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Participation – A Conceptual Discussion

A very useful distinction has been made by the proponents of the social capability approach2 regarding the concept of participation – the idea that efficiency-based participation is different from agency-based participation. The first idea understands participation as an instrumental means to the ends that vary from institutional efficiency to state-defined public interests. The latter concerns itself with the role of human agency in policy and political changes. The emphasis here is on empowerment of those who are affected by these policies and political changes, along with an equitable distribution of costs and benefits among them. Participation in this case becomes a goal in itself.

Contemporary Context
Even though these concepts of participation have illustrious lineages, the current discussion on these ideas is situated in a very specific and unique contextual space, a space which is distinguished from the other historical contexts by contradictory yet characteristic features – then ear-ubiquitous presence of a liberal bureaucratic welfare state with its decisions affecting and determining almost all spheres of public as well as private life; ever-increasing globalisation in economics and knowledge among other areas, and demands for a political voice by groups that were hitherto marginalised and excluded sections of society. Because of this unique situation,these ideas of participation are basically addressing three audiences: the state, which provides as well ensures the presence of institutions that facilitate participation; a global audience consisting of international organisations like the World Bank, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and global knowledge generators like research institutes and universities; and the 'people' that they seek to include in the participatory regimes.

The difference in emphasis by the proponents of participation – efficiency or Equity/empowerment/voice – may depend, among other things, on the audience they are addressing (the former when it is the state and policy-making institutions and the latter when it is'people'). What follows is an exposition of the current theoretical justifications for the difference inthis emphasis.

Participation for Efficiency
One of the recent and perhaps most famous works that could be placed in the category of the participation for efficiency approach is Robert Putnam's seminal book, Making Democracy Work, which attempts to answer the question of what conditions are conducive 'for creating strong, responsive, effective representative institutions'. Putnam's work on the Italian regional experiments with decentralisation led him to the conclusion that there are basically two prerequisites for effective 'good government' – one, active participation of the civic community in public affairs, and two, a civic culture in which the participants are 'bound together by horizontal relations of reciprocity and cooperation, not vertical relations of authority and dependency', and whose norms and values 'instill in the… members habits of cooperation, solidarity and public spiritedness'. The latter constitutes what is termed social capital which, in Putnam's words, includes 'features of social organisation, such as trust, norms and networks that can improve the efficiency of society by facilitating coordinated actions [Putnam 1993].Publication of this book led to a series of other works on the same lines. The idea of social capital and civic participation providing the raw material for successful policy-making was soon picked up by influential policy institutions like the World Bank. Patnam's book and the works that followed itcame an opportune time. As Section III shows, by the 1980s many people had started questioning the idea of top-down state-facilitated development programmes and begun talking of 'peoples' involvement' and participation in these programmes. Putnam managed to corroborate these ideas by a study spanning over 20 years. The result has been that policy-makers have over the past decade started increasingly relying on the concepts of social capital to fashion development interventions that mobilise pre-existing local social networks for varied policy goals[Rankin 2002].

Participation as Voice/Equity/Empowerment
The second approach has two broad theoretical foundations. The first is contemporary democratic theory, which articulates a preference for a deepening of the democratisation process through the inclusion and recognition of hitherto marginalised groups of society. These articulations are both an acknowledgement of the global trend towards democratisation and the growing demands of recognition by (and of) collective identities, as well as interventions meant to propel these trends further.4Secondly, this approach, as stated in the beginning of this section, borrows heavily from AmartyaSen's work on entitlements and capabilities. For Sen, the normative goal of empowerment (focus on enlarging a person's 'functioning and capabilities to function'), equity (of both costs and benefits) and human agency far outweigh the issues of efficiency as the main objectives of development. In his (and Dreze's) words, the "life of a person can be seen as a sequence of things the person does, or states of being he or she achieves, and these constitute a collection of'functionings' – doings and beings the person achieves. 'Capability' refers to the alternative combinations of functionings from which a person can choose…the range of options a person hasin deciding what kind of life to lead…" [Dreze and Sen 1995, 1999]. The basic objective ofdevelopment is expansion of these capabilities for their 'intrinsic value'. ("The bettering of human life does not have to be justified by showing that a person with a better life is also a better producer".) So, development policies should not view people as the 'means of production' but as an 'end' in themselves [Dreze and Sen 1995:183-85]. For achieving this broad goal, this 'peoplecentred'approach puts human agency and its contribution to 'changing policy, social commitment, and norms that require collective action' at the centre stage [Fukuda-Parr 2003].

Participation Complexities
The idea of participation, whether it is equity-based or agency-based, privileges the idea of community and the local. Both sides of the opinion have had to respond to the criticism that their views end up looking at the community as an undifferentiated cohesive whole. In their most basic form, they seem to ignore the fact that a community, like any other human collective, is a space of internal differentiation, contestation, and power differentials. Along these lines the social capital theorists have come in for criticism on two counts: one that they seem to ignore the existence of what others have called the bad social capital [Foley and Edwards 1996] – after all, norms of trust, reciprocity and cooperation also exist in very coercive, hierarchical and exclusive communal formations. And two, that by privileging the idea of voluntaristic networks of associations they are ignoring the fact that most collective action that takes place at the community and local level is based on ascriptive affiliations such as caste, religion and tribe. Social capabilities theories, with their emphasis on empowerment, equity and voice, seem to be better equipped to deal with the ideas of difference. For example, in Sen's discussion on poverty and entitlements,5 he says that a person is exposed to poverty when the exchange entitlement set that s/he has is not sufficient for meeting the basic necessities of his/her life. These entitlements are, in turn, determined by his/her particular place – especially gender and class – in society. Yet, in spite of such references, issues of difference and power (that are inherent in the spaces that communities occupy and can impinge upon their participatory goals for development) are not analysed much. Almost tautologically, they are seen as impediments towards people based development that would no more be there once participatory development is institutionalised.In fact, in the past few years, both these approaches (social capabilities more so than social capital) have come to recognise that inequalities, social hierarchies and discrimination are characteristics of the everyday face-to-face relations and interactions within local communities. Theories and concepts both reflect and influence real-life trends. Policies encouraging participatory development have been around for a long time – the example of community-based development programmes in Latin America in the 1950s is often quoted in this context. However,it was only from 1970s onwards that such programmes were pushed by governments and NGOs[Guijt and Shah 1998]. In the words of one author, there seems to have been a change from'exclusion to participation' [Ribot 1995] over the past few decades in the implementation of such programmes. However, since this change does not problematise the idea of community and looks at it as an uncontested whole, it might result in acquiescing to the systemic biases inherent in communities against the underprivileged sections of society (which would include women, lower castes or classes), and therefore end up being 'participatory exclusion' [Agarwal 2001] in the words of another author. Similarly, privileging the idea of the local does not take into account how local does not exist as a separate entity but is also determined by its interactions with the extralocal– both state and non-state – actors [Peters 2000]. And, most importantly, the fact that local institutions of participation can function as democratic organs only under an overall democratic framework of the state is not emphasised much. Historical examples of institutions of decentralisation (like the Soviets in the former USSR, People's Democracy in China, Basic Democracy in Pakistan) show that they can in practice lead to a system of regimentation and extension of coercive power of the state to the lowest level.For a better understanding of this problematised picture of the ideas of participation, local and community, the next section takes up some concrete real-life examples.

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