Participation: the ascendancy of a buzzword in the neo-liberal era

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Somewhere in the mid-1980s, participation ascended to the pantheon of development buzzwords, catchphrases, and euphemisms. From that moment on, and throughout the greater part of the 1990s, the new buzzword would stand side by side with such giants as ‘sustainable development’, ‘basic needs’, ‘capacity building’, and ‘results based’. Participation entered the exclusive world of dominant development discourse; it had gained currency and trade value in the competitive market struggle for development project contracts, an indispensable ingredient of the replies to requests for proposals that issued from multilateral aid agencies everywhere. Development professionals and consultants rushed to attend workshops on how to employ a multiplicity of methodological packages such as Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA), Participatory Learning and Action (PLA), Appreciative Inquiry (AI), Community Based Needs Assessment (CBNA), and Stakeholder Analysis. Other professionals rushed to lead these workshops, given the growing market for them. There was no doubt: participation was hot, it was in, and it was here to stay – or at least, until it was displaced by another, newer buzzword.

That this happened should be of no surprise to anyone, since the development industry has made an art of reinventing itself in the face of its failure to reduce or alleviate poverty, social and economic inequity, and environmental degradation after more than five glorious development decades. What is striking is the time and manner in which it came upon the institutional development scene, and this article seeks to explore this particular issue.

The historic and systemic failure of the development industry to ‘fix’ chronic underdevelopment puts it in the challenging position of having both to renew and reinvent its discourse and practice enough to make people believe that a change has, in fact, taken place and to make these adjustments while maintaining intact the basic structure of the status quo on which the development industry depends. This explains why we have seen, over the past 50 years, a rich parade of successive development trends: ‘community development’ in the post-colonial period, ‘modernisation’ in the Cold War period, and ‘basic human needs’ and ‘integrated rural development’ throughout the 1970s. The neo-liberal period (1980s to the present day) witnessed a pageant of such trends as ‘sustainable development’ and ‘participatory development’ from the late 1980s and all through the 1990s; ‘capacity building’, ‘human rights’, and ‘good governance’ throughout most of the 1990s; and, we must not forget, ‘poverty reduction/alleviation’ in the dawn of the twenty-first century.

Available: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614520701469518#tabModule

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http://knowledgepolicy.wordpress.com/2012/06/28/participation-the-ascendancy-of-a-buzzword-in-the-neo-liberal-era/ Participation: the ascendancy of a buzzword in the neo-liberal era