The people-driven form of governance in Myanmar reminds me of a provocative book I recently read, called “The Participation Paradox: Between Bottom-Up and Top-Down Development in South Africa,” by Luke Sinwell. He describes how the ~22,500 residents of Thembelihle, an informal settlement south of Johannesburg, took governance into their own hands when the local representative of the party in power (the African National Congress) failed to respond to their repeated requests for better service (such as connection to the formal power grid). The result was first a community crisis committee, followed by a People’s Parliament that has operated for more than two decades.
Sinwell calls the mechanisms created by the people in both Karenni (Myanmar) and Thembelihle “invented participatory spaces” – in other words, created by the people themselves, not the entity with power, such as a government or international NGO. Why are people-created spaces better? Because, says Sinwell, the former too often set the rules: dictating the topic, the range of options, the forum for discussion, etc.
“The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to allow lively debate, while at the same time strictly limiting the spectrum of dialogue,” explains Sinwell. “That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.”
So, in reality, people’s participation often is intended to simply determine the specific form of projects already sanctioned by a government or development agency. At this point in Sinwell’s book, I recalled a World Bank project in Kyrgyzstan that I wrote about when working for People Powered. A massive new power line was being installed across the country as part of CASA-1000, an international initiative designed to link the energy systems of Central and South Asia — Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan with Afghanistan and Pakistan — and enable trading of electricity. In conjunction with that project, the World Bank offered community-improvement grants to the municipalities located along the power line. And it mandated that residents in those towns decide for themselves how to spend the grants, within three categories of projects: electricity supply, social “infrastructure” and livelihood generation.
But was that real participation? The residents didn’t get to weigh in on whether the power line should cut through their area to begin with. And they also could only choose to to allocate the funds to one of the three specified purposes.
“In part as a response to Marxist tendencies within anti-colonial movements across the world, but also because of the perceived need for the development establishment to be seen as uplifting nations in the Global South, participation has become mainstreamed, watered down and depoliticized,” writes Sinwell. “The theory and practice of radical, popular participation have been essentially decapitated in a long-term, calculated strategy by neoliberal institutions such as the World Bank to give a more human face to an inhumane market-driven or economistic development agenda.”
Despite the most progressive intentions, concludes Sinwell, “without a formidable counter-power capable of intervention into state affairs, participation more often than not becomes a pawn in the hands of authorities bent on maintaining the status quo.” That’s why, he says, the residents of Thembelihle consider protest – both blocking of major streets and occupation of government offices – to be important tactics in their public participation. Sometimes, it’s necessary to go outside of the channels chosen by the powers-that-be and challenge the status quo.
Maybe we need to focus on the social and political context in which the idea and practice of participation emerges. Do they emerge from government, development agency boardrooms or the experiences of the dispossessed?
Food for thought.
- PB
