Participation Reader

Edited by Andrea Cornwall

Calls for greater participation of those affected by development interventions have a long history. This expert reader explores the conceptual and methodological dimensions of participatory research and the politics and practice of participation in development. Through excerpts from the texts that have inspired contemporary advocates of participation, accounts of the principles of participatory research and empirical studies that show some of the complexities of participation in practice, it offers a range of reflections on participation that will be of interest to those new to the field and experienced practitioners alike. Bringing together for the first time classic and contemporary writings from a literature that spans a century, it offers a unique perspective on the possibilities and dilemmas that face those seeking to enable those affected by development projects, programmes and policies.

Contents

Part One: What is participation?
1. A ladder of citizen participation (Sherry R. Arnstein)
2. The many faces of participation (Matthias Stiefel and Marshall Wolfe)
3. What is meant by people’s participation? (N. C. Saxena)
4. Participation’s place in rural development: seeking clarity through specificity (John Cohen and Norman Uphoff)
5. Depoliticizing development: the uses and abuses of participation (Sarah White)
6. Participation: the ascendancy of a buzzword in the neo-liberal era (Pablo Alejandro Leal)
Part Two: Participatory methodologies: principles and applications
7. Production and diffusion of new knowledge (Orlando Fals Borda)
8. The historical roots and contemporary urges in participatory research (Rajesh Tandon)
9. New Paradigm Research Manifesto (New Paradigm Research Group London)
10. Doing feminist participatory research (Patricia Maguire)
11. Cooperative inquiry (Peter Reason)
12. PRA five years later (Robert Chambers and Irene Guijt)
13. Ten myths about PRA (Ian Scoones)
14. Growing from the grassroots: building participatory planning, monitoring and evaluation methods in PARC (Janet Symes and Sa’ed Jasser)
15. Tools for empowerment: community exchanges (Sheela Patel)
16. Citizens juries: a radical alternative for social research (Tom Wakeford)
17. Voices aloud: making communication and change together (Oga Steve Abah)
18. Powerful Grassroots Women Communicators: Participatory Video in Bangladesh (Renuka Bery and Sara Stuart)
Part Three: Community and participatory development: principles and practice
19. Managing local participation: rhetoric and reality (Robert Chambers)
20. Community participation: history, concepts and controversies (James Midgley)
21. The making and marketing of participatory development (David Mosse)
22. Whose voices? Whose choices? Reflections on gender and participatory development (Andrea Cornwall)
23. Ethnicity and participatory development methods in botswana: some participants are to be seen and not heard (Tlamelo Mompati and Gerard Prinsen)
24. Towards a repoliticization of participatory development: political capabilities and spaces of empowerment–Glyn Williams
Part Four: Participation in governance
25. Towards participatory local governance: six propositions for discussion (John Gaventa)
26. The politics of domesticating participation in rural India (Ranjita Mohanty)
27. Aiding policy? Civil society engagement in Tanzania’s PRSP (Elaina Mack)
28. Participation without representation: chiefs, councils and forestry law in the West African Sahel (Jesse C. Ribo)
29. Talking politics in participatory governance (Gianpaolo Baocchi)
30. Co-governance for accountability: beyond ‘exit’ and ‘voice’ (John Ackerman)
Part Five: Participation as collective action: mobilization, insurgency and struggle
31. Users as citizens: collective action and the local governance of welfare (Marion Barnes )
32. Insurgency and spaces of active citizenship: the story of the Western Cape anti-viction campaign in South Africa (Faranak Miraftab and Shana Wills)
33. Pedagogical guerrillas, armed democrats and revolutionary counter-publics: examining paradox in the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas, Mexico (Josee Johnston)
34. Bodies as sites of struggle: Naripokkho and the movement for women’s rights in Bangladesh (Shireen Huq)
35. Citizenship: a perverse confluence (Evelina Dagnino)

About the Author

Andrea Cornwall is Professor of Anthropology and Development in the School of Global Studies at the University of Sussex. She has worked on participation as a researcher and practitioner for many years, and is author of Beneficiary, Consumer, Citizen (2000) and Democratizing Engagement (Demos) and co-editor of Pathways to Participation (with Garett Pratt, 2003), Spaces for Change? (with Vera Schattan Coelho, 2006) and The Politics of Rights (with Maxine Molyneux, 2009).