Introduction: powering knowledge from the margins

Tom Thomas and Pradeep Narayanan

Over the past two decades Praxis has witnessed the trials, tribulations and glories of 'participation', not as a bystander or uninvolved commentator but from inside the ring as a practitioner. Praxis' initiation came at a time of frenzied activity with the explosion of tools, field innovators, writers, and authors – a time when the development world was smitten by the participation bug. Everyone was adapting, modifying or innovating tools, renaming them as appropriate to specific theatres of participative action. The push was to adapt, innovate, document, and share. Praxis (in its previous avatar as a unit of ActionAid India) became the clearing house for much of these activities of the early 90s. Then came the scale-up and the big push by the World Bank through its 'Voices of the Poor' project that spanned continents. We joined that effort too by undertaking the India segment of the study. Participation became the buzzword and no project, be it of the World Bank, UK Department for International Development (DfID) or other donors/nongovernmental organizations (NGOs)/international NGOS (INGOs), was worthy without a 'participatory' tick in the checkbox. Participation was written into all donor- funded government programmes. Of course, scaling up comes with its share of problems and criticisms. The decade that followed saw a slew of these, and participation was then declared the new orthodoxy and the new development tyranny.

We agree and identify with most of the criticism, and looking back, we wonder whether it is the price we paid for the move from the margins to the mainstream – or whether there is something inherent in the approach that couldn't stand up to the expectations? The answer probably lies somewhere at the intersection of these two. There is no denying that the approach was a huge paradigm shift for aided developmental interventions. Knowledge creation has been problematic since time immemorial – at best it attempted neutrality and at worst, it was a blatant display of power by the dominant class or caste. What got buried deep beneath all this is the struggle of people living in poverty: people who are stigmatized and excluded. Within development circles, participation for the first time opened its doors to a more systematic and equitable inclusion of the pariahs in knowledge creation through the pioneering work of Robert Chambers and others. People living in poverty were for the first time being asked their views and their priorities. Through Whose Reality Counts? and similar work, their reality was being given a premium. They were being heard rather than being told, for a change. The sites for exercise of power were loosening up. However, the liberating potential of this experience remained limited because much of these interactions were one-offs, confined to the Western philosophical tradition of knowledge for its own sake rather than being founded in the history of struggles of the marginalized. This defect slowly began to be challenged by many practitioners from the global South, and the addition of 'Action' to the terminology reflected this shift (Participatory Reflection and Action/Participatory Learning and Action). Somewhere along this stage in the history of participatory approaches came the intersection with the scaling up by the big players. The scaling up was resourced by proponents of neoliberal ideology that encouraged and supported the utilitarian aspects of participatory approaches, focusing on stakeholder engagement for faster implementation and better efficiency. It saw in the approach a quick way to gain access to a new community, get (and often set) their expectations, forge consensus and allocate roles – thereby reducing costs, managing crowds better, and increasing project efficiency. The governments that adopt this approach often view community engagement as one-dimensional and yearn for depoliticized forms of participation that are sanitized, clinical and conflict-free (Whitfield, 2012). A good part of participatory approaches got pushed back into the fold of knowledge for its own sake, with no particular accent on dialogue to raise critical consciousness or probe deeper into structural causes of poverty. This made it easy for the new financiers (and hence self-assumed managers) of the approach to cherry-pick whatever suited their scheme of things – the prime example being the World Bank's 'Voices of the Poor' initiative. Fairly soon along this trajectory, a mockery of the approach also came in the form of compartmentalization of community participation as a separate component. It was often sanctioned long after the planning and programme roll out phases were under way – making do without even the need for cherry-picking! The likes of the World Bank, The Asian Development Bank and DfID excelled in this.

Even when the political left dabbled with participation at scale (such as in the People's Plan Campaign, Kerala), it failed to go beyond the party's attempt at community outreach. Even here it continued to focus on surface-level issues and skimmed over structural causes of inequality and marginalization. It also almost completely failed to reach out to the poorest – the adivasis (tribal communities) of Kerala.

Why participation? It owes much of its intellectual heritage to the Western philosophical construct of knowledge for its own sake that assumed political neutrality of knowledge. It was resourced and scaled up by neoliberals who, at best, used it as a mechanism for project management. Even the left used it mainly as an outreach programme. Though this remained the mainstreamed paradigm, many continued to explore the subversive potential that participation offered. Some saw its potential for conscientization, infusing some of Paulo Freire's thinking into it, while others used it to explore the local power dimension more deeply. David Archer's REFLECT (Regenerated Freirean Literacy...