Witchcraft,Social Cohesion and Participation in a South African Village

The past thirty years have seen development agencies, non‐governmental organizations and their funders embrace ‘participatory’ development strategies. These strategies require the poor to take part in decision‐making about, and the implementation of, development projects and programmes. Underlying enthusiasm for participation is the recognition that centralized, top‐down systems and methods have not delivered development, and the assumption that the poor are eager and able to ‘participate’. Using ethnographic research on witch beliefs and their impact on social relations in a South African village, this article argues that such assumptions are not always justified. It shows that witch beliefs and related conflicts have long‐term negative consequences for intra‐community relations and examines what this implies for development policy and practice.     

On the Limits of Liberalism in Participatory Environmental Governance: Conflict and Conservation in Ukraine's Danube Delta

Participatory management techniques are widely promoted in environmental and protected area governance as a means of preventing and mitigating conflict. The World Bank project that created Ukraine's Danube Biosphere Reserve included such ‘community participation’ components. The Reserve, however, has been involved in conflicts and scandals in which rumour, denunciation and prayer have played a prominent part. The cases described in this article demonstrate that the way conflict is escalated or mitigated differs according to foundational assumptions about what ‘the political’ is and what counts as ‘politics’. The contrasting forms of politics at work in the Danube Delta help to explain why a 2005 World Bank assessment report could only see failure in the Reserve's implementation of participatory management, and why liberal participatory management approaches may founder when introduced in settings where relationships are based on non‐liberal political ontologies. The author argues that environmental management needs to be rethought in ways that take ontological differences seriously rather than assuming the universality of liberal assumptions about the individual, the political and politics.     

Relocating Participation within a Radical Politics of Development

In response to (and in sympathy with) many of the critical points that have been lodged against participatory approaches to development and governance within international development, this article seeks to relocate participation within a radical politics of development. We argue that participation needs to be theoretically and strategically informed by a radical notion of ‘citizenship’, and be located within the ‘critical modernist’ approach to development. Using empirical evidence drawn from a range of contemporary approaches to participation, the article shows that participatory approaches are most likely to succeed: (i) where they are pursued as part of a wider radical political project; (ii) where they are aimed specifically at securing citizenship rights and participation for marginal and subordinate groups; and (iii) when they seek to engage with development as an underlying process of social change rather than in the form of discrete technocratic interventions — although we do not use these findings to argue against using participatory methods where these conditions are not met. Finally, we consider the implications of this relocation for participation in both theoretical and strategic terms.     

Doing democracy and governance in the fast lane? Towards a ‘politics of time’ in an accelerated polity

This article examines the relationship between time, governance and political participation through a critical engagement with the ‘acceleration thesis’. Whilst the acceleration thesis argues that the ‘shrinking of the present’ is a condition of contemporary governance, others have viewed it as dysfunctional to the democratic process and effective policymaking. By drawing on a wide range of literature and through the use of illustrative examples, this article argues that slow and fast politics have strengths and weaknesses when it comes to the practice of governance and democratic participation. In turn, questions are raised about how public organisations and others might manage temporality and change in an ‘accelerated polity’. The article concludes by calling for further research into the ‘politics of time’ and its effects on public policymaking and political participation.     

Unequal Knowledges in Jharkhand,India: De‐Romanticizing Women’s Agroecological Expertise

Taking the Jharkhand region of India as a case study, this article uses empirical data to intervene in ‘women, environment and development’ and ecofeminist debates regarding women’s environmental knowledge. The article first outlines the adoption of gender/environmental issues into development planning and considers the dangers of overestimating women’s agroecological knowledges and assuming that they can easily participate in development projects. It then highlights the local complexities of environmental knowledge possession and control with reference to gender and other variations in agricultural participation, decision‐making and knowledge transfers between villagers’ natal and marital places. Particular emphasis is placed on the economic, socio‐cultural and ‘actor’ related factors that supplement gender as an influence on task allocation, decision‐making, knowledge distribution and knowledge articulation. The article concludes that given the socio‐cultural constraints women face in accumulating and vocalizing environmental knowledge, simplistic participatory approaches are unlikely to empower them. Instead, more flexible, site‐specific development initiatives (coupled with wider structural change) are required if opportunities are to be created for women to develop and use their agroecological knowledges.     

Towards relational geometries of public participation and hydropower governance in the Lower Mekong River Basin

The Lao People's Democratic Republic's aspirations to become the ‘battery’ of Southeast Asia has involved plans for a cascade of hydropower dams on the mainstream of the transboundary Mekong River. This has triggered the unprecedented undertaking of public stakeholder consultations under the Mekong River Commission's Procedures for Notification, Prior Consultation and Agreement (PNPCA). This paper focuses on PNPCA stakeholder consultations organized in Thailand and Cambodia, and seeks to understand how these stakeholder consultations, despite their merits in information sharing, have come to be criticized by civil society as a ‘rubber stamp’ for ‘participation’ in Lao hydropower development. Building upon the literature on public participation in development, critical hydropolitics, and stakeholder engagement in Mekong water governance, we seek to conceptualize a critical politics of public participation by adopting a relational approach towards identifying the key challenges relating to participation. We suggest that a relational approach must consider how the interrelations between the multiple formal and informal tracks of stakeholder engagement shape one another and overall opportunities for participation, and how power relations within these spaces impact on perceptions towards public participation. Distrust towards state-organized participatory spaces can be traced from the state-organized participatory spaces to another key interrelation: the power relations between state and nonstate actors in the multi-scalar political spaces that extend beyond participatory spaces. This paper examines how anti-participatory forces pose a challenge to the emergence of both state and nonstate participatory spaces, providing additional insights into the state-society dynamics that influence environmental outcomes around large-scale infrastructural development.     

Process,Perception and Power: Notes from ‘Participatory’ Research in a Zimbabwean Resettlement Area

The increased popularity of ‘participatory’ methods in research, development projects, and rural extension in developing countries, has not consistently been accompanied by a critical evaluation of the quality and reliability of knowledge created and extracted in the process. In this article, the author employs her own research using Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA) in a Zimbabwean Resettlement Area, to examine how knowledge is created through this type of research act, and how later research may be used to turn back and ‘make sense’ of PRA data. The article explores how power relations among participants are both revealed and concealed in PRA, focusing specifically on the implications for gendered perspectives. The paper also highlights the dynamic, contested and often contradictory nature of ‘local knowledge’ itself. Apparently transparent chunks of ‘local reality’ gleaned through PRA can turn out to be part of complex webs of multiple ideologies and practices. The author argues that while participatory methodologies may offer effective ways of beginning a research project, adoption of short PRA workshops in academic or project related research could lead to dangerously faulty representations of complex social worlds.     

Beyond Naivety: Women,Gender Inequality and Participatory Development

In recent years, participatory development has become an established orthodoxy among development agencies across the political spectrum; at the same time, the importance of consulting with and recruiting women has been highlighted in most discussions of participatory strategies. Drawing on the author's own research and a range of secondary sources, this article focuses on gender aspects of participatory projects. The evidence suggests that gender inequalities in resources, time availability and power, influence the activities, priorities and framework of participatory projects just as much as ‘top-down’ development and market activities. Contrary to the view of a number of writers and activists on participatory development, increasing the numbers of women involved in participatory projects cannot, therefore, be seen as a soft alternative to specific attention to change in gender inequality. Meeting the demands of poor women in the South will require not only local participatory projects, but a linking with wider movements for change in the national and international development agenda.     

Participatory Governance in Urban Management and the Shifting Geometry of Power in Mumbai

This article questions the participatory dimension of urban governance in Mumbai. Based on surveys of a number of participatory projects for urban services, it compares the differentiated impacts of participation in middle‐class colonies with those in slums. Results demonstrate that changing citizen–government relationships have led to the empowerment of the middle and upper middle class who harness the potential of new ‘invited space’ to expand their claims on the city and political space. In contrast, the poor end up on the losing side as NGOs function more as contracted agents of the State than as representatives of the poor. Direct community participation empowers influential community members, small private entrepreneurs and middlemen, and contributes to labour informalization. Ultimately, these processes consolidate a form of ‘governing beyond the State’ that promotes a managerial vision of participation and leads to double standards of citizenship.     

Development for Children,or Children for Development? Examining Children's Participation in School‐Led Total Sanitation Programmes

The Community‐Led Total Sanitation (CLTS) approach is said to have radically revolutionized a poorly performing sanitation sector. The claims of CLTS programmes successfully stopping practices of open defecation have only recently begun to be critically reviewed: scholars and practitioners are questioning the sustainability and scrutinizing the participatory nature of this approach. This article builds on these analyses to draw attention to the School‐Led Total Sanitation (SLTS) programme which promotes the role of children as sanitation change agents to ‘trigger’ a shift of behaviour in their peers and elders in school and surrounding environments. The article reviews the active role of children in SLTS in the context of how ‘participation’ is structured in demand‐led sanitation approaches, as well as in relation to children's rights to participation in developmental projects in general. Reviewing the arguments supporting SLTS in practitioner literature and drawing on observations from SLTS case studies in Ghana, the authors notice a significant contradiction in the concept of children's participation as premised in SLTS initiatives and as outlined in the child rights agenda. These findings expose inherent tensions in SLTS between children's rights, participation and the role of children as sanitation change agents. They build on existing critiques of participation as coercion within demand‐led sanitation approaches that have ‘gone global’.     

Speech,Gender and Power: Beyond Testimony

This article aims to unsettle some taken‐for‐granted ideas about speech and power, to argue against taking testimony ‘at face value’ without reflecting also on silence, on the forms and techniques of talk, on embodied communication, and on the complex ways in which interests are expressed and animated. It argues that treating direct testimony in public political institutions as a metric of gender inequality may be another example of the distortions that follow from an uncritical adoption of an unmarked male template of speech as universal standard. The article aims thereby to improve the way development researchers ‘hear’, and how practitioners think about ‘participation’.     

The Malleability of Participation: The Politics of Agricultural Research under Neoliberalism in Bolivia

This article analyses how neoliberal restructuring encouraged the use of participatory methods in agricultural research in Bolivia and how, at a later stage, participatory development initiatives had to be adapted to prevent conflicts with the post‐neoliberal views of farmer organizations. The article contributes to the debate on the normalization of participatory methods in agrarian development. Engaging with Foucault's work on governmentality and neoliberalism, our analysis goes beyond interpretations of participation which conceptualize it exclusively as a technology of power to discipline subjects. Drawing on a distinction between a liberal and a neoliberal moment in the restructuring of agricultural research, we study the case of PROINPA (Foundation for the Promotion and Research of Andean Products), a national NGO that was once part of the state system for agricultural research but was then privatized. Although PROINPA employed participation mainly to enhance managerial effectiveness, it also facilitated moments of participation from below. We argue that participation designed by this type of NGO is not just ‘technical’ as PROINPA professionals would like to perceive it, nor is it simply ‘political’ as critical views on participation hold. Instead it is malleable in the sense that each actor is involved in finding a new balance between technical, economic and political considerations.     

Building Local Governance: Participation and Elite Capture in Slum‐upgrading in Kenya

Community and democratic participation are still an essential component of current mainstream development interventions. However, elite capture seriously undermines the outcomes of development projects. This article analyses the effects on (in)equality of the implementation of policies that are technically participatory, in the context of an internationally‐funded urban development programme in Nairobi, which was implemented in the aftermath of the post‐election violence of 2007–2008. Ethnographic data reveal how the institutionalization of pre‐existing power imbalances between landlords and tenants is accomplished through the creation of structures of community governance and ‘participatory enumeration’. The article concludes that without the resources to challenge powerful interests within the settlement, the programme is likely to worsen the condition of a large section of the residents. In the context of strong pre‐existing inequalities and conflict, participation needs careful management and firm external agency to achieve genuine social transformation.     

Better than an Ironclad: Leonard Isitt,Temperance and Greater Britain

The English-born New Zealand temperance activist, the Rev. Leonard M. Isitt, undertook a number of temperance ‘missions’ in Britain between 1895 and 1905, offering historians a deeper insight into the lived reality of the ‘British world’ and ‘Greater British’ identity. Addressing several areas of imperial historiography, the article uses newspapers from both New Zealand and Britain to acquire a truly ‘Greater British’ perspective of an imperially mobile individual, from which can be drawn lessons about imperial identities and ‘networks’. Isitt's participation in a self-consciously imperial temperance movement highlights the development of a New Zealand identity that depended upon both contrast and commonality with Britain, but it also points to a politics of imperial peregrination, with the temperance reformer's visits to the ‘Mother Country’ factoring in the highly divisive drink question in both New Zealand and Britain. The article concludes with reflections on the nature and limitations of a ‘Greater British’ politics.     

Common Starting Points,Different Directions

In the late 19th century, political debates emerged in Sweden and Norway as well as in Finland concerning Travelling families – in this article defined as indigenous itinerant families whom the settled population pejoratively designated with terms such as ‘tatere’ (Norway), ‘tattare’ (Sweden) or ‘zigenare’ (Finland). In this article, these debates are compared, and the transfer of ideas and proposals between the three countries is analysed. It is argued that, on a local level, similar politics of ‘territorial exclusion’ were enacted in all three countries. This was, however, challenged by ‘liberal social politics’, a strategy aiming not at exclusion but at forced assimilation by means such as, for example, removing children from their parents. This strategy was proposed in all three countries, and socio-political agents were well aware of the debates in the neighbouring countries. But it was only in Norway that the most far-reaching proposals were realized. This is explained mainly by pointing at the way in which leading agents chose to act when trying to implement their proposals. The article also problematizes some conclusions drawn in earlier research, where the emergence of debates on Travelling families has been explained by pointing at the rise of ethnic nationalism. Instead, the article argues, the emergence of the so-called ‘social question’ in Western Europe in the 19th century should be considered as an at least equally important background factor.     

Citizen-led democratic reform: innovations in Indi

Contemporary political systems are experiencing a democratic disconnect between formal institutions of representative government, and the more informal spaces of political participation. Rather than offer an institutional remedy, this article turns to practice and considers how citizens themselves are seeking to transform dysfunctional democratic practices. The article provides an in-depth analysis of democratic events that have unfolded between 2012 and 2017 in the Australian federal electorate of Indi. The analysis explores the intertwined participatory efforts of the citizens’ group, Voices4Indi, and the local Independent federal member, MP Cathy McGowan. The Indi experience demonstrates that while citizens may be frustrated with ‘politics as usual’, they are not rejecting the system but rather instigating creative democratic reforms.     

Heritage and participatory governance: An analysis of political strategies and social fractures in Spain

In the heritage field, institutions tend to see social participation as a synonym for good governance practice. This extends to other areas such as the environment, humanitarian aid, and sustainable development. In this article, the authors analyze the use of participatory models in the management of heritage through the study of three heritage sites in Spain: the prehistoric paintings in Altamira, the Mosque‐Cathedral in Córdoba, and the Cabo de Gata‐Nijar Natural Park. Their study suggests that, despite the promises of more democratic heritage governance, participatory methods are commonly bounded by social fractures that are concomitant to certain ‘heritage regimes’. They conclude that the critical study of participation in heritage should go beyond the dichotomy between ‘good and bad’ participation. Rather, it should focus on understanding what participation does to the entire heritagization process.     

Reconceptualizing Participation for Sustainable Rural Development: Towards a Negotiation Approach

In many popular intervention methodologies aimed at stimulating sustainable rural development (in the widest possible sense) the idea of ‘participation’ is a leading principle. This article will demonstrate that the process in which actors are supposed to participate is often thought of as being a process of planning, decision‐making and/or social learning. It will be argued that such an operationalization of development processes is based on inconsistent theoretical assumptions, and can easily lead to unproductive development interventions due to an inability to handle conflicts. As an alternative it is proposed to use negotiation theory as a basis for organizing participatory development efforts. The implications of such a shift in thinking about participation are far‐reaching: it requires new modes of analysis, and different roles, tasks and skills for facilitators of participatory processes.     

Community‐Based Resource Management in Turkey: ‘Je Participe,Tu Participes,Il Participe… Ils Profitent’1

The current discourse and practice of natural resource management rest on the assumption that participatory decision‐making mechanisms offer efficient and equitable policy solutions. There is increasing recognition, however, that such mechanisms might fail in ensuring effective participation of all stakeholders and, consequently, be prone to (re)producing inequalities and remaining ineffective in environmental protection. Taking this observation as a backdrop, this study addresses the under‐investigated implications of state–society relationships on the operation of participatory processes. By employing a unique combination of data provided by focus groups, in‐depth interviews, and a survey administered to 377 individuals, it analyses the ‘failure’ of participatory decision making within the context of an internationally‐funded environmental conservation project in Sultan Sazl???, Turkey. The article argues that the specific manifestations of state–society relationships and the political economy dynamics at the local level account for this failure. It shows that local materializations of state behaviour, interacting with local inequalities and perceptions of the decision‐making process, impinge on effective participation. In emphasizing that the capability of different groups to participate is shaped by the state in important ways, this article calls for more research on the political economy of state–society relationships and community‐based resource management.     

Parties,Participation and Outcomes: The 2008 Victorian Local Government Elections

In November 2008, voters in Victoria participated in local government elections under a system that has been subject to significant reform since the 1980s. This paper seeks to discern trends from the outcomes and identify significant structural features of the reformed system. With regards to outcomes, the paper highlights the high success rate amongst incumbent councillors and the strong sense of successful candidates being independent of political parties. The paper argues that these outcomes have been particularly influenced by the proliferation of electoral districts with relatively small voting populations or by the use of multimember electoral systems in larger districts. The variety of systems used underpins a localised and ‘clientelist’ politics that militates against the dominance of political parties over the contest. The paper also draws attention to the comparatively low rate of voter participation in an election in which compulsory voting applies. It argues that voter absenteeism was particularly noticeable in municipalities with large numbers of residents renting properties and might be explained as a form of ‘renters’ illusion’ impacting on voting behaviour.