Keeping it Vague, Discourses and Practices of Participation in Rural Mozambique
Development practice has been strongly influenced by the policies of donor countries. One policy followed the other and practice followed suit. Donors and experts prescribed the development agendas. Many failures of top-down approaches justified (renewed) attention for the ‘local’, and for ‘participatory’ or ‘community-based’ approaches in the 1980s and 1990s. Participatory approaches were presented as ‘a new paradigm’, a reversal, as the new magic bullet. We may argue now that in many cases the ‘participatory paradigm’ has become a victim of its own popularity. During the 1990s, participatory approaches were ‘mainstreamed’. And thus we were back to where the problems started; the approach was integrated into the recipes and formulas of donors and development agencies. What was intended to be empowering and bottom-up eventually turned into extractive and imposed interventions.
This thesis is the result of the struggle by the author to make sense of development practice. The study is based on an analysis of five development projects in Mozambique where the author lived and worked from 1995 till 2000. The book attempts to explain what takes place when policies and project documents created by donors and development agencies are translated in the course of project implementation. In this process, but also in reporting back from the field, actors actively frame the discourse. The central concepts that are used such as ‘community’, ‘participation’ and ‘empowerment’ are extremely ambiguous and are easily used in a populist manner. The discourse of participation often suggests that all actors are able and willing to come to mutually beneficial collective action. In this way, it blinds us to the power dimensions that are inherent in any development process. The ambiguity of the concepts ‘participation’ and ‘empowerment’ enables the constant framing and makes it possible to generate different discourses for different audiences. Keeping these concepts vague may therefore be very convenient at certain moments in order to ensure that the various actors with different interests remain on board.
Advocates of participatory approaches have warned against the so-called ‘bad practices’ that would be the result of inappropriate behaviours and wrong attitudes of practitioners. This study also looks at the problematic sides of the discourse itself. If we look from the point of view of practitioners and how they actively translate the discourse into practice, we may regard their behaviour as highly adaptive in order to get the project (partially or wholly) going, although this may not coincide exactly with all the objectives as stated in the project document. Such practice may be necessary to bridge the gap between the rather optimist, not to say naïve, philosophy of the participatory development discourse and the harsh realities of rural Mozambique.