought instead to strengthen the link between
the Bank's assistance strategy and the country's own efforts to reduce poverty (World
Bank 1991). Around this time, the Bank-wide Participatory Development Learning
Group were interested in exploring ideas for scaling up participatory approaches from
the project level into the country level and Poverty Assessments were identified as a
means to do this. The so called Participatory Poverty Assessments (PPAs) – which
employed the methods of participatory rural appraisal pioneered by Robert
Chambers and others – began to be implemented alongside conventional Poverty
Assessments. To date, over 60 countries have carried out PPAs with the support of
the Bank, with an equal number implemented with the support of other development
agencies (Robb, 2002).

1
This does not cover the full range of positions that can be identified within development studies with regards
participation, but rather those positions that have coherently engaged with the ‘post-tyranny’ state of this field. For
example, there remains strong opposition to the alleged conservatism of the neo-populist strand within participatory
development from some political economy perspectives (e.g. Brass 1995) while some within the postmodernist turn
reject participation as yet another imperialist imposition (Rahnema 1992). Also see Kesby, and Quaghebeur &
Masschelein (this conference) on the postmodern response to the ‘post-tyranny’ debate.

6
Table 1: Participation in development theory and practice: a selective history

Era Phase Rationale Methods Key Sources: institutional and

academic
1940s- Community Development requires participation and self-reliance, need Animation rurale, adult literacy and UK Colonial Office 1944 Report
1950s Development for stable rural communities, cost-sharing. Participation as an extension education, institution on Mass Education in Africa
(colonial) obligation of citizenship, citizenship formed in homogenous building, leadership training, local
Brokensha and Hodge 1969, Prosser
communities. development projects.
1982, Jeppe 1985, Atampugre 1998
1960s- Community As above, plus development of state hegemony, manage As above, plus health, education. Postcolonial governments (Social
1970s Development rural society, moral economy of state penetration. Welfare or specialised departments)
(postcolonial) Munro 2000, Holdcroft 1982
1960s Political A source of strength to the political system in ‘new states’, Voting, campaigning, political party Political development, school of
participation form of political education, a right and an obligation of membership modernisation theory. Almond & Powell
citizens. 1966, Nelson 1976, Arnstein 1969
1960s- Emancipatory Analyse and oppose ‘structures of oppression’ through active Participatory action research (PAR), Radical researchers, educationalists in
1970s participation engagement with poor groups; social action. conscientisation, popular education the ‘South’. Friere 1972, Rahman 1993

Liberation As above Form base Christian communities, Second Vatican Council, Latin
theology training for transformation American Catholic priests.
Sobrino & Ellacuria 1996, Ela 1986
1970s- ‘Alternative Participation as a reaction to exclusion; wide-ranging critique Strong civil society, social Dag Hammarskjold Conference 1974.
1990s development’ of ‘mainstream’ development; proposal of alternatives. movements, self-help groups. Development Dialogue, IFAD Dossier,
Participation as a right of citizenship, ‘citizenship’ as a key Latterly, an inclusive state. Nerfin 1977, Friedmann 1992
objective of alternative development.
1980s- Populist / Failure of top-down projects and planning. Participation Participatory: rural appraisal, Northern development professionals,
present Participation in required to empower people, capture indigenous people’s learning and action, monitoring and World Bank Participation Learning
development knowledge, ensure sustainability and efficiency of evaluation, poverty assessments. Group, NGDOs, UN agencies
interventions NGDO projects. Chambers 1983, Cernea 1985, Holland
and Blackburn 1998
Mid- Social capital Participation in trust-based networks and associations, basis Local institution building, create World Bank Social Capital and Civil
1990s- for deepening civil society. Provides basis for economic enabling environment Society Working Group
present growth Putnam 1993, Bourduieu 1988,
Narayan et al 2000
Late Citizenship Convergence of ‘social’ and ‘political’ participation, scaling-up Participatory governance: state-civic PRIA, Africa Charter on Popular
1990s- participation of participatory methods, from project participation to policy partnerships, decentralisation, Participation.
present influence participatory budgeting, citizens Gaventa and Valderrama 1999,
hearings. Schneider 1999

7
This initiative marked a significant scaling up of participatory approaches from their
roots in project and community level planning. With reference to the history of
participation presented in Table 1, this was a new high-point for the ‘participation in
development’ approach. There is clear evidence that in some cases, the findings of
PPAs have informed policy changes that have been of direct benefit to poor and
marginal groups (Holland and Blackburn 1998). However, the emphasis of PPAs
remained on information extraction for macro and sector policy analysis as opposed
to deeper participatory transformation (Norton 1998). Some PPAs, such as South
Africa’s, did emphasise the process of participation. This fostered a tentative
consensus that in addition to strategy analysis, the process of conducting PPAs
could challenge policy makers’ attitudes towards civil society involvement in policy
analysis. This emphasis on policy influence represent the “second generation” of
PPAs with Uganda and Vietnam usually heralded as the exemplars. For example, the
Uganda Participatory Poverty Assessment Programme (UPPAP), involves officials
from the Ministry of Finance, Planning and Economic Development (MFPED) along
with civil society representatives and donors. It aims to institutionalise a participatory
approach to poverty planning and monitoring from the central down to the district
level (McGee and Norton 2000; Craig and Porter 2003). However, with the second
round of the Ugandan PPA carried out in 2002, there was not even the pretence that
communities will be directly empowered, with no feedback mechanism concerning
the data collected and no support for communities to work towards resolving the
problems of poverty that they raise.2

Rather, it is more mainstream policy actors rather than the participating communities
themselves that are the focus of transformation within PPAs, as is demonstrated in
the following quote:

“We experts sometimes do believe that people don’t know their problems... (or)
...the solutions to their problems. That has been proved wrong by the PPA. So
they know their problems and they know their solutions. More interestingly, they
are capable of analysing the policies that we prepare for them. They could even
propose alternative policies; that is very exciting to me. We experts, we must sit
down and listen to the people. They know what they are doing, they know what
they want. The PPA has surely proved us wrong. We must change our tactics
now” (Director, Social Services Division, Planning Commission, Government of
Tanzania featured in The Poverty Experts video, World Bank, 1996)

This catharsis amongst key decision-makers involved in PPAs is also vividly revealed
on the UPPAP video, where the Director of Economic Affairs openly admits to having
his eyes opened and attitude towards poverty transformed.

Towards the end of the 1990s, this in-country scaling up of participatory approaches
was formalised through the Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP) initiative.
From the highly criticized ‘structural adjustment programmes’ (SAPs) emerged this
more comprehensive planning approach, intended to be at once ‘poverty-focused’
and ‘nationally owned’ by recipient countries. PRSPs seek to ensure that the debt
relief provided under the enhanced Highly Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) Initiative,
along with concessional loans from the international financial institutions, help to
reduce poverty in the poorest, most indebted southern countries. In order to qualify
for such relief, HIPC-eligible countries have to prepare a Poverty Reduction Strategy
Paper (PRSP) outlining poverty reduction goals and plans for attaining them.
Countries must then demonstrate progress towards these goals before funds are
released. The PRSP is the output from a participatory strategy designed to include
civil society in a process of analysing poverty and poverty reduction outcomes and
2
Personal communication from a researcher on UPPAP II to one of the authors, January 2003.

8
identifying key public actions, including policy changes, institutional reforms
programmes and projects to achieve those outcomes (McGee with Norton, 2000).
As such they counter early criticisms of the IFI’s ‘one size fits all’ approach to macro-
policy design.

PRSP’s do show some institutional innovations which bring civil society organisations
into the policy process, although they fall short of genuine inclusion and partnership
(Craig and Porter 2003). For example, budget monitoring and advocacy initiatives
with local community groups in South Africa, Uganda and Ghana reflect this drive
towards ‘local policy literacy’. These “downward information flows” (McGee and
Norton 2000: 34) were spearheaded by national advocacy groups with the increasing
compliance and participation of governments, donors and lenders. There are clear
possibilities for participatory approaches to influence the PRSP at each stage of the
process (McGee 2001b).

Again, it is Uganda which has been hailed as a leader in PRSPs. Their ‘homegrown’
PRSP – the Poverty Eradication Action Plan – was drawn up in 2000 and included
the usual invocations of addressing powerlessness, vulnerability and opportunity
(Government of Uganda 2000). It was successful in drawing in new funds to key
sectors such as education and health, although less successful with the more
political ministries such as the Ministry of Justice, in spite of the emphasis placed on
‘access to justice’ within the PPA findings. However, the extent of participation in this
process has been questioned (see above), as has the impact on participatory
governance reform more broadly.

Conflicts are emerging between the PRSP process and the institutionalisation of
participation through Uganda’s decentralisation programme. Although the system of
local government was designed to identify local priorities and administer policy
interventions, the PRSP process has helped to ensure that an increasing proportion
of central government funding for local government is conditional, with 85% of the
total local government income ear-marked according to nationally-determined
priorities (Government of Uganda 2002). Compliance is ensured, in part, through a
series of fiscal sanctions and penalties, which are closely linked to donor insistence
that certain central funds should be ring-fenced (the Poverty Action Funds). The
input by the lowest political tiers into this decision-making process was virtually non-
existent (e.g. Jeppsson 2001). The outcome is a disciplining of the local rather than
its liberation and empowerment in order to determine, as far as possible, its own
priorities and actions. The participatory rhetoric of national poverty planning is thus
implicit in circumventing the transformation of the local state, and effectively short-
circuiting the establishment of more participatory forms of governance, to the extent
that a recent study has noted “the destructive effect on local governance of the
financing and management arrangements accompanying PRSPs” in Uganda (Craig
and Porter 2003: #).

At a broader level, the scope for participation to influence national poverty policy is
closely circumscribed in Uganda – and elsewhere – in that key areas of national
policy-making are not up for negotiation. As one critical agency notes, the wider
macroeconomic picture is sown up before the voices reach the table (WDM 2001). In
Uganda, the mechanism for ensuring this is the Medium Term Expenditure
Framework (MTEF), which sets a three-year ceiling on sectoral spending in order to
ensure the macroeconomic stability that is deemed to be required for current fiscal
policy to hold (Craig and Porter 2003: 60-61, Foster and Mijumbi 2001). Although the
benefits of this cannot be dismissed in terms of ensuring stability, the effect is not
simply to restrict spending on poverty reduction for fear of ‘over-heating’ the
economy, but to close down any debate about alternative forms of ‘pro-poor’ or

9
‘redistributive’ growth, in spite of growing evidence that the current approach to
poverty reduction – based on neoliberal growth policies – is leading to greater
inequality and the marginalisation of certain regions (Deininger and Okidi 2002).3
Here, the transformation aimed at by development alternatives is written out of the
picture despite the rhetoric of ‘dialogue’ and ‘openness’.

The danger is that like SAPs before them PRSPs are simply a new form of
compliance which writes out of the process the uneven power relations within
countries and between the donors and recipient countries. As Craig and Porter
(2003: 55) note,

“(the PRSP) understates and obscures not just the structures of global market
power, local political economy and sectoral local economic opportunity, but it
also reasserts a narrow, politically naïve approach to governance that…contorts
and limits local and national political scope and options”.

PRSPs demonstrate that participation can be scaled up in so far as it has entered

mainstream state level planning and undoubtedly marks a victory for Robert
Chambers' ‘benign virus’ of participation spreading through institutions. However,
the problem is that a change in individuals’ attitudes does not guarantee the
overthrowing of deeper institutional divisions or the forms of governance thrown up
by uneven development. Central ministerial acceptance does not guarantee
participation or ownership, and PPAs may simply ensure that the locus of
‘transformation’ is individualised at the centre rather than at the structural or the local.
PRSPs remain steadfastly part of the neo-liberal agenda and are simply a new
‘technical framework’ (Craig and Porter 2003) which does not address uneven power
relations within countries and between them and donors.

Reconceptualising participation: bridging the gaps between participatory

development and participatory governance, and between technical
participation and popular agency
“In the 1990s the focus of the participation debate shifted to policy, governance
and institutional concepts, and linkages with newer concepts of civil society,
citizenship and rights-based approaches to development” (McGee 2001a: 112).

The second response to the post-tyranny agenda that we identify here has been
concerned with seeking to capture at a conceptual level the changes that the
participatory turn has undergone within contemporary international development
discourse and practice over recent years. For example, and in terms of recognising
the difference between participation in the form of intentional or planned development
and more historical and embedded forms of participation, a recent review notes that
“people have always been agents of their own development” (McGee 2001a: 92) and
that “the exercise of agency only becomes participation when the impetus or
framework for a development activity is located outside of people’s life worlds” (op
cit.). However, this formulation overlooks key questions concerning how participatory
development as an intervention engages with local and historically constructed
expressions of popular agency, and whether this occurs in ways that are more or less
‘empowering’ as a result.

The notion of ‘citizenship participation’ has recently emerged as a means by which

the convergence of people's agency and their participation in specific interventions
might be understood (Gaventa 2002, Gaventa and Valderrama 1999). The links
between ‘citizenship’ and ‘participatory development’ can to some extent be

3
This argument, based on recent research by one of the authors in Uganda, is pursued in greater depth elsewhere
(Hickey 2003a, forthcoming)

10
conceptualised in terms of the interaction between a series of institutional norms and
agency-led practices, whereby,

“Citizenship can be defined as that set of practices (juridical, political, economic

or cultural) which define a person as a competent member of society, and which
as a consequence shape the flow of resources to persons and social groups”
(Roberts 1993: 2).

To relocate ‘participation’ within citizenship analysis, then, is to situate it within a

broader range of sociopolitical practices, or expressions of agency, through which
people extend their status and rights as members of particular political communities,
and thus increase their control over socioeconomic resources. The question for
participatory development interventions thus becomes the extent to which they can
both enhance the ‘competency’ of participants to assert their agency beyond the level
of specific interventions and into these broader arenas, and, more broadly,
progressively alter the ‘immanent’ processes of inclusion and exclusion that operate
within particular political communities, and which govern the opportunities for
individuals and groups to claim citizenship therein. This implies, first of all, that we
need an approach which is embedded within a theory that is both analytical and
normative, and is grounded in a sound epistemological and ontological
understanding of how development works. This approach – not always apparent in
ongoing work on citizenship participation in development studies – is developed in
the Section 4 below. The notion of citizenship also captures the shift to participatory
governance, in recognising the new moment wherein the social and political agendas
of ‘participation’ and ‘good governance’ have increasingly converged (Gaventa 2002:
1), both as a result of the state moving ‘closer to the people’ and the infiltration of
participatory approaches within bureaucratic institutions (Holland and Blackburn
1998, Thompson 1996).

The focus on citizenship has been joined by other conceptual advances that seek to
capture the wider sense in which popular agency exists beyond specific development
interventions, and is inherently political in character.4 Amongst these advances, only
the notion of ‘political space’ also seeks to capture the overlap between participatory
development and participatory governance, as well as between ‘participation’ and
‘popular agency’. For Webster and Engberg Pedersen (2002) political space
comprises three analytical dimensions:

The institutional channels through which policy formulation and

implementation can be accessed, controlled or contested by the poor;
The political discourses in which poverty and poverty reduction are significant
issues; and
The social and political practices of the poor which may be a basis for
influencing decision-making, agendas, policy and programme implementation.

In terms relocating the notion of participation as a transformative approach to

development, the notion of ‘political space’ is useful for a number of reasons. First, it
identifies political practices that the poor actually engage in rather than imposing, as
an agent of participatory development might (Cooke 2001), an external set of political
concepts and procedures. Second, it understands power along Gramscian-
Foucauldian lines by examining, on the one hand, the ways in which populations
consent to their own domination and internalise certain disciplinary actions and, on
the other hand, how political organisation can challenge hegemony. Third, adding
discourse analysis acknowledges the important effects of political culture in creating
4
Two of these – namely political capital and political capabilities – are discussed in the following section with regards
the need to move beyond notions of social capital.

11
the epistemic conditions in which certain actions are rendered legitimate and
possible.

However, the notion of political space lacks an analysis of the global and is premised
on an abstract understanding of space so that we get no sense of the socio-spatial
context in which political action occurs. Again, this is in danger of under-theorising
the local in relation to other scales of political and economic life. Furthermore,
beyond its linkage to poverty reduction there is no deeper or clearly enunciated
approach to development as framed within at least a broad notion of progress. While
useful, then, political space as currently elaborated fails to elaborate a clear
understanding of how development (might) work.

For these reasons (and others explored in greater depth below), this paper will focus
on citizenship as the guiding ‘meso’ level concept that can frame participation in a
more political and embedded sense than that critiqued within Tyranny and
elsewhere. We seek to go beyond current approaches to citizenship within
development studies by arguing for a radical notion of citizenship that is located
within a particular theoretical home.

The radical backlash from within: a return to a golden age?

The final response to the problem of tyranny within participatory development both
rejects the way in which participation has been mainstreamed into a technocratic
methodology, and seeks to retain those elements of participatory development with
transformative potential within a more radical form than it is currently constituted
within development theory and practice. This has characterised a number of critical
responses to participatory development (e.g. Fals Borda 1998, Rahman 1995, White
1996), some of which hint at a golden age of radical participation by suggesting that
participation “has been ‘domesticated’ away from its radical roots” (Cleaver 1999:
608). However, while we have a degree of sympathy with such approaches, we
would argue that the search for a radical home for participatory development cannot
be soundly built on the legacy of past approaches alone, in part because this
overlooks the extent to which such approaches remained marginal because of
serious internal deficiencies.

An historical trajectory of participation within the last century of development theory

and practice reveals that there have only been two (closely related) moments during
which participatory approaches have been directly informed by what might be termed
a radical approach to development: alternative development and liberation theology
5
(Table 1). To argue that participation has only been seen as transformatory within
just two moments in the last century of development is not deny the radical challenge
that the populist/participation in development approach made to development
professionals within the industry during the 1980s, which some have referred to as a
paradigm shift (e.g. Shepherd 1998), although the extent of this paradigm shift is
challenged below. However, it is (broadly speaking) with alternative development that
proponents of a return to a radical agenda of participation seek to align themselves,
and which thus provides the focus here.

According to proponents of alternative development, “participation…was always

radically conceived as a struggle against political and economic exclusion from
exercising control over public resources” (Fals Borda 1998: 161). Participation was a

5
For reasons of space, a fuller examination of the role of participation within liberation theology is not possible here.
However, both although the extent to which “(t)he language of liberation theology is infiltrating the big multilateral
agencies” (Moore 2001: 321) and the way in which its has sought to re-generate itself around a mixture of
structuralist and cultural concerns (de Schrijver 1998) suggests its relevance as an object of study within
contemporary participatory development.

12
particular variety of grassroots work of “a ‘radical’ (liberation) character” (Rahman
1995: 26), rather than a means of undertaking or justifying specific projects.
However, mainstream development agencies effectively co-opted ‘participation’ into a
depoliticised form of development intervention, which conforms to and legitimises the
neoliberal orthodoxy, rather than challenges the processes of exclusion and
disempowerment that are inherent in ‘mainstream’ development (Rahman 1995,
Carmen 1996, Fals Borda 1998). This has been part of a wider process whereby the
main “forms of alternative development”, including participation, NGOs and green
issues, “have become institutionalized as part of mainstream development” (Pieterse
1998: 350).

For some, such co-option is a sign of the success for any radical project (McGee
2001a), although such a position fails to acknowledge the veracity of the critique that
participation has been domesticated in ways that have reduced its transformative
potential. As argued above with reference to PRSPs, the locus of transformation in
this approach is the individual development professional rather than either the
institutional or structural basis of disempowerment. As argued by Francis (2001a),
the participatory approaches inspired by Chambers et al resemble the ritualistic
banishing of ‘bad’ development practice and the liberation of the participatory expert
from the shackles of disempowering techniques. The emphasis on the ‘primacy of the
personal’ (Chambers 1995) has negated both a clearer engagement with either the
underlying processes of exclusion that make it difficult for poor people to ‘participate’
in the first place, and the need to formulate participation as a coherent development
theory or sub-field thereof. It has also distracted attention away from the need of
institutional reform (Williams et al 2001), as illustrated by the fact that this ‘populist’
approach to participatory development has been swallowed whole by development
institutions such as the World Bank that have remained otherwise unchanged. As this
approach to participation became mainstreamed then, its essentially atheoretical and
apolitical character meant that ‘participation’ could therefore be easily detached from
any radical agenda. It is this notion of participation, then, that has been complicit in
the de-radicalisation of participation.

However, the perennial debate concerning whether or not radical approaches should
seek or avoid co-option also serves to distract from other reasons as to why
alternative development ceased to provide the natural home for participatory
approaches. For some critics, the radical notion of participatory citizenship within
alternative development ceased to be influential as the deficiencies of alternative
development as a development theory became apparent (Sanyal 1994, italics
added). For example, the tendency to reify what its proponents termed ‘actually
existing development’ in the form of a caricature of Eurocentric modernisation to an
extent that actually obscured ‘real’ and underlying processes of development. It also
tended to ignore the state, glorify the local and ‘community’, and failed to locate the
sociopolitical agency and/or institutional support required as the vanguard of
alternative approaches (Pieterse 1998, Sanyal 1994). Indeed, it can be argued that
alternative development has in fact been responsible for many of the deficiencies that
have been identified within the current critique. NGDOs were the agents of
transposing alternative development. For example, alternative development’s notion
of ‘communities’ as "a group of people living in a geographically bounded community,
controlling a certain set of natural resources, and united through a certain set of
cultural values" (Hettne 1995: 200), is closely related to the assumption in
participatory development "that local 'communities' exist as distinct entities: small,
well-bounded, homogenous and integrated" (Cornwall and Jewkes 1995: 1673). As
such, there is little convincing reason for returning the participatory approach to the
main tenets of alternative development as some have sought to do (e.g. Carmen
1996, Wolfe 1996).

13
Against this, it also needs to be recognised that alternative development offers
several useful pointers in terms of conceptualising a radical approach to citizenship.
Since its emergence in the 1970s (Nerfin 1977), alternative development located this
notion of participation within a wider aim of empowering citizens. It claimed to be “the
perspective of the excluded…it is a cry for visibility, participation and justice” (Hettne
1995:161), and defined its task as being “is to transform the claims of these
discarded citizens into rights” (Friedmann 1996: 171). Particularly innovative at the
time was the proposition that citizenship participation occurs within multiple and
overlapping political communities from the local to the global level (Friedmann 1992).
More broadly, the definition of empowerment offered by Friedmann – namely in terms
of a process that involves the attainment of citizenship, human rights and dignity –
closely anticipated the propositions that recent theorists have identified as having the
potential to reconstitute participation. For example, see this paper as well as Gaventa
(2002) and Hickey (2002) on citizenship; on rights, see Mohan and Holland (2001)
and (Brockelsby and Holland 2003, this conference), while Ute Buhler Kelly (Buhler
2002) has previously explored the extent to which a focus on dignity can restore
participation in the aftermath of the tyranny critique. Moreover, if the radical moments
of participation in history remain unconvincing as theoretical perspectives on
development, they continue to inspire much radical action within contemporary
approaches to participatory development and governance (e.g. see below on the role
of liberation theology priests and participatory budgeting in Rio Grande du Sol, and
the continued Freirean influence within non-governmental organisations).

As such, alternative development managed some analytical insights into the problem
of participation as citizenship, while leaving these insights without a theoretical
approach that could grasp the underlying processes of inclusion and exclusion that
characterised ‘actually existing development’. We would argue, then, that in terms of
seeking a radical relocation of participation, the point is not to hark back to a bygone
golden age. The problem has not simply been that participation has been
domesticated away from these approaches and co-opted by the mainstream, but also
that there were certain theoretical and strategic deficiencies within these approaches.
As such, the more convincing way forward is to examine participation within
contemporary political strategies and practice for instances of where it can be
associated with transformation, and explore the extent to which these approaches
can be aligned with theoretical approaches that can capture and transcend the
practice and secure a radical home for participation

3. Towards citizenship: participation and transformation in

contemporary development policy and practice
This section reviews recent approaches to participatory development and
governance, drawing its evidence from the various fields of policy and practice within
which participation forms a key element. These are participatory
governance/decentralisation; social capital/civil society; NGOs and participatory
development projects; and social movements. We argue that initiatives within each
arena have either gone or have the potential go beyond the critiques identified by
Cooke and Kothari (2001) and address broader issues of politics in ways that make
change more embedded and thoroughgoing. The two key ways that the debates
have moved is to focus on new forms of participation, that is “the ways in which poor
people exercise voice” (Gaventa, 2002: 1), and the accountability and
responsiveness of institutions, which generally falls under the rubric of good
governance. The realisation is that these two processes need to occur in tandem so
that we see participation and governance as mutually reinforcing. Woven into this

14
has been the question of rights which has the potential within development to
transform people from beneficiaries to active claimants (Cornwall, 2002). So, this
section reviews some of those initiatives within participatory governance and
development theory and practice that have moved beyond the problems identified
with participation as tyranny and towards participation as transformation. In
identifying the factors that have contributed to their relative successes, this section
lays the foundation for a reassembling of these positive political lessons – in
alignment with wider theoretical insights – into a theoretical and analytical framework
wherein participation as transformation can be located.

Participatory governance and democratic decentralisation

Democratic decentralisation is a key aspect of the participatory governance agenda,
and is associated with the institutionalisation of participation through regular
elections, council hearings and, perhaps most significantly, participatory budgeting.
There is also some evidence that the devolution of power to local authorities
increases levels of civil society activity (Crook and Sverrisson 2001, Manor 1999).
Recent research into ‘partnerships’ as a form of more participatory and accountable
local-level service provision, suggests that their success depends to a large extent on
local authorities having genuine authority and resources (IDS Bulletin 2000).
However, despite being lauded by international development agencies and theorists
(across the political spectrum) alike as the key to state reform, popular empowerment
and, more recently, poverty reduction (e.g. Blair 2000, UNDP 2000, 2001, 2002,
World Bank 2001), the track record of decentralisation in developing countries has
come under increasing criticism. Problems observed so far include the failure of
decentralisation to overcome socio-economic disparities within local authority
regions; the likelihood of elite capture; problems of local government capacity and the
installation of predatory tax regimes (Crook and Sverrison 2001, James et al 2001,
Francis and James 2003, Johnson 2001, Manor 1999), with some concluding that the
central state remains the key actor in ensuring the levels of responsiveness and
accountability claimed by some for the local state (Tendler 1997). An important
critique from our perspective is the charge that, along with the ‘good governance’
agenda in general, decentralisation has been promoted as a technocratic means of
‘reducing’ or ‘smartening’ the central state (Campbell 2001), rather than as a political
project aimed at transforming state legitimacy and forging a new contract between
citizens and the local state.

In terms of participation, a key question concerns the extent to which the increased
participation of marginal groups within local government has been merely tokenistic.
For example, the ‘33% quota rule’ that seeks to ensure representation of marginal
groups on local councils in both Uganda (women) and India (women and lower caste
groups) has been criticised heavily for failing to either secure regular participation of
these groups or to ensure that this participation overcomes power relations
embedded within particular sociocultural structures. In Uganda, it has been noted
that many women are prevented from attending the meetings by their husbands and,
more broadly, that local councils actually monopolise local political space in ways
that close down opportunities for women to participate in their own associational
forms (Tripp 2000). In India, women often do take up their posts, but even those who
do participate with relative autonomy (that is, they are not simply the stooge of male
interests) find that meetings are set for inconvenient times, that they are not listened
to by the men and that their voice is not carried up to higher levels (e.g. Kapoor
2000). More theoretically, James et al (2001) argue that the form of participation
introduced by decentralisation engages with, and is often subsumed within, more
informal modes of participation (the patronage complex) in ways that nullify its
transformative potential.

15
However, certain cases of democratic decentralisation stand out as having achieved
both greater participation of and social justice for marginal groups and localities. In
decentralisation, this accolade has gone primarily to West Bengal, the state of India
that has managed to attain poverty reduction via decentralised forms of governance
(Harriss 2000, Crook and Sverrisson 2001), but also to Kerala (Heller 2001). In both
cases, decentralisation has been credited with ensuring the participation of
subordinate groups and being directly linked to the pursuit of redistributive policies
that have had pro-poor outcomes. In West Bengal, the participation of women, along
with landless groups, sharecroppers and small peasants greatly increased, with the
vested interests associated with ‘elite capture’ removed (Crook and Sverrisson 2001:
14-5). Here, democratic decentralisation has also increased the ‘political space’
within which poor groups can mobilise themselves beyond the formal institutions of
state power (Webster 2002). Since the Communist Party of India (Marxist) also
returned to power in Kerala in 1996, and began the Campaign for democratic
decentralisation, subordinate groups have also managed to increase their
engagement with local governance structures, which have themselves been
significantly empowered through the devolution of a range of powers, resources and
responsibilities (Heller 2001: 142). Here, mass participation has been constituted
more through pre-existing and newly emerging civil society organisations than
through a ‘vanguardist’ party as occurred in West Bengal (Harris 2000: 15).

What is striking from the current state of decentralisation in developing countries is

the extent to which successful cases are strongly associated with approaches that
are both political and radical. The project of democratic decentralisation within both
Kerala and West Bengal can be located within a wider political project of state
transformation.6 The ‘reinvention’ of leftist politics in light of the failures of centralised
rule and planned economies provided, and the need for parties of the left to maintain
and increase their electoral constituency, provided the context within which
participatory forms of governance became integrated within wider project of
redistributive politics and social justice. In Kerala, the project of institutionalising
democratic decentralisation is literally termed ‘the Campaign’ (The People’s
Campaign for Decentralised Planning), and measures are adopted which deliberately
emphasise the political rather than the technical significance of devolution (for
example, the overnight devolution of large-scale resources to local authorities)
(Heller 2001: 141). In both cases, there were higher levels of political mobilisation
and participation by lower caste/class groups than has been the norm within other
states in India (Harriss 2000: 15). Of further importance is the extent to which a
counter-elite was able to pursue a political project against the interests of economic
elites. This autonomy of the political from the economic is a key theme, which will be
returned to below.

Similar findings as to the extent to which the inclusion of subordinate groups within
participatory governance reform depends on the driving presence of a radical (leftist)
political project also emerge from reviews of participatory budgeting Brazil. In one
sense, participatory budgeting is itself a direct riposte to the critique that participation
fails to enter the arenas of decision-making within which power is actually wielded.
More concretely, participatory budgeting in Brazil has been credited with increasing
popular participation (e.g. over 10% of the electorate in the state of Rio Grande do
6
For example, it has been noted that “(a)ll of the reforms carried out by the Left Front clearly had an ideological
motivation, which meant that the political and economic empowerment of poor and landless peasants was
deliberately intended to give impetus and mass support to the CPI(M)’s radical agrarian reform programmes. The
latter aimed to restructure the semi-feudal basis of Bengali rural society through share-cropper protection and land
redistribution (Crook and Sverrisson 2001: 15). A caveat here is the extent to which the ruling Left Front Alliance, and
the Communist Party of India (M) in particular, have increasingly become a broad-based party of power rather than of
the subordinate groups per se, and also the extent to which the poorest groups, such as the landless, were never an
important constituency for the ruling alliance (e.g. Hill 2003 forthcoming).

16
Sul participate in budgeting); changing investment patterns in favour of progressive
social sectors such as housing, education, sanitation and health; drawing excluded
slums and populations into the political process; and also increased efficiency in
terms of planning and implementation (Schneider and Goldfrank 2002, Santos 1998,
Souza 2001). Patronage relations have been challenged (Heller 2001: 140), with
people now able to make claims according to their status as citizens rather than as
clients (Aber 1998, Souza 2001). Interestingly, the success of participatory budgeting
has transcended two of the problems associated with projects designed to promote
participatory citizenship: it has moved from the local to higher levels of governance
(e.g. the success of Porto Alegre has been scaled up to state level in Rio Grande do
Sul), while also transcending the urban-rural dichotomy that threatens the extension
of citizenship in many developing countries (Mamdani 1996, Perez-Bustillo 2001).

Once again, the agency for the success of participatory budgeting can be located
within a wider radical political project. It is striking that the most successful cases of
participatory budgeting have been in areas where the PT has been in power, rather
than when attempted by other parties. Careful analysis of the drivers of the high
levels of participation show that whereas literacy and lower levels of population per
unit of budgeting are positively correlated to increased levels of participation, the
most significant positive correlation is with regards membership of the PT (Schneider
and Goldfrank 2002: 9). More broadly, the rural-based Landless Movement, in
alliance with the unions and progressive churches, have supported participatory
budgeting, even underwriting the costs of some meetings where the state
government had been prevented from spending on budget hearings by the opposition
parties. Where social movements have been too weak to champion this radical
project, priests inspired by liberation theology provided the necessary support
(Schneider and Goldfrank 2002: 9).

As such, and as argued by Schneider and Goldfrank (2002: 13), “…participatory

budgeting articulates first and foremost the political project of excluded groups” who
seek to promote a popular vision of democracy and a redistributive vision of
development. Similarly, Heller (2001: 139) argues that the defining feature of both
democratic decentralisation in India and participatory budgeting in Brazil is that of “a
political project in which an organised political force – and specifically a non-Leninist
left-of-center political parties that have strong social movement characteristics –
champions decentralisation”. However, particularly with the case of participatory
budgeting, it is important to note that the constituency of support for this radical
project went beyond the lower-classes; the middle- and upper-classes have also
become supporters of participatory budgeting as a result of its success in challenging
corruption and waste and promoting greater efficiency and transparency (Schneider
and Goldfrank 2002: 13). With reference to a case with less success, Barten et al
(2002) argue that any project of democratic local governance must adopt a
development paradigm that directly challenges structural inequalities. This chimes
with broader observations on the politics of radical (redistributive) change need not
always fall foul of ‘political economy pessimism’ – that there can actually be win-win
situations whereby elites and subordinate groups can pursue the same radical
agenda (Moore and Putzel 1999). However, it also reinforces the need for the
(counter) elite actually pursing the project to be relatively autonomous of the
economic elite.

These examples suggest that participatory governance reforms work best when they
are part of a wider transformative project. In these it is social movements and
political parties which have acted as the key agents of successful participatory
governance, and which have challenged patronage through the promotion of
participatory citizenship.

17
From social capital and civic participation to more political approaches
Social capital entered the development discourse in the mid-1990s, and has since
achieved a greater ubiquity than even the notion of participation in the development
lexicon (Francis 2001b, Mohan and Mohan 2000). It placed renewed emphasis on
political culture, particularly the idea of civic action and participation in associational
life, and was seen as the socio-cultural ‘glue’ to enable civil society engagement with
the state. For its proponents, social capital deepens and enables civil society, and
thus provides the ‘missing link’ between development on the one hand, and ‘good
government’ on the other (Putnam 1993).7 Social capital is developed primarily
through associational activity, which provides the organisational basis upon which
people can influence policy and hold governments to account. For some, (e.g.
Grootaert 1998), social capital at the national level actually encompasses the social
and political environment that enables norms to develop and shapes social structure,
including the government and political regime.

However, the extent to which the concept of social is capable of bearing this
considerable and highly political load is now widely contested, with one commentator
stating arguing that, social capital is “a totally chaotic concept that is unable to
capture the dimensions of power and the political” (Francis 2001b: 90). Our aim in
this sub-section is to locate the key problems with social capital from a political
perspective, a critique that has four main elements, rather than revisit the now
familiar general criticisms. 8 We go on to suggest that issues of participatory
associationalism and civic action require a more political reading in order to identify
those moments where participation can be related to transformation. Such a reading
might be increasingly possible through a new range of conceptual tools, including
political capital and political capabilities.

The first ‘political problem’ with social capital concerns the growing evidence that for
local forms of human agency to influence decision-making on development
processes, social capital may be a necessary but not sufficient condition. Focusing
on national level cross-sectional survey data in Central America, Booth and Richard
(1998: 782) argue that associational activity alone will not be enough unless it can
"foster attitudes and behaviors that actually influence regimes in some way”. The
second and related point is that high levels of social capital have been proven to be
of little utility unless a sufficient degree of political agency is also available to
households and communities (Krishna 2001). This might come in the form of ‘strong’
local leadership, which can gain access to decision-making and influence the
distribution of development resources. Such political agency is a crucial adjunct to
social capital, where collective agents are seeking to expand their influence into
those arenas of the state (or market) where they are not in a position to control the
result (ibid. 938).

The third problem relates to circumstances where poor groups lack social capital,
perhaps in areas where the state represses civic activity. Here, Putnam’s reliance on
‘path-dependence’ (1993: 179), leaves little room for manouvre those seeking to
overcome an historically low endowment of social capital. So, there is little guidance
on how marginal groups can go about developing and then mobilising stocks of
social capital. Also, this standpoint effectively “eclipses the role of political ideas,
political action and the state in determining democratic prospects” (Putzel 1997: 946).
7
For positive reviews of the role of social capital in developing countries, see Portes and Landolt 2000, Grootaert
1998,
8 1999.
The broader charges against social capital suggest that it is too conceptually imprecise and ambiguous to be of
analytical use; is overly functional and methodologically individualist; that it signifies the creeping economic
colonisation of the social sciences, and also that social capital can have negative development outcomes. Amongst
the most critical reviews are offered by Fine 1999, Francis 2001b, Harris and de Renzio 1997, Putzel 1997.

18
For example, social capital might be generated by the state, as with decentralisation
(Manor 1999) or anti-poverty programmes (Joshi and Moore 2000). It might also be
generated against the state, as through the political action undertaken by social or
popular movements, unions or political parties.9 Again, the role of political agency is
crucial.

Finally, in spite of the links that conflation that is often made between social capital
and democratic outcomes, there is no necessary link. For example, ‘groups’ are
necessarily exclusive, and associationalism in itself does not guarantee the
democratic content, ideas and objectives of associations (Putzel 1997: 941-2). As
noted in a review of survey data in South Africa, it is an attachment to radical political
ideology that tends to consolidate and secure processes of democratisation rather
than the level of associationalism (Orkin 1995). Orkin’s study found that democratic
values were more likely to be sustained within groups that formed around a radical
political project than around a notion of collective/sectional self-interest. That is, the
politics of membership, associationalism etc is not necessarily democratic and could
become exclusive (see Harriss etc on social capital).10 In contrast the engagement
with political struggle has embedded democratic values within more radical
movements and associations. Put another way, social capital theory itself does not
effectively distinguish between those groups that organise as a means of defending
socioeconomic privilege and those who organise to protect the rights of excluded and
impoverished groups – a key distinction between social movements in contemporary
Africa for example (Mamdani 1990, 1996). This underlines the theme of this section
with regards the need for participation to be aligned with a radical political project,
rather than simply founded on politically agnostic – and potentially conservative –
notions of ‘inclusion’ or ‘associationalism’.

As such, it appears that the links between participation and broader transformation
requires a fundamentally political analysis. Some recent research into ‘political
capital’ and ‘political capabilities’ might begin to fill this gap. Political capital can be
defined narrowly as "based on access to decision-making" in the political process
(ibid. Rakodi 1999: 318), or more broadly as “…the ability to use power in support of
political or economic positions and so enhance livelihoods” (Baumann and Sinha
2001: 1). The use of political capital to explore a case of decentralised natural
resource management in India insightfully revealed how participatory reforms that fail
to take issues of politics and power seriously risk being subject to elite capture to the
further disempowerment of marginal groups (Baumann 2000, Baumann and Sinha
2001).

However, although this concept is gaining increasing currency within development

studies,11 at present, political capital is a relatively new and as yet untheorised
concept, not only within development studies but political studies more broadly. For
example, one study notes that the term cannot be found in most political science
dictionaries (Birner and Wittmer 2000: 4). Nor is there a coherent sense of its
intellectual or ideological heritage as a concept. The notion of political capital
appears to draw most heavily on political resource theory, an approach employed
mainly by US political scientists as a means of explaining policy outcomes (Birner
and Wittmer 2000: 4-7). This broad framework can incorporate a range of different

9
For example, Tarrow (1996) and others have pointed out that political parties were responsible for encouraging the
formation
10 of associations in Italy, while Putnam’s analysis (1993) isolates this social capital from its political origins.
One study in Central America revealed that communal-level activism was associated with lower rather than higher
levels of democratic norms, had not significant association with voting, although it did tend to increase the extent to
which
11 members contacted public officials (Booth and Richards 1998: 788).
Political capital has so far been mobilised to extend the insights that social capital can offer into civic and political
action (e.g. Birner and Wittmer 2000, Booth and Richard 1998), and how it might help to ‘politicise’ the livelihoods
framework (e.g. Baumann 2000, Baumann and Sinha 2001, Hickey 2003b forthcoming), and the related
assets/vulnerability approach (Rakodi 1999).

19
theoretical perspectives, and appears to be free from specific ideological affiliations.
This dual lack of analytical ‘groundedness’ and radical positioning renders political
capital as even more malleable notion than ‘participation’, and therefore unlikely to
offer the conceptual advances sought by the project pursued here. Moreover, the
notion that popular agency can be captured within a notion of ‘capital’, with its
tendency towards an economistic focus on ‘stocks’ and ‘assets’ rather than ‘agency’
and ‘relations’, is also problematic for a project that seeks to render explicit the
underlying politics of participation.

Political capabilities are defined broadly “to include the institutional and
organizational resources as well as collective ideas available for effective political
action” (Whitehead and Gray-Molina 1999: 6). Understanding the political capabilities
of the poor involves identifying the resources that are able for collective action, and
also explaining successful collective action. Explaining the link between the two is an
essentially political task, centred on the analysis of the locally-defined rules of the
game, in terms of political engagement (e.g. processes of bargaining and
negotiation). However, as with political capital – and notwithstanding the paper of
Williams in this conference – the applications of this concept are so far limited, and
little sense has been gained of its intellectual and ideological roots. The key study is
limited to a single country (Bolivia), a study that expressly suggests the limited
application of this concept beyond relatively stable states with coherent systems of
public policy-making and implementation.

As such, this paper prefers to locate efforts that seek a radical and a political
approach to participation within a notion of citizenship which, as detailed below, has
both a coherent intellectual history and, we argue, a radical perspective.

NGOs and participatory development

The critique of participation as promoted by non-governmental organisations (NGOs)
through discrete project interventions has been amongst the most vigorously pursued
element of the critical backlash against participation. This critique is based not merely
on the problems of participation within the project framework favoured by NGOs, but
also alleged problems concerning NGOs as agents of participatory forms of
citizenship more generally. Key problems include, first, their straddling of institutional
arenas, to the extent that some argue they operate more like market operators or
public service providers rather than civic actors (Bebbington 1997a). As such, they
might be either incapable of interacting with people other than as clients (Uphoff
1996), or be complicit in the weakening of the ‘social contract’ between state and
citizen (Blair 1997). Second, the ‘transnational community of development NGOs’
transmits what is essentially a neoimperialist project through concepts and strategies
of how the ‘third world’ should be managed (Townsend 1999, Townsend et al 2002),
which essentially negates any efforts towards empowerment. Third, relationships
that are forged within this transnational community – both between ‘northern’ and
‘southern’ NGOs (e.g. (Fowler 1998) and between NGOs and local communities (e.g.
Hickey 2002, Miraftab 1997) – often disempower the ‘lower’ partner through
establishing relationships based less on the solidarity and equity implied by the
language of ‘partnership’ and ‘citizenship’ than the asymmetrical reciprocity of patron-
client relationships. The fourth and related problem is the tendency amongst NGOs
to eschew partnerships with more political elements within civil society in developing
countries in favour of capacity-building professionalised NGOs in their image
(Hashemi 1996, Mamdani 1993). Fifth, the increasing dependency of NGOs on
official sources of funding, allied with the strong emphasis placed on evaluations and
reporting, raise the dangers that the demands of upwards accountability effectively
short-circuit the participatory mechanisms required to secure downwards
accountability (Edwards and Hulme 1996). Finally, there remains an urban bias

20
amongst NGOs (Mercer 2002) that restricts their capacity to reach and empower
those subjected to ‘traditional authority’ beyond the rights-based discourse of urban
civil society (Mamdani 1996, Perez-Bustillo 2001).

To a large extent, this paper would concur that NGOs face severe limitations in
seeking to be genuine agents of transformative development through participatory
approaches. However, the vast range and diversity of agencies and activities within
the transnational community of NGOs not only precludes sweeping judgements, but
has also produced initiatives capable of promoting participatory development in ways
that do involve transformation. Three such examples can be expanded on here,
namely the ‘REFLECT’ approach to literacy generation; the growing focus on rights-
based approaches to development; and the increasing role of NGOs in advocacy
work, through which NGOs have become involved in pursuing a rights-based and
fundamentally political agenda into policy arenas at multiple levels. Although space
precludes a full investigation of each initiative or process, it will be argued that each
is distinguished by an engagement with the politics of participation and
empowerment that promises to overcome the tyranny critique, and that this political
focus revolves to a large extent around an engagement with issues of citizenship as
located within a wider project of achieving transformations at a number of levels.

REFLECT: Regenerated Freirean Literacy through Empowering Community

Techniques
The REFLECT approach to literacy generation, originally piloted by ActionAid in the
mid-1990s, is currently employed by 350 organisations in 60 countries, involving
governmental and non-governmental agencies (ActionAid 2003). The key idea
behind REFLECT is to merge the pedagogical and political philosophy of Paulo
Freire (Freire 1972) with the techniques of participatory rural appraisal. Building on
findings that participatory methods need to be linked to some form of education in
order to become empowering (de Koning 1995), REFLECT proceeds by engaging
participants in dialogical discussions of their socio-economic problems, and uses
visual graphics to structure and depict the discussion (Archer and Cottingham 1996).
‘Keywords’ emerge from these discussions, which then form the basis for literacy
development. Participants are encouraged to devise means of solving the problems,
beginning with ‘action-points’. Depending on the level of action required, REFLECT
groups can either undertake the action themselves, or develop links with higher-level
organisations. The results of REFLECT in many cases to date have been impressive,
with genuine empowerment and transformation taking place with regards gender
relations, community-state relations, and between age groups within communities
(also see Parker, this conference). Participants report self-realisation, increased
participation in community organisations, and increased community-level actions
(Archer and Cottingham 1997: 200-1); female participants and REFLECT facilitators
in particular have become key resource people for the communities (Kanyesigye
1998: 51-53).

The REFLECT approach emphasises both an empowering notion of ‘citizenship

participation’ outlined below, particularly in recognising the need to ‘reconnect’
populist methods of participation with more politicised understandings of social
change. REFLECT is inextricably linked to citizenship formation, in that it focuses on
“people’s ability to participate in civil society, enabling them to effectively assert their
rights and assume their responsibilities” (Archer 1998: 101). It is also theoretically
informed by ‘gender and development’ thinking, and seeks to develop women’s
capacity to take on participatory roles at community level and beyond (Archer and
Cottingham 1996: 18, Metcalf and Gomez 1998). However, while REFLECT was
constructed, and is currently promoted by northern NGDOs, radical adult education
has tended to align itself more clearly with social movements, such that, “radical adult

21
education initiatives are unlikely to prove effective when carried out on their own.
They must operate in relation to a social movement” (Mayo 1999: 133).12 This
position is supported by recent research into a REFLECT project in Cameroon, which
suggests that in order for REFLECT to achieve results that are transformative of
existing power relations, it needs to be aligned not only with local social movements
but also with rights-based approaches to development that transcend the local and
support engagements with ‘structures of oppression’ (e.g. in the form of repressive
state agents) (Hickey 2002). Both themes are returned to below.

NGOs and rights-based approaches

Although we do not have the space for a full discussion of rights-based development
(see DFID 2000, Maxwell 1999, Mohan and Holland 2001, UNDP 2000), the key here
is that it attaches political rights and responsibilities to fundamental aspects of human
needs and well-being. As such, this marks an inherently political shift in development
thinking and in spite of problems with rights-based approaches, there thus remains
the potential for empowerment.

For NGOs, a rights-based approach has been heralded as the opportunity for them to
overcome the disabling distinction between ‘relief’ and ‘development’ activities (Slim
2001), open themselves up to greater accountability (van Tuijl 2000) and secure
themselves within the values of a civil society with the role of ‘watchdogs’ concerning
state and corporate transgressions (Fowler 2000). For our purposes, the significance
of a rights-based approach for NGOs lies in its capacity to locate NGO challenges to
exclusion and poverty within a political response to poverty and exclusion. For
example, in some cases, it has provided NGOs with an alternative conceptual and
strategic approach that leads them to approach their ‘target’ group as agents with
claims rather than as victims in need of ‘rescue and rehabilitation’, with subsequent
successes in terms of empowerment (e.g. Misra et al 2000). Elsewhere, the
discourse of rights offers an ideological resource that marginal groups can draw on in
order to situate their struggle within a broader democratic project with a ‘universally’
recognised and politically powerful framework (Hickey 2002: 853). Similar lessons
are apparent from the involvement of human rights groups in the campaigns of
indigenous peoples against displacement and environmental degradation (e.g.
Wignaraja 1993). Although this ‘universalism’ is problematised below, it appears that
the ‘rights’ agenda is a less malleable discourse than some forms of the
‘participatory’ discourse, and that this relative autonomy and international recognition
offers a useful form of ‘political capital’ to local struggles (Mohan and Holland 2001:
193-5). More specifically, then, the alignment of participatory approaches with a
rights-based agenda brings together the key elements of a citizenship-based
approach that stresses political engagement at local, national and international
levels.

NGO Advocacy
“(the purpose of advocacy is)…to alter the ways in which power, resources, and
ideas are created, consumed and distributed…so that people and organisations
in the South have a more realistic chance of controlling their own development
(Edwards 1993: 164).

One of the key weaknesses of the project-based work traditionally favoured by NGOs
is its inability to challenge wider structures of marginalisation. As Nyamugasira (1998:
297) observes NGOs “have come to the sad realization that although they have
achieved many micro-level successes, the systems and structures that determine
power and resource allocations – locally, nationally, and globally – remain largely

12
For studies of the links between popular education and social movements, see Ghanem 1998 and Patel 1998.

22
intact”. In one sense the rights agenda just described holds the promise of making
the state more accountable and responsive, but the state is not the only political
terrain where marginalisation and poverty can be contested. Increasingly NGOs and
other development actors are realising that a useful contribution is not to take an
atomistic view of local organisations but to address political processes which shape
and constrain the local. As such advocacy contains greater potential for
transformation than project based work. It is political and rights-based, and engaged
with making claims for excluded people in ways that (should) increase their capacity
to demand their rights of citizenship and help them participate in wider arenas of
decision-making. Significantly, it can be seen as one of the mechanisms by which
the links between participatory development and participatory governance might be
forged (e.g. Brehm 2000, PLA Notes 2002). For example, Harper (2001) argues for a
participatory form of advocacy that both involves the grassroots in agenda setting
through genuine partnerships and participatory methods, and opens up policy
processes to a wider range of voices and stakeholders. More radically, case-study
evidence also reveals that the role of ‘participation’ within successful advocacy
campaigns is often as a form of popular protest rather than as a set of methods
(Dechalert 1999).13

To focus on the politics of advocacy requires an analysis of transnational civil society

(Edwards and Gaventa 2001). With globalisation contemporary configurations of civil
society action “look for political spaces other than those bounded by the parameters
of the nation-state system” (Lipschutz, 1992: 392-3). Under globalisation there has
been a paradoxical movement in which the state has been ‘hollowed out’ by
multinational capital and supranational organisations such as the EU, but also
internationalised with powerful states projecting their power ‘upwards’ and ‘outwards’
into various institutions of global governance. As Shaw (1994: 650) notes “The
emergence of global civil society can be seen both as a response to the globalisation
of state power and as source of pressure for it”. The mixture of these contradictory
forces depends upon the issues at stake. For example, environmental degradation
transcends borders and is seen by civil society actors as requiring a global political
response compared with the WTO which is resisted by activists as a global actor
riding roughshod over national sovereignty.

In analysing the effectiveness of international NGOs and other transnational

networks Risse-Kappen (1995) examines the interaction of the international and
national such that “differences in domestic structures determine the variation in the
policy impact of transnational actors” (Risse-Kappen, 1995: 25, original emphasis).
The other determining factor in their success is the degree of institutionalisation at
the transnational level. The process is circular in that states affect the degree to
which civil society actors need to (or can) go transnational and once they are
transnational states can then filter and obstruct the activities of civil society actors.
Keck and Sikkink (1998) terms this the ‘boomerang pattern’ which refers to the ways
in which national civil society organisations seeking some local justice turn to global
discourses and actors as a way of by-passing their national government and affecting
pressure from without. They argue that “When channels between state and its
domestic actors are blocked, the boomerang pattern of influence characteristic of
transnational networks may occur; domestic NGOs bypass their states from outside”
(1998: 12). Such networks “can amplify the demands of domestic groups, pry open
space for new issues, and then echo these demands into the domestic arena” (ibid:

13
An ‘alternative’ way of forging the links between advocacy and participation comes from Slum Dwellers
International, an urban social movement founded on horizontal participation and solidarity rather than top-down
interventions that has transformed both the lives of marginal slum dwellers in some parts of South Asia and Africa
and the concept of ‘participation’ and ‘partnership’ (Mitlin et al 2001, Mitlin and Patel 2002).

23
13). Such processes are about the creative use of power amongst the relatively
powerless.

Although it is argued below that social movements play a key role in extending
citizenship status and rights to marginal groups, it is ironic that transnational social
movements may be undermining national citizenship, and seeking to replace it with a
form of ‘global citizenship’ that remains unattainable to most people in poor countries.
For example, much global citizen action by-passes national governments in favour of
applying direct pressure to global institutions (Edwards 2001). Although such action
is important, it ignores the crucial role that nation-states must play in reducing
poverty and responding to the needs of marginalised peoples. In particular, there is a
need to develop national constituencies that can pressure governments to become
more accountable to their citizens, and develop pro-poor reforms. In failing to engage
with states (Edwards 2001: 148), global movements may end up circumventing the
political processes that need strengthening in order for poverty and exclusion to be
challenged.

This section has argued that participatory approaches can enhance citizenship, but
they require linkage to more political social movements and activities than
mainstream development NGOs. Much of this activity increasingly requires moving
beyond the locality with empowerment involving multi-scaled strategies and networks
of global organisations. Indeed, one observer argues that NGOs who prioritise
advocacy should become classified as social movements (Dechalert 1999). Clearly,
engaging with a more politicised and radical project will often entail heightened
conflict with vested interests at multiple levels (e.g. Rafi and Chowdhury 2000).
Issues of representation – whether of ‘universalist’ ideals within different cultural
contexts or of ‘southern’ NGOs by ‘northern’ NGOs in various policy arenas – appear
to beset critical debates concerning NGO advocacy (e.g. Hudson 2000). However, it
might be that a focus on the political is once again the way forward here, with a shift
in focus from issues of ‘representation’ and ‘legitimacy’ to one on ‘political
responsibility’ at all levels of advocacy work (Jordan and van Tuijl 2000). Here, the
key is for campaigns to be conducted “with democratic principles foremost in the
process” (ibid: 2053), with all actors having to respond to the demands of ‘politically
responsibility’ at each stage. This involves dividing different political arenas (or
communities, see below) between different actors and empowering them to act
therein, while monitoring the (potentially negative) impact that actions in one political
arena might have in another (ibid: 2063). As argued below in Section Four, this calls
for a close understanding of the way in which the multiple political communities within
which development futures are contested interact with each other.

Social movements
Development theory and practice has been wary of engaging directly with social
movements, preferring the more orderly and ‘makeable’ world of NGOs. However,
the line between NGOs and social movements is not clear-cut and a number of
theorists are realising the potential of the latter for radical change (Escobar, 1995;
Esteva and Prakash 1998). The move towards social movements was premised on
a thoroughgoing critique of the dominant ‘left’ position on civil society.

Two of the most influential theorists in this post-Marxist vein, Laclau and Mouffe,
argued that the state "is not an homogenous medium, separated from civil society by
a ditch, but an uneven set of branches and functions, only relatively integrated by the
hegemonic practices which take place within it" (1985: 180). These authors see
society as made up of numerous and shifting identities and alliances so that political
struggles are constituted around ever-changing mixtures of interests organised

24
through overlapping networks of actors. The paradigm for such fluid and dynamic
politics is the ‘new social movement’. However, while opening up a more nuanced
account of state-society relations and championing the social movements, Laclau
and Mouffe tend to underplay the role of the state as a site of political struggle which
has implications for citizenship (Jessop, 1990) since the state is clearly a key site for
redistribution. For Walby (2001) redistribution politics concerns the state-welfarist
and class-based arguments of the ‘old’ social movements such as trade unions. By
contrast many ‘new’ social movements and civil society actors push for the
recognition of cultural difference and other identities. However, as she
acknowledges the most transformative struggles, such as the women’s movement,
have been about both forms of political engagement simultaneously.

In the developing world social movements have emerged as a form of socio-political

agency in the pursuit of transformative forms of participation. Whether through
engagements with political parties or international NGOs, social movements offer an
associational form of popular participation. Historically they have been associated
with extending the boundaries of citizenship rights and gaining inclusion for marginal
groups (Scott 1990, Foweraker and Landman 1998) and can also capture the
cultural/identity-basis of participation (Castells 1997). The case of the Zapatistas
reveals how claims that are considered by some observers to be ‘postmodern’ are
better understood as located within a critical position vis-à-vis the ongoing project of
modernity (e.g. Veltmeyer 1997).

The Zapatistas have campaigned actively since 1994 to not only attain full citizenship
for the Indians of Chiapas, but also for wider political and economic reforms in
Mexico. In terms of ‘culture’ as the basis of political claims, the Zapatistas reveal how
a new form of identity can be both forged and politicised through a struggle over a
particular place. Previous to the uprising, the Indian communities of the Chiapas
region were divided along ethnic lines. However, by sensitising different communities
to their shared problems of exclusion and exploitation in a particular place, the
Zapatistas constructed a ‘pan-ethnic identity under the notion of ‘indigenous Indians’.
Reflecting on this, Zapatista leaders note that “What is common to us is the land that
gave us life and struggle” (Quoted in Castells 1997: 78).

Marcos argues that these factors have led indigenous Indians to become “a very
inferior category of ‘citizens in formation’”, forced to occupy “the basement of the
Mexican nation” (Marcos 1994). In attempting to claim citizenship for indigenous
communities, there is no renouncement of the notion of Mexican citizenship, but of
the exclusive way in which it has been forged. In a statement to mark seven years of
activity by the Zapatistas, Marcos issued a demand that the government amend the
constitution so as to “recognise the indigenous as indigenous and as Mexicans”
(Marcos 2001). The movement has challenged patronage politics in favour of
genuine democracy at the regional level, within which people can actively participate
as citizens. Externally imposed economic development models are rejected in favour
of local development processes that sustain local ecologies and cultures, involving
equitable land reform and more control for local co-operatives.

This demand for dual recognition reaffirms the importance of sub-national identities,
both in themselves as demoting the boundaries of cultural belonging and attachment
to place, and as a means of gaining the rights and status accorded to other
Mexicans. According to Philip McMichael (2000: 270), this hallmark claim makes the
Zapatistas “most potent example of cosmopolitan localism”, a term coined to
describe “the assertion of diversity as a global right, and the identification of the
locality as globally formed” (ibid: 269). This synergy between localism and globalism
has also been apparent in strategic terms (Routledge 2001: 28): while the local

25
struggle waged by the Zapatista’s has relied on their intimate knowledge of the local
terrain in Chiapas to avoid capture and make gains, their strategic use of global
communications has swayed international solidarity behind their them. The term
‘cosmopolitan localism’ is used by postmodern theorists of social movement activity
to refer to a process whereby social movements are actually bailing out of the
"limping vessel of development (and) striking out for new horizons in smaller craft"
(Esteva and Prakash 1992: 51). The destination as yet has no name other than
‘cultural autonomy’ and an escape from ‘mainstream’ development.

However, what is arguably most significant about the Zapatistas is not so much their
emphasis on cultural autonomy. Rather, it is the way in which their claims of
‘indigenous rights’ are woven within a broader discourse of what are at once the
familiar demands of modernity, while also resonating with postmodern concerns with
the politicisation of identity. For example, the concerns of the Zapatista’s is not to
renounce their claim to citizenship within the Mexican state but to claim it within the
context of democratic reform, alongside their claims for cultural autonomy. Land,
democracy, citizenship and development – all totems of the modern project – remain
the key concerns. As such, the Zapatistas appear to have found a way of “relating
the universal and the particular in the drive to define social justice from the standpoint
of the oppressed",14 in a way that some movements that politicise identity and place
have failed. In so doing, they have articulated a mode of political action capable of
imagining and generating alternative development futures not only for its immediate
constituency, but also for a broader community of dispossessed and marginalised
peoples. Citizenship has provided both the frame of analysis and strategic way
forward. This notion of social movements being transformative and radical within the
modern is further supported by research with popular organisations in Andean
regions of Latin America (Bebbington and Bebbington 2000). These cases suggest
that the politics of cultural identity, material redistribution and social justice are not
alternatives, but can be part of a single political project. Such a politics involves
multiple inclusions and conceives of ‘place’ as more than a romanticised and
homogenised attachment to ‘community’ and ‘landscape’.

Identifying the politics of participation as transformation

This (selective) sampling of political and policy arenas demonstrates that
participation discourse and practice has – to some extent and in some ways – gone
beyond the critique mounted against it, particularly with regards the failure to engage
with issues of politics and power. Although we cannot claim that these developments
are conclusive or will go onto fully achieve their ends, they have transcended the
search for simple technical fixes and are demonstrably moving towards more
structural transformations. Moreover, we argue that there are several threads of
continuity that run throughout these initiatives, which can be drawn out as the key
dimensions that underlie successful approaches to participation as transformation.
We identify four key dimensions that emerge from this review, the first two more
strongly than the latter, which remain as more tentative conclusions.

First, the successes of participation within contemporary development policy and

practice have depended upon being part of a broader project that is at once political
and radical. By this we mean a project that seeks to directly challenge existing
power relations rather than simply work around them for more technically efficient
service delivery. The roots of this political radicalism varies. For example, in the case
of decentralisation, the stage was set by a convergence between the growth of

14
Harvey, D. 1993. ‘Class relations, social justice and the politics of difference’, in J. Squires (ed.) Principled
Positions. (London: Lawrence and Wishart). Quoted in Lister (1997: 89).

26
populist approaches to governance and development, and the need for organisations
of the political left to find a means of both institutionalising a politics of social justice
in the post-welfarist, post centralist era of governance and (re)connect with an
electoral base. With NGOs, it has either formed around a rediscovery of the radical
within participatory development history (REFLECT), a politicisation of efforts with
regards policy and power ahead of service-delivery and of rights ahead of needs.
What is key here is that there is an explicit articulation of a radical project that
focuses primarily on issues of power and politics.

Second, each approach is characterised by an explicit focus on and pursuit of

participation as citizenship. We deal in more detail presently with defining and
operationalising the particular notion of citizenship that we understand to be
mobilised in the developments cited above. However, what is apparent is that the
initiatives reviewed here seek in different ways not only to bring people into the
political process, but also to transform and democratise the political process in ways
that progressively alter the ‘immanent’ processes of inclusion and exclusion that
operate within particular political communities, and which govern the opportunities for
individuals and groups to claim their rights to participation and resources. Amongst
the key exemplars here are the Zapatista’s campaign for constitutional change in
Mexico and the underlying focus of NGO as “…an act of organizing the strategic use
of information to democratise unequal power relations” (Jordan and van Tuijl 2000:
2052).

The following two conclusions are more circumspect and require both further
empirical evidence and theoretical elaboration. The third commonality appears to be
that, for participatory approaches to be successful in achieving transformation, a
precondition is that the modes of accumulating political and economic power in the
given context are structurally disentwined from each other. For example, the
success of decentralisation in the Indian states of West Bengal and Kerala has been
predicated to a large extent on the fact that the political elite that gained power on a
radical agenda were separate from and able to avoid being captured by the local
economic (landed) elite. To the extent that we focus on participation as a political
project here, then, there is a need also to examine the political economy of
participation, particularly in contexts where the accumulation of political power and
economic wealth are entwined (e.g. in ‘neopatrimonial’ states such as Uganda,
Francis and James 2003), and where a focus on ‘participation’ may simply be a
means of concealing ongoing clientelism.

The fourth and related point is that the successes reviewed here suggest that a
degree of institutionalisation needs to have taken place in order for participatory
movements to achieve sustained transformation. Without this, the atomistic pursuit
of individual liberties has limited impacts and in such cases citizenship remains an
elusive and ideologically convenient label to mask political inequalities. However,
once the political process has become institutionalised, claim-making by advocacy
groups ands social movements seeking participation and justice can find a point of
engagement for their transformatory process. The next or parallel move is to
institutionalise participatory approaches – as in the constitutional protection for
participatory budgeting in Brazil or Law of Popular Participation in Bolivia (for further
examples see Blackburn and Holland 1998). However, and given the stronger
evidence in support of the two points noted above, it is worth stressing here that to
pursue an institutional focus alone will tend to lead towards a narrow, technocratic
agenda of ‘getting the institutions right’, rather than a more substantive focus on
understanding the ways in which participatory political movements secure their
autonomy and transformative potential through developing a radical political project
that articulates a notion of participation as citizenship.

27
4. Towards the relocation of participation: a radicalised notion of
citizenship?
So far we have argued that current debates and practical approaches to participation
reveal transformatory tendencies but that the underlying politics that leads to these
relative successes have yet to be brought together within a coherent framework that
might explain them. The lessons clearly point to the importance of citizenship but in
these formulations the theory is never made explicit nor is the normative view of
development to which it is attached. More broadly, we feel that this reluctance to be
explicit about the development project for which participation is the modus operandi
leaves the discourse and practice vacuous and open to co-option and dilution. We
also argued that efforts to relocate participation within an earlier radical moment in
development theory and practice are unconvincing, while acknowledging that such
moments – particularly alternative development – offer valuable analytical insights.
At both stages, citizenship emerged as a central aspect of both the empirical review
of successful approaches and of potentially radical approaches to participation. Our
basic lesson is that participation becomes tyrannical – or at least fails to be
transformative – when development theory and practice fails to take citizenship
seriously and is not attached to a radical political project. In this section we take on
board these insights in refashioning a radicalised notion of citizenship. However, this
does not simply involve adding up all the ‘best bits’ from previous attempts but
looking more fundamentally at the values and politics that might underpin a radical
citizenship as well as the different modalities required for its realisation. We contend
(in Section 5) that for citizenship to be transformatory it must be linked overtly to a
radical development trajectory which is capable of addressing issues of inequality
and power without lapsing into or evoking an irrelevant and Eurocentric discourse of
progress. To do this we discuss the idea of critical modernism and its linkages to
active citizenship in place. This then allows us, in the concluding sections, to raise
questions and caveats about realising such an agenda.

Citizenship and the politicisation of participatory development

Accounting for the rise of citizenship as an increasingly important discourse within
social science and policy-making circles over recent years is beyond the scope of
this paper.15 However, it is of relevance to note that the concept has received support
from across the political spectrum, including decentralisation and participation. Within
the United Kingdom for example, the focus on ‘active’ citizenship under the New
Right in the late 1980s was aligned to both a paternalist and neoliberal campaign to
form ‘responsible’ citizens capable of policing themselves and providing their own
social security needs in the context of declining social spending and state withdrawal.
The increasingly ubiquitous ‘third way’ proposed by elements of the New Left, also
views citizenship as a unifying theme in the post-welfarist politics (Turner 2001),
albeit with a closer balance between rights and responsibilities. Debates over
citizenship in both the UK and Europe are often driven by the exclusionary politics of
maintaining ‘fortress’-like boundaries in the face of mass migration. While a more
emancipatory and radical notion of citizenship is pursued below, the point is that
there is a need to critically engage and articulate the particular politics of citizenship
that is being pursued, rather than engage with uncritical invocations. This is a
particular concern given that citizenship now appearing as a touchstone concept
across debates within development theory and practice, often with little attention to
such political concerns.

15
Amongst the best recent reviews are Heater 1999, Turner 1999, 2001, van Steenbergen 1994.

28
Our task here it to identify a notion of citizenship can adequately capture the radical
aspects of participation that are forwarded within the successful political projects
detailed above. Which notion of citizenship contains “a participatory vision of
democracy and a redistributive vision of development” (Schneider and Goldfrank
2002)? Also, there is a need to identify an analytical approach to citizenship that can
account for different political contexts. Exploring the potential of citizenship with
regards participatory development necessitates looking beyond development studies,
and here we find inspiration from feminist theory, geography and political sociology.

Towards a radical theory of citizenship

It is argued here that the basis for formulating a radical concept of citizenship starts
with the formulation of citizenship in relation to substantive membership of political
communities rather than in a legalistic or juridicial sense. This initial move allows
citizenship analysis to focus on participation as both a right and a driver of citizenship
rights and status for marginal groups, to engage with political struggles for rights, to
overcome the public-private divide, and, to an extent, overcome the conventional
divide between national and either sub- or supra-national forms of citizenship. This
argument is pursued below, before exploring the broader theoretical implications in
terms of linking a politics of difference to a politics of justice.

Citizenship and political communities

The links between participation and citizenship are most clearly expressed within
‘civic republican’ as opposed to ‘liberal’ theories of citizenship.16 Civic republicanism
is founded on “the collective and participatory engagement of citizens in the
determination of the affairs of their community” (Dietz 1987: 13-15, in Lister 1997:
24), where the citizen “plays an active role in shaping the future of his or her society
through political debate and decision-making” (Miller 1995: 443). Civic republican
theory thus define citizenship in terms of membership within a particular political
community, whereas liberal conceptions tend to rely on legal definitions concerning
the formal status of citizens, and focus on narrow forms of ‘political participation’ (e.g.
voting). This juridical focus tends to mask the fact that the “sociological realities are
those of subjects, clients and consumers, not those of citizens of equal worth and
decision-making capacity” (Stewart 1995: 74). Against this, “membership in a
community can be a broader, more inclusive category” (Silver 1997: 79), wherein
‘citizenship’ constitutes not only a set of legal obligations and entitlements “but also
the practices through which individuals and groups formulate and claim new rights or
struggle to expand and maintain existing rights” (Isin and Wood 1999: 4). This
participatory notion of citizenship is particularly “attractive to women and other
marginalised groups” (Lister 1997: 28), as it offers the prospect that citizenship can
be claimed ‘from below’ through their own efforts in organised struggles, rather than
waiting for it to be conferred ‘from above’. Here, participation becomes not merely a
means by which citizenship roles are reproduced and obligations fulfilled, but of
extending citizenship to previously marginal groups.

If we understand citizenship as being about social membership within modern

political collectivities (Turner, 1993) then it invokes both a status people possess and
a practice which people engage in (Lister, 1997; Prior et al, 1995). Prior et al (1995)
argue that the status ascribed to citizenship depends upon the nature of the political
community to which a citizen is a member. For them a political community is a

"collectivity whose members share a common system of governance, which

includes both the institutions of government and the processes of collective
decision-making...it simply refers to the existence of arrangements to enable a
16
On the differences between the republican and liberal traditions of citizenship theory, see van Gunsteren (1994)
and Miller (1995).

29
 collectivity to govern itself, and the recognition of such arrangements by other
polities. Individual members of the community who are entitled to participate in
these political arrangements have the status of 'citizens'" (6).

This moves us away from exclusively state-based models of citizenship and allows
individuals to be citizens in more than one political community at a time (Turner,
1993). In this way we are social beings who derive self-understanding from the
social world so that "being a citizen involves belonging to a community" (Assiter,
1999). For Prior et al (1995), as we saw, 'community' is partly defined by the
systems of governance that apply to all members whereas Assiter is more open
about what binds communities and what political values are attached to citizenship.
However, the key is that the political communities are not just state-based, but
multiple and overlapping. This understanding helps us to think beyond conventional
notions of what constitutes ‘public’ and ‘private’ political action that have sometimes
excluded women’s agency, and also engage with citizenships that are no longer tied
to national territories, as with civic action that is ethnically driven.

Broadening and gendering citizenship participation: the informal and the hidden
The distinction between ‘public’ and private’ spheres is a perennial problem within
citizenship analysis. In particular, mainstream republican notions of citizenship have
been criticised for extolling a model of citizenship that could only be fulfilled by the
publicly active, property owning, white male, and which has too often “excluded many
classes of potential citizens, including women, indigenous minorities, slaves, colonial
subjects, the working classes” (Werbner and Yuval Davis 1999: 7). In order to
formulate a substantive notion of citizenship that includes those participatory arenas
that are relied upon by ‘subordinate’ social groups, feminist writers in particular have
sought to broaden the scope of what can be considered ‘public’ (Lister 1997: 24-9,
Young 1990: 118-120). In order to retain citizenship as an essentially political notion,
this requires making a distinction between ‘political citizenship’ in a broadly defined
public sphere and ‘personal politics’ within the private arena (Lister 1997: 38), while
focusing on the dialectical relationship between people’s expressions of agency
within each sphere. The growing awareness that women are often the driving force in
local civic and political action, in what has been conceptualised as a local and
feminine sphere of ‘informal politics’ (Lister 1997: 145-194).17 Informal forms of
participation are often the preserve of ‘subordinate’ or ‘excluded’ social groups who
are denied access to more public forms of participation. In some cases, this
marginality may “allow those who have systematically been disprivileged a ‘central
space’ of their own in which to organise the expression of their needs” (Fardon 1988:
774, also Jackson 1999), and lead to the development of alternative forms of
citizenship.

Citizenship beyond the state: the rise of sub-national citizenship/s

“…the political communities which provide the contexts of democratic
citizenship…are able to encompass group as well as individual citizenship and
their social sites are potentially widespread, both subnational and transnational,
the city and the region as well as the community and the federation” (Stewart
1995: 74).

Civic republican theory has traditionally framed national citizenship as the preeminent
political identity, against which any ‘subnational’ or ‘indentity-based’ forms of political
mobilisation must be considered to be divisive and potentially destructive of a unified
polity (Habermas 1994, Oommen 1997). This was paralleled by the localist bias

17
This resonates with research on women’s participation in Africa which argues that the concepts of ‘political
participation’, ‘civil society’ and ‘democracy’ need to be expanded in order to account for the diverse and often
informal ways in which women participate as citizens (Chazan 1982, Hirschmann 1991, McEwan 2000, Tripp 1998).

30
towards citizenship participation within alternative and participatory development.
However, more nuanced accounts within each approach have emerged, which
perceive the importance of recognising the different levels and types of political
community in which different types of citizenship rights and obligations are competed
for and realised. For example, recent revisions to alternative development theory
recognise the importance of the state as well as civic localities, and posit a layered
conception of overlapping political communities which can be said to exist from the
household through neighbourhood, village, city, nation and even beyond (Friedmann
1992: 74). A similar move towards locating citizenship within political communities at
different levels is apparent within civic republicanism, as indicated by the above
quotation from Stewart that refers to citizenship debates in the context of closer
European integration.

Political analysis of ‘sub-national’ forms of identity-based political activity has

arguably progressed furthest within studies of ethnicity in Africa. Here, such activity
has become increasingly framed by reference to civic republican notions of
citizenship. This is founded on the recognition that in many postcolonial African
states, then, “individuals participate in two substantive publics” – the national end the
ethnic – (Ndegwa 1997: 602), neither of which has managed to eclipse the other.18 It
is recognised that certain aspects of citizenship express themselves more fully in
subnational rather than national communes, particularly in terms of high levels of
participation, reciprocity and co-operation within a ‘moral economy’ of socioeconomic
exchange.19 Such modes of sociopolitical action are frequently absent from the
national ‘civic’ public in Africa, where the imposed character of the colonial state, and
the anti-colonial struggle against it, left little room for political participation to emerge
on the basis of any generalised moral imperative or overarching sense of ‘public
interest’; rather, people tend to demand their rights but usually fail to fulfil the
obligations of citizenship (Ekeh 1975: 92).

Political analysis of the links between state and ethnic citizenship tends to stress the
extent to which ethnicity is inimical to a wider sense of statehood (Ndegwa 1997,
Oommen 1997). However, this is problematic, first because it fails to appreciate the
extent to which state formation in Africa was founded on a collection of ethnic
identities (Mamdani 1996), and second, because ethnicity may not necessarily
damage the ideals of social justice and equality contained within notions of
citizenship. Indeed, one close observer of the links between ethnicity and citizenship
argues that in Africa “…ethnicity is universal; it gives the identity that makes social
behaviour possible” (Lonsdale 1992: 328), a claim that resonates with Ruth Lister’s
above-cited formulation of citizenship as agency. Moreover, ethnicity can contain the
seeds of civic virtue, which may even be forged symbiotically with reference to a
wider sense of ‘nationhood’. Lonsdale distinguishes between ‘moral ethnicity’ and
‘political tribalism’, as do Doornbos (1991) and Ekeh (1990), who argues that it is
possible to found a political morality on the basis that public resources should be
shared equally among different ethnic groups (e.g. Srebrnik 2000).20

To frame ethnic political action in terms of ‘citizenship’ is not to valorise all forms of
ethnic or ‘identity-based’ mobilisations in Africa (Ndegwa 1997), some of which have
18
This tension has been classically formulated as existing between two different types of political community that
compete within the same nation-states, namely the ‘civic’ (the formal state institutions associated with the colonial
administration) and ‘primordial’ (mainly primary associations based on kinship or ethnic) (Ekeh 1975). While this
binary divide does not exist in reality, the strength of this analytical construct is the focus that it places on the
dialectical relationship between the two which, for Ekeh, “foments the unique political issues that have come to
characterise
19 African politics (Ekeh 1975: 93; echoed by Eyoh 1999: 288, Abah and Okwori 2002: 26-27).
According to one study, local level “age and kinship groups, secret societies, and gender organizations were the
fount
20 of political accountability in traditional African society” (Hutchful 1995: 64; also see Lonsdale 1986, 1992).
For example, Ekeh claims that “With respect to participation in the affairs of the state and in its agencies, the
ethics of tribalism call for mandatory fairness in sharing out the benefits that accrue to citizens across constituent
ethnic groups” (Ekeh 1990: 690).

31
clearly been politically destructive and even linked to genocide.21 Rather, the
approach adopted here recognised that the politics of national citizenship formation
for historically excluded groups begins almost by definition with the particularist
claims of identity (Foweraker and Landman 1997). As such, “rather than regarding
citizenship and identity as antinomic principles” it might be necessary to “recognize
the rise of new identities and claims for group rights as a challenge to the modern
interpretation of universal citizenship” (Isin and Wood 1999: 4). From this position, it
is possible to critically explore the extent to which this form of ‘recognition politics’
can develop into what Iris Young has termed an ‘emancipatory politics of difference’
(Young 1990: 163), within which participatory democracy is both an element and a
condition of the social justice sought by the extension of citizenship (ibid: 183). This
project requires engaging with questions of difference, multiple standpoints, and a
politics of justice.

Difference, empowerment and emancipation

A key problem for a project based on multiple rationalities is the tension between
theories which posit universal values and concepts, on the one hand, and those
which work around particularisms, on the other. If development is committed to a
politics of social justice, how can it resolve the tension between a universal value of
justice and multiple, situated rationalities? Harvey (1993) sees this as a problem for
postmodernism which rightly questions the naturalness of different ethical positions
but largely ducks the political ramifications of this by positing a politics of anything
goes relativism. This search for a politics of justice must also chart a path away from
the Marxist tendency to see all discourses of equivalence (such as rights and civil
society) as bourgeois ideologies which seek to conceal the pernicious effects of
capitalism.

The problem is how to find a set of values which are absolute and allow us to judge
which claims are valid, but at the same time does not annihilate the specificity of
group identities in complex societies. The first means of addressing this, Harvey
continues, is to break out of the local. By this he means moving beyond a
reactionary form of resistance by deconstructing the supposed homogeneity of self-
defined communities. Young (1993) takes this on by seeing groups as heterogenous
and relational. She goes on

Groups should be understood not as entirely other, but as overlapping, as

constituted in relation to one another and thus as shifting their attributes and
needs in accordance with what relations are salient. In my view, this relational
conception of difference as contextual helps make more apparent both the
necessity and possibility of political togetherness in difference” (1993: 123-4)

This idea of ‘togetherness in difference’ is based on the interspersion and interaction

of different groups. While differences exist there is also the recognition that relational
identities require multiple others so that the identity of one depends upon other/s
which gives groups a mutual stake in one another’s existence. At various levels this
opens the possibility that alliances exist since only some differences are intractable.

The key to Young’s politics of difference is that it “requires not the melting away of
differences, but institutions that promote reproduction of and respect for group
differences without oppression” (1990: 47, cited in Harvey, 1993: 105). Operating
‘without oppression’ is similar to the idea of emancipation although the latter implies a
more proactive agenda of transformation than simply avoiding oppression. Assiter
(1999) argues that emancipation might be a viable and empowering axis around
21
See Oommen (1997: 152-4), for a discussion of how the 1994 genocide in Rwanda was at root a struggle for the
rights and status of citizenship between Hutu ‘insiders’ and Tutsi ‘outsiders’.

32
which to judge the legitimacy of expanded citizenship rights and claims of difference.
Emancipation is a value which refers to releasing individuals or groups from
subjugation which is broader than the liberal notion of rights without lapsing into an
anything goes relativism. However, these concepts still lack a normative basis by
which to judge the validity and practicality of different claims.

For Assiter there needs to be a hierarchy such that "emancipatory values will be
those that ensure life, first of all, and then those that enable the satisfaction of
objectively defined needs" (Assiter, 1999: 49, See also Sengupta, 2000). On the
other hand, Young (1990) sets out what constitutes oppression so that we have a
sense of what a strategy which avoids oppression might look like. These sources of
oppression are exploitation (the transfer of the fruits of the labour of one group to
another), marginalization (the expulsion of people from useful participation in social
life), powerlessness (the lack of authoirty, status of sense of self which permits a
person to be listened to with respect), cultural imperialism (the stereotyping in
behaviours so that the oppressed groups culture is denied value and the dominant
culture is imposed), and violence (the fear and actuality of unprovoked attacks).

While this gives us a framework for resolving differences within a struggle for justice
there is still the problem of which or whose difference claims are valid and which are
not. As Haraway (1990) 202-3 quoted in Harvey 1993: 112) has noted “Some
differences are playful, some are poles of world historical systems of domination.
Epistemology is about knowing the difference”. For Harvey this epistemological task
of judging validity requires a renewed engagement with political economy. This level
of analysis tends to be ignored by postmodernists but can help explain the processes
through which fragmentation and difference are generated. Postmodernists tend to
focus on the outcomes of fragmentation in the form of multiple identity groups and
celebrate them. Understanding the political economy of the processes shifts the
focus in two ways. First, by understanding the relational formation of group identities
we do not ignore claims by groups which we find oppressive, but look at how their
presence shapes and is shaped by those groups seeking emancipation. Second,
political economy alerts us to the similarities as much as the differences, which then
provides a basis for alliances and connections between different groups.

Discussing a politics of difference and togetherness does not necessarily imply

assimilation, consensus or separation. Liberal notions argue that in the individualism
of the public sphere difference is reduced and in this rational process particularisms
are only practised in the private sphere. An alternative model of difference is a form
of separation (ranging from self-help, secession, self-imposed ghettoisation, cults
etc). Again, this politics may serve to destabilise the power order but is not workable
in complex societies. The thesis argued by Young and others suggests that such
differences are not swept away but openly articulated and practised. However, this
process is not without conflict.

Much participatory development seeks consensus at the community level, but this is
to deny difference within and between communities. Mouffe’s work (1993; 1995;
1996) on democracy deals with some of these difficulties. She rejects Habermas’
rationalism and universalism and argues instead for an anti-essentialist identity
politics in which “political practice in a democratic society does not consist in
defending the rights of preconstituted identities, but rather in constituting those
identities themselves in a precarious and always vulnerable terrain” (1995: 261). She
goes on to argue that this political practice is structured by “the dimension of
antagonism which is present in social relations” (1995: 262). The key becomes
“Once we accept the necessity of the political and the impossibility of a world without
antagonism, what needs to be envisaged is how it is possible under those conditions

33
to create or maintain a pluralisic democratic order” (Mouffe, 1993: 4). This involves
an ‘adversarial’ relationship in which “the ‘other’ is no longer seen as an enemy to be
destroyed, but as an ‘adversary’, somebody with whose ideas we are going to
struggle, but whose right to defend those ideas we will not put into question” (1995:
263). In contrast to Habermas’ approach, Mouffe does not seek a ‘rational
consensus’, because democracy’s “dynamic is hindered by an apparent excess of
consensus, which usually masks a disquieting apathy” (1993: 6). This is not to say
that we pursue completely different values because there needs to be a shared
understanding of the political values which can underpin such a process of debate.
Within this shared, or consensual, understanding of the political values at stake
“there is room for a certain amount of conflict and struggle about the interpretation of
those values” (1996: 136).

Those theories that treat the ‘grassroots’, the ‘local’, and the ‘community’ as
unproblematic categories have become commonplace in many approaches to
participatory development (Mohan and Stokke, 2000). A key problem of these
understandings of the location of politics is that the places and spaces are highly
abstract and/or taken for granted. A question that stems from these abstract theories
is where does this politics occur? As Cornwall (2002: 51) notes

“Less attention has been paid to instances of participation as situated

practices…(but)..Treating participation as situated practice calls for approaches
that locate spaces for participation in the places in which they occur, framing
their possibilities with reference to actual political, social, cultural and historical
particularities rather than idealised notions of democratic practice”

Clearly, political practices take place at and across a range of sites which puts
‘community’ back, not in an idealised or abstract sense, but as a living and contested
entity. Bebbington’s idea of place-making captures some of this and makes us re-
think what we mean by political spaces. Earlier we discussed the recent use of
political space (Webster and Engberg-Pedersen, 2002), but space in this framework
is an abstract one in which any sense of belonging to a locality or community is
rendered invisible. While we do not want to lapse into a rosy evocation of local,
village life we can have a more politicised notion of space, like that of the Zapatistas,
which goes beyond the reactionary localism displayed in, say, Putnam’s recent work.

Massey’s work on a sense of place and radical democracy is instructive here

(Massey, 1994,1995). Places, Massey argues, "can be imagined as articulated
moments in networks of social relations and understandings, but where a large
proportion of those relations, experiences and understandings are constructed on a
far larger scale than what we happen to define for that moment as the place itself"
(1994: 154). This 'global sense of place' immediately cautions against internalist and
defensive understandings of the local. However, places are not simply reactive, but
become the bases for identity formation and a politics of both difference and alliance.
Massey argues that

“the social relations which are the medium and the form of power are necessarily
spatialised...On the other hand, the identities, including political identities, on
which the project of radical democracy focuses are themselves formed in a
spatialised interlocking of power-filled social relations..we make our
spaces/spatialities in the process of constructing our various identities” (1995:
285)

So we construct our spaces through the construction of identities (such as national

belonging or ‘Fortress Europe’), but also that spatial organisation is implicated in
political practice. Crucially, for the radical democratic vision such spatialities must be

34
established through relations which are democratic as opposed to being oppressive
(such as in an expansionist nationalism). It also adds dynamism to the political
process because “Political subjects are indeed constituted in political practice, but
they are not constructed out of nothing” (1995: 286) which is where Massey uses a
‘layering’ metaphor to evoke ongoing ‘rounds’ of identity formation. Cornwall (2002:
52) makes a similar point in that “No newly created space can be entirely cleared of
traces of social relations, nor of people’s previous experiences of planned
intervention in other spaces”. This observation urges us to take note of the historical
construction of place-based identities that is sensitive to the effects of prior
processes which are themselves shaped by forces which may not originate within
that space. It also means that from a transformatory point of view where certain
political spaces are ‘imposed’ such as in ‘community development’ initiatives the
potential exists for these spaces to be “filled with those with alternative visions whose
involvement transforms their possibilities” (Cornwall 2002: 52).

Implicit in all these conceptualisations is that while spaces cannot be bounded or

hermetic there is a moment, however fleeting, when a sense of place or place-based
identity coalesces and solidifies. It is at such times when an identity beyond the
individual comes together and can be a force for resistance or change. An important
factor in solidifying an identity is a process of othering. Mouffe is, as we saw,
sceptical about the ability to reach consensus in democratic politics, because this
negates the essential force of a relational identity politics. That is, consensus implies
closure and homogeneity, so that if there is no ‘them’ there can be no ‘me’ or ‘us’.
Massey’s use of scalar ‘political communities’ echoes this in that “communities can -
frequently do - themselves constitute a ‘us’ (the consensus) defined by the ‘them’
beyond” (Massey 1995: 287). These political communities may become the basis for
a radical democratic project which implies a new form of citizenship not bounded by
the nation-state, but they can equally become oppressive of others. Furthermore,
individuals can belong to more than one such political community which may well
involve multiple scales of action. For example, our earlier discussion of the
Zapatistas showed how a concern over local land rights was linked into international
calls for tolerance of (all) others. A further example is drawn from Africa.

In Africa, Von Lieres (1999: 140) argues that grassroots politics must go "beyond the
dominant Western liberal conception as an individual bearer of rights and include a
wide range of more substantive contents". By emphasising rights, liberal
conceptions of citizenship "become immunized against the forces of cultural and
ethnic life" (143). One of the sources of these problems is in the philosophical
inheritance of the rights discourse which is based on liberal individualism. However,
the alternative to liberalism is a form of citizenship which sees rights shaped by and
accountable to a collective (Dunne and Wheeler, 1999; Von Lieres, 1999). Talking of
Africa, Ake notes "(O)ur people still think largely in terms of collective rights and
express their commitment to it constantly in their behaviour" (1987: 5 cited in
Maluwa, 1997: 64). Von Lieres (1999) suggests that previously excluded groups
should be actively included into the political process and be free to transcend the
rights-custom duality "by working out alternative conceptions of self and community"
(143). Such citizenship will be democratically active rather than passive receipt of
privileged rights. This view is not only theoretically justifiable but also chimes with
empirical conditions in which multiple democratic 'spaces' open up following the
retreat of the state, leading to a

"a new dynamic model of interaction between multiple, often interdependent

socio-political and cultural spaces and groups..(moving us away)..from the idea
of the citizen as a bearer of rights towards the idea of the citizen as participant
and claimant, embedded in a series of networks guaranteeing inclusion and

35
 preventing marginalization from wider social and political processes" (Von
Lieres, 1999:146)

While she may be right to describe the African political imagination as 'survivalist',
such a view of political inclusion remains rather voluntaristic and denies the
possibility that, in an environment of poverty and political turmoil, the 'new spaces'
might be filled by warlords, gangsters and other anti-democratic factions. It also
potentially fails to engage with the state, albeit for good historical reasons.

Wamba (1994) echoes this but sees the political imagination as too locked into
thinking with concepts that are limiting (parties, civil society etc). He argues that
“emancipatory politics will be a politics without parties but through political
organizations” (258) which requires new forms of consciousness that is based on
what people actually think. This echoes Gaventa’s (2002: 6) advice to “start with the
views of citizens themselves” as well as Mamdani’s call for analysing ‘actually
existing civil society’. Wamba conjectures that “This leads to a realization that
progressive politics has several sites and a multiplicity of processes: localized
processes like in the factory, and open (to all) processes involving all categories of
people without privileging anyone of them” (259) which has elements of radical
citizenship and politics of difference. However, there is a danger with this view of
seeing these multiple processes, communities and places in empty, non-material
terms. Simply respecting difference and pursuing emancipation must not only avoid
oppression but, crucially, be premised on a politics of material well-being.

Recently Bebbington has developed the idea of a progressive and materialist sense
of place through an engagement with Escobar. He argues that the culturalist views
of Escobar, while important, tend to underplay those factors which neo-liberals
discuss ad nauseam; namely market forces and material well-being. Bebbington is
also critical of Escobar and others' insistence on localities as sites of 'resistance',
because this also fails to understand how people make a living in these increasingly
global times. He argues that rather than seeing places as sites of resistance we
need to see them in more complex terms involving production and reproduction. He
states "Understood thus, place would be less something that people defended, and
more something whose means and practices of production they aimed to control"
(Bebbington, 2000: 498). This emphasis on control rather than resistance is
important, because it does not underplay cultural considerations but integrates them
into a livelihoods framework and brings with it a notion of political agency.
Bebbington characterises these process as 'place-making', because people are not
simply detached recipients of external assistance, but active and knowing agents in
their own well-being.

This emphasis on agency brings us back to two fundamental questions of who

determines the developmental process? and what vision of development underpins
it? In answering the first question we have argued that multiple, and sometimes
overlapping, political communities organise and contest the development process.
However, even this progressive agenda tends to equate the politics of places with
multiple sites of resistance to capitalist modernity although ‘place-making’ offers a
more engaged and realistic approach to materiality. Answering the second question
is even more problematic since any specification of a development trajectory implies
a privileging of certain views over others, although neo-liberals clearly have no such
hang-ups about the ‘best way’ to do development. We do not follow the post-
development school in advocating an abandonment of modernity in favour of a
potentially romanticised view of pristine, bounded islands of alternatives. Rather we
want to link the agency of belonging to and engaging with multiple political
communities to an alternative reading of modernity which does not abandon its

36
positive elements through a catch-all rejection of anything deemed ‘western’. Indeed,
pre-sanitising discourses which might potentially do damage to the ‘other’ and
consigning these people to a Never Never land of alternatives to development seems
an excellent way of denying them any agency. Rather we want to link our
understanding of citizenship to a project of critical modernity.

5. Critical modernism
Critical modernism emerged as a response to the failure of either populism,
postmodernism or political economy approaches to adequately capture the complex
positioning of structure and agency within contemporary development arenas. This
position emerged from a critical theoretical engagement with seeking to understand
social movements and their relationship with development, that is an attempt at
‘relevant’ development theory. However, as we shall see, it expands the political
beyond social movements to encompass a broad-based and participatory form of
democracy, which is where it links directly with our framework of radical citizenship.
As an approach, it is primarily distinguishable from the postmodern/postdevelopment
rejection of development, in part to stress that most countries of the South have
never been ‘modern’ in the sense understood by postmodernists (Schuurman, 1993,
Peet, 1997).

Critical modernism begins from the premise that rather than reject development tout
court we need to ‘rethink’ it (Peet and Hartwick, 1997). Theoretically it is rooted in
Marxism, feminism and post-structuralism but works with these critiques to seek
positive political change. This is where it differs from some post-modernism which
tends to dismiss development as a modernist conspiracy and is muted on the types
of interventions required to achieve purposive change. Critical modernism retains a
belief in the central tenets of modernism - democracy, emancipation, development
and progress - but begins from a critique of their current articulation under a
patriarchal, class-based capitalism.

This approach is critical of existing material power relations, particularly a critique of

capitalism “as the social form taken by the modern world, rather than on a critique of
modernism as an overgeneralized discursive phenomenon” (Peet and Hartwick,
1997: 200), the latter being the realm of post-structuralist deconstruction. This faith
in modernism is also ‘scientific’ in that it requires evidence for analysis and action,
rather than faith. It is here that affinities with certain populist approaches to
participatory knowledge exist, but these are to be rigorous, debated and contested.
This avoids romanticising the plight of the poor and treating all ‘local knowledge’ as
pure and incontrovertible. As Peet and Watts (1996: 38) argue within critical
modernism “rationality is contended rather than abandoned”.

This assertion rests on the belief that modernity is not a singular entity which unfolds
in a linear fashion such that you either have more or less modernity ranging along
some teleological time-line. Rather, the “ideas and practices of modernity are
themselves appropriated and re-embedded in locally situated practices, thus
accelerating the fragmentation and dispersal of modernity into constantly proliferating
modernities” (Arce and Long 2000: 1). These ‘multiple modernities’ (Comaroff and
Comaroff, 1993) destabilise and provincialise the notion of an ideal European
modernity and replace it with one that seeks to understand “the encounters between
multiple and divergent modernities” (Arce and Long 2000: 159) in societies
containing a “multiplicity of rationalities” (Arce and Long 2000: 160). Seen thus
development is a “resolutely dialectical process..(which is)..a sort of mixing,
syncretism and cross-fertilization rather than a crude mimicry or replication” (Watts
forthcoming: 26). As Massey (2001: 16) characterises it “Globalization is not about
crossing space; it is about the meeting up of a multiplicity of trajectories. And the

37
politics lies in the terms of their intersection”. This recognition enables an analysis of
the contending rationalities of multiple modernities as opposed to abandoning
modernity and rationality altogether.

However, as we have alluded to, this process is not ethically rootless in which all
identities and rationalities are equally valid. We argued earlier that some differences
are more important than others. For the critical modernists the bottom line is material
well-being. The existence of widespread poverty both within and between countries
is the starting point for an ethics of development (Corbridge, 1998). Postmodern
approaches to poverty see it as socially constructed and embedded within certain
economic epistemes which value some assets over others. By revealing the
situatedness of such interpretations of economy and poverty, postmodern
approaches look for alternative value systems so that the poor are not stigmatised
and their spiritual and cultural ‘assets’ are recognised (Latouche, 1994). While this is
laudable, analyses of poverty do have to address absolute material need, otherwise
they run the risk of celebrating dire human need as expressions of resistance and
cultural autonomy (Campbell, 1997). The pragmatic ethics of critical modernism is to
understand these basic needs and to find ways of meeting them. In many cases the
poor have spoken out in angry, public and radical ways which goes beyond the
technocratic exercises of the main development agencies (For example, Narayan et
al, 2000) as we discussed earlier. Such political expressions are crystallised by
social movements.

We have already discussed the role of ‘new’ and ‘old’ social movements, but the
pressing question in terms of realising the critical modernist project is what or who
will be the key agents and in which institutional arenas? These strategic questions
are difficult to answer unreservedly since it is neither possible nor proper to think of
strategy in the abstract. The nature of strategy is such that it depends upon concrete
openings and possibilities found in ‘real’ places so we cannot specify a priori by
whom and in what ways such a politics will be realised. In terms of critical
modernism social movements are seen as an expression of marginalised peoples’
demands for rights of greater access to a more generous idea of development, rather
than a complete overhaul of its basic tenets of material progress and human
betterment. This approach reflects the fact that social movements rarely reject all
notions of progress, but are rather seeking to localise them. For example,
indigenous organisations may well prefer the methods of modernisation (e.g. modern
agriculture) to that of ‘alternative development’ (e.g. indigenous knowledge)
(Bebbington 1996). As such, it represents a more complex and nuanced approach to
social movements than that of the alternative development approach, in that the
multiple strategies, praxis and ‘everyday resistance’ that characterise social
movements cannot be captured by a simplistic inversion of mainstream development
concepts.

According to Heller (2001: 152), neither the state nor the party can be agents of
“sustained transformative projects”; rather what is required is an “ecology of agents”
which blends “the institutional capacities of the state and the associational resources
of civil society” (Heller 2001: 158). This is not in the sanitised and simplistic sense of
state-civic synergies as promoted under the rubric of partnership (Evans, 1997), but
in the more political sense of party-social movement dynamics and within the context
of a shared political project. What we get is a form of radical democracy which
transcends the local and forges alliances with a range of regional, national and
globalised movements (in much the way that the Zapatistas did). Alliances as we
noted earlier can come from a revivified political economy which rather than posit
endless differences (as with post-structuralism) or seek totalising sameness (as in

38
some modernisms) finds similarities of experience around which to coalesce and
campaign. Hence, coalitions around certain forms of exploitation emerge.

This view of the politics of development links back to place in a different way to either
functionalist notions of community or reified sites of resistance. From a radical view,
rather than defining places in an oppositional fashion that simply resists modernity
and hegemony, we need a more ambivalent view which is also less essentialist. As
Oakes (1997: 525) notes “The construction of place-based identity stems more from
the troubled awareness of an unresolvable tension between progress and loss than
any conviction to resist hegemony”. Such a tension, rather than being an aberration,
is in fact central to all experiences of modernity, western or otherwise. The
Zapatistas, for example, mobilised around the sense of a rooted Mayan identity,
although one that was not reactive and static but presented itself as a force for
democracy and an inclusive nationalism.

These observations regarding social movements, place and modernity reveal the
type of politics envisaged by critical modernism and link squarely to our assertions
regarding citizenship. The basis of critical modernism is radical democracy which
“believes in direct popular control over all the resources and institutions used and
inhabited by people, from field to forest, factory to family, university to
neighbourhood, art gallery to website” (Peet and Hartwick, 1997: 206). In many ways
it mirrors our own framework in being ‘radical, reproductive, and participatory’ in
which “institutions are fundamentally characterized by cooperative effort among
equal partners” (ibid. 207). The notion of equality does not imply consensus but
reflects the values which underpin the democratic interaction. Following a broadly
Habermassian line decisions are arrived at through discussion or ‘reasoning’ which is
pragmatic rather than idealistic. That is, it is the best that reasonable people can
achieve under prevailing conditions rather than being the transcendent Reason
envisaged in classical Enlightenment thought. For example, in terms of participatory
development Schrijvers (1995: 25) comments that “all parties create room to make
explicit their points of view so that they can exchange and discuss their
interpretations - among which are the images of each other and of the power
relations at stake”. This assumes knowledge is generated inter-subjectively and
does not a priori privilege one form of knowledge as more complete or essentially
more appropriate. In terms of active citizenship, people adhere to decisions and
share responsibility precisely because they have participated in the discussion rather
than being ‘bound’ or ‘obliged’ by law.

Realising radical citizenship: criticisms, caveats and strategic concerns

This section takes these theoretical concerns and examines some of the issues
raised in trying to realise such a project. Firstly, we try and pre-empt the main
criticisms which might be levelled at the critical modernist project. Secondly, and in
light of the previous points we offer a series of strategic caveats. Clearly there are
many criticisms which could be raised against such a project. One which can be
levelled against the idea of multiple modernities is that certain forms of
rationalisation, particularly capitalist social relations, are more significant than other
forms of rationality and modernity. Indeed, this was a significant contribution of the
‘modes of production’ theories of the 1970s. As Watts (forthcoming: 27) exclaims
“the powers of capitalist modernity are undiminished“ while calls for alternative
modernities tend to “occlude the terrible realities of unprecedented global economic
inequality and the crude violence of twenty first century empire” (28). Such an
awareness of political economy is salutary and chimes with Harvey’s (1993)
discussion of epistemology in determining which differences make a difference and
how those differences came about. Clearly, from a left perspective we need to show
how economic exploitation unevenly structures social relations, although following

39
Gibson-Graham (1995) we can see forms of economic exploitation as multiple and
not simply rooted in capitalism. Additionally, as Young’s dimensions of oppression
identified earlier show there are other forces which we need to address in our
emancipatory politics besides capitalism. Finally, in response to Watts’ (forthcoming)
comments about the inescapability of the ‘clanking gears of capital’ Gibson-Graham
argue that by privileging capitalism in our analyses we continually reinforce its
dominance at the discursive level. If non-capitalist (again, we privilege capitalism)
ways of organising the economy are to be found then one way is to avoid endlessly
privileging capitalism and looking at and describing other ways; that is, “to create a
different truth” (forthcoming: 4).

Another important and frequent criticism is that anything premised upon abstract
universal rights and citizenship is bound to be Eurocentric. Turner (1993) argues that
in classic theory modernisation involves a progressive move from particularism
('tribe', community, ethnicity etc) to universalism and secularism. A possible danger
is that citizenship, as with modernity, becomes equated with the suppression of
difference and, hence, open to totalising or exclusionary practices. We have already
countered this to a degree by arguing for a recognition and assertion of difference but
only one that does not oppress others. Following Young we called this ‘togetherness
in difference’. Another way around is to empirically and practically foreground the
perceptions and experiences of those citizens concerned as they are lived out in
concrete places, places which are formed out of unbounded flows. Such a materially
grounded global-localism allows ‘dialogic’ negotiations between the universal and the
particular (or local) which form new hybrid political spaces and discourses.

For example, Shivji (1989) has argued in the case of Africa, in contrast to the
discourse of liberal natural rights (Dunne and Wheeler, 1999), that human rights
need to be locally-meaningful such that,

"..human rights-talk should be historically situated and socially specific. For the
African perspective this ought to be done frankly without being apologetic. Any
debate conducted on the level of moral absolutes or universal humanity is not
only fruitless but ideologically subversive of the interests of the African masses"
(Shivji, 1989: 69)

Being social and historically specific involves engaging with processes of imperialism
and globalisation yet recognising that negotiating with non-local cultural values does
not automatically lead to the annihilation of difference. Here we follow Parekh's
'cosmopolitan pragmatism' which believes that "The point of a cross cultural dialogue
is to arrive at a body of values to which all participants can be expected to agree"
(1999: 156) which "recognises the reality of cultural embeddedness whilst leaving
open the possibility for a transcultural consensus which is more than just 'the lowest
common denominator of different cultural traditions'" (Dunne and Wheeler, 1999: 11).
The notion of ‘differentiated universalism’ (Lister 1997: 89) suggested here
incorporates an appreciation of power, as well as culture-based differences, and
directs research towards examining both the exclusivist and transformative
tendencies of citizenship claims.

Having briefly addressed some of the possible criticisms we offer a series of caveats.
The first is that we are well aware that the current climate offers threats22. The long-
term alignment of radical leftist political forces with participatory approaches to

22
As has been noted, “…working-class political power does not necessarily cumulate into transformative capacity,
especially in an era when globalization has weakened the capacity of nation-states to deploy the regulatory and
redistributive elements through which European states expanded labor’s share of the social surplus…(in Kerala) the
pressures of liberalization, and the declining service efficiency of the state have all combined to threaten earlier gains
in social development” (Heller 2001: 132).

40
governance cannot be taken for granted. Threats include political expediency, the
need to extend an electoral base beyond subordinate classes, the instrumental need
of governments to maintain power and mobilise support, and also the tendency of
participation to be seen by states as an obligation rather than a right of citizenship.
Electoral demands (and failures) will put projects on hold, with little evidence as yet
to suggest what will happen to these projects in the interregnum, although the time
spent in opposition by the CPM in Kerala actually offered the space for them to
regenerate their transformative project (Heller 2001: 152). The left has come a long
way to (and taken a long time over) recognising the transformative potential of
participatory approaches to development and governance – some yet to be
convinced. However, the merging of populist and political economy approaches
contains a great deal of potential – fertile and mutual learning ground within which to
locate not only participatory development but also a number of other radical
approaches to development.

Second, for NGOs, the threats remain familiar ones of legitimacy and scale. At the
strategic level, a citizenship-based approach offers NGDOs a means of reformulating
participatory development interventions aimed at challenging exclusion. By relocating
participation as citizenship, NGDOs could understand how their participatory
methodologies are likely to be interpreted by local ‘communities’ in the light of an
often conflictual history of both their efforts to express their agency, and of the efforts
of various institutions to co-opt this. In methodological terms, citizenship analysis also
offers a critical basis of enquiry into participatory development theory and practice.
For example, an analysis of how participatory development initiatives engage with
and impact on processes of citizenship formation amongst marginal groups would
provide an insightful means of evaluating their impact on their exclusion and terms of
inclusion. However, as we have seen involving the grassroots in genuine dialogues
is difficult with the outcome that NGOs often end up managing and containing
political aspirations rather than liberating them. Similarly, while decentralisation may
be one way of finding a meaningful scale for state-society interactions it can weaken
political alliances. As Mamdani (1996: 300) notes “decentralized systems of rule
fragment the ruled and stabilize their rulers”. So, strengthening the responsiveness
and accountability of local government to civil society organisations and individuals
may, paradoxically, weaken the ability to transform national and supranational
political and economic structures.

6. Conclusion
Our argument has not been to discredit those efforts towards participatory
development and participatory governance that are now being promoted. Rather, the
intention has been to locate a radical home for the participatory project that secures
its autonomy, room for innovation and links to a transformative project. In reviewing
these efforts we came back to the notion of citizenship as a meso-level concept
linking politics, culture and place. The multiple political communities were
progressive in that they allowed people to express their agency in various ways
which extended the bounds of rights and accountability through (often multiple) forms
of citizenship. Citizenship analysis arguably has a significant contribution to make
towards development theory and practice. As befits development theory, it is an
inherently multidisciplinary concept, relating to socioeconomic, political, legal and
cultural spheres. Operating at the meso level of social theorising, citizenship
represents the type of ‘conceptual innovation’ demanded by this post-impasse
discipline (Booth 1994: 12), with its need to find a path between the failed
expladandums of metanarratives and the methodological individualism of the more
voluntaristic actor-oriented approaches, and also between the political and the

41
cultural. Furthermore, the notion of citizenship maintains a ‘universalist’ normative
appeal, while maintaining a capacity to be operationalised within particular contexts.

More specifically, citizenship represents a significant conceptual advance within

understandings of participatory governance and development for several reasons.
First, it offers a means of covering the convergence between participatory
development and participatory governance (Gaventa 2002). Second, citizenship
links to rights-based approaches since it "is inevitably and necessarily bound up with
the problem of the unequal distribution of resources" (Turner 1993: 2-3). A related
point is that citizenship helps to establish participation as a political right that can be
claimed by excluded or marginal peoples, and thus provides a stronger political, legal
and moral imperative for focusing on people’s agency within development than is
currently the case. Moreover, citizenship analysis may also provide a means of
transcending the distinction between imminent and immanent forms of participatory
development, particularly as it seeks to situate participation within a broader political,
social and historical perspective that draws attention to the politics of inclusion and
exclusion that shape popular agency beyond particular interventions. The notion of
citizenship thus offers a useful political, social and historical form of analysis within
which to situate understandings of participation, as located within the formation of a
social contract between citizenry and authority in particular political communities.
More broadly, then, citizenship is an inherently political perspective on participation,
arguably the chief requirement of post-tyranny approaches to participation.

Finally, we argued that such a politics of citizenship must be tied to a project that
does not reject modernity tout court since modernity has never been a coherent and
teleological process, but one fractured and multiply realised. This ontological
reasoning allows for a view of development such that political communities can
pursue their different experiences of and desires for modernity. Having said that we
need to be continually aware that the breadth and penetrative influence of capitalist
modernity means that it cannot easily be relativised away as one among many
modernities, but must be critically engaged with as the pre-eminent force shaping
contemporary and future development processes.

42
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52
 References for Table 1: a selective history of ‘participation’ in
development theory and practice

Accompanying references for Hickey, S. and G. Mohan (2003) Relocating

participation within a radical politics of development: citizenship and critical
modernism. Draft working paper prepared for conference on ‘Participation: From
Tyranny to Transformation? Exploring new approaches to participation in
development’. 27-28 February 2003, University of Manchester

Community Development
Prosser, A.R.G. 1982. ‘Community Development: The British Experience’, Progress
in Rural Development, Vol.1, 232-247.
Yenshu, E. 1998. ‘The evolution of official attitudes towards grassroots initiatives in
Cameroon’. Community Development Journal, Vol.33, No.1, 41-48.
Atampugre, N. 1998. 'Colonial and contemporary approaches to community
development: a comparative overview of similarities and differences in West
African experiences'. Community Development Journal, 33/4, 353-364.
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development and state-making in Zimbabwe. Ohio University Center for
International Studies.
Political participation
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Understanding Political Development. (Illinois, US: Scott, Foreman/Little,
Brown). 103-159.
Huntingdon, S. 1968. Political order in changing societies. Yale UP.

Participation for emancipation

Freire, P. 1972. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. (London, UK: Penguin).
Rahman, M. D. A. 1993. People’s Self-Development: Perspectives on Participatory
Action Research. (Dhaka, Bangladesh: Zed Books).
Carmen, R. 1996. Autonomous Development: Humanizing the Landscape. (Zed).

Liberation theology
de Schrijver, G. 1998. (ed.) Liberation Theologies on Shifting Grounds: a clash of
socio-economic and cultural paradigms. (Belgium: Leuven University Press).
Linden, I. 1998 Liberation Theology: Coming of Age? (London: CIIR), 2nd print.
Sobrino, J. and I. Ellacuria 1993. (eds.) Systematic Theology: Perspectives from
Liberation Theology. (London: SCM Press).

Alternative Development
Nerfin, M. 1977. (ed.). Another Development: approaches and strategies. (Uppsala,
Sweden: Dag Hammarskjold Foundation).
Friedmann, J. 1992. Empowerment: The Politics of Alternative Development.
(Blackwell.)
Hettne, B. 1995. Development theory and the three worlds: towards an international
political economy of development. (UK: Longman). 2nd Edition.
Stiefel, M. & Wolfe. 1994. A voice for the excluded: popular participation in
development. Zed/UNRISD
Fals Borda, O. 1998. People’s Participation: Challenges Ahead. World Congress of
Participatory Convergence, Cartagena, Columbia, 1997. (London, UK: ITP).

Participation in development

53
 Cernea, M. 1985. Putting People First: Sociological Variables in Development
Projects. (Baltimore, US: John Hopkins Press).
Chambers, R. 1983. Rural Development: Putting the Last First. (London, UK:
Intermediate Technology Publications).
Chambers, R. 1994. Three papers on PRA in World Development, Vol.22, No.7, 9 &
10.
World Bank (1994) Participation Sourcebook. WB.

Social capital
Putnam, R. 1993 Making Democracy Work: civic traditions in modern Italy.
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press).
Narayan, D. et al 2000. Voices of the Poor: Can Anyone Hear Us? (Washington DC:
World Bank).
World Bank Research on Social Capital and Poverty Reduction
http://wbln0018.worldbank.org/essd/essd.nsf/All/57510B92EAE96A9985256A320060
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Includes links to research papers such as: Grootaert, C. 1998. Social capital: the
missing link? And Collier, P. 1998. Social Capital and Poverty.

Citizenship participation
Gaventa, J. and C. Valderrama. (1999) Participation, Citizenship and Local
Governance. Background paper on ‘Strengthening participation in local
governance’, IDS.
Schneider, H. (1999) ‘Participatory governance for poverty reduction’, Journal of
International Development, Vol.11, 521-534.

54

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