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Participation as Spiritual Duty; Empowerment as Secular
Subjection
Henkel & Stirrat examine the 'new orthodoxy' within development
that has as its mantras 'participation' and 'empowerment'. This
orthodoxy is shared not only amongst NGO practitioners, but also
amongst bilateral donor governments and multilaterals. One of the
interesting points about this orthodoxy, however, is that there
is no systematic ideology sustaining it; i.e. different groups in
the development world are embracing participation and empowerment
for different reasons, and based on different rationales.
The new orthodoxy of participation and empowerment is characterised
by several cross-cutting trends: a preference for bottom-up approaches;
an assumption that people can escape poverty if they are empowered;
a focus on the marginal (women, the poor, ethnic minorities); a
celebration of 'indigenous knowledge'; a distrust of the state;
and trust in NGOs.
The authors trace the long theological and moral history of participation
in the West, and suggest that even though participation today appears
completely secularised, it nevertheless has many traits and associations
that can be likened to religious experiences. As an illustration
of this they outline Robert Chambers' beliefs in 'the primacy of
the personal' and 'new professionalism'.
Henkel & Stirrat argue that the ways in which participation
and empowerment are operationalised within development today, serve
to incorporate people into a 'modern' Western mindset (with overtones
of centuries of Western theology and philosophy). Moreover, participatory
and empowering projects often (inadvertently) place people under
closer surveillance, both as 'participants' in a development project
and as 'good citizens' of a state. In both cases the surveillance
is seen as an effort to change not only people's behaviour, but
also their hearts and minds. They conclude that although participation
and empowerment are marketed as a radical shift away from ethnocentrism
and the 'bad sides' of modernity, it is more useful to see this
new orthodoxy as part of the current manifestations of the modernisation
process.
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