ultimate goal of these and other necessary institution-building activities and encourage accountability to the publics in intervention environments - not donors and governments. Therein is the fight and the challenge. If participatory development stands a chance of prevailing in this slow motion collision, we must implement programs that disempower ourselves.
Organizations implementing participatory programs must more fully commit in thought and action to decentralizing and giving their power to local partners. Current development institutions that host the conventional paradigm must restructure or dismantle themselves. New arrangements must assemble around participation as a core value in their organizational customs and behavior. The gains such creations as the OTI and the World Bank’s Participation Fund have made will need to be consolidated, they will need to recommit to internalizing participation and hold the line on their mandates as the collision creates more pressure for each to choose sides.
The most challenging frontier will be in rapid onset emergency interventions. This is where there is danger, from the first hours, for patterns of aid dependency to originate and it is where the relevance of participatory approaches is most questioned. In this area, as in the areas where participatory methods are more regularly put to use, practitioners will need to continue the creativity and innovation that has thus far defined the paradigm. In doing so, the merit of the approach will become evident and among the serpents and dragons on the edges of the parchment sea, the new continent will be drawn.
↑ 1 Karl Popper’s critique of Thomas Kuhn’s theory of knowledge aside, Kuhn’s use of “paradigms” and “paradigm shifts” provides a useful, easy framework to understand the struggle in international relief and development between an institution-centered, conventional worldview and a more recent “people centered” one. David C. Korten and Robert Chambers also use “paradigms” to describe this tension. Korten juxtaposes the “people-centered” paradigm to what Robert Chambers characterized as “conventional professionalism” and, to Chambers, conventional development professionals are inclined toward providing assistance to state institutions, prefer working within centers of power, favor modern over traditional technologies, quantitative analysis over subjective experience, market approaches over subsistence production and industry over agriculture. To the conventional practitioner, to “go local” is unprofessional. Both Chambers and Korten note that conventional professionalism has dominated development activity for the last forty years and is largely responsible for a depressing record of failure to relieve chronic poverty. When paradigms are referred to in this paper, traditional professionalism will be called the “conventional paradigm” or “conventional professionalism” while “people-centered” approaches will be referred to as the “participatory development” or “participatory methodologies” paradigm. See Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, reprinted by University of Chicago Press, 1996; David Korten, ed., Community Management: Asian Experience and Perspectives, Kumarian Press 1986; Robert Chambers, Rural Development: Putting the Last First, Longman Group 1984; and Chamber’s “Us and Them: Finding a New Paradigm for Professionalism in Sustainable Development” in Diane Warburton, ed., Community and Sustainable Development: Participation in the Future.
↑ 2 For a comparative review of these approaches see The World Bank Participation Sourcebook, World Bank Publications, 1996. Also find at http://www.worldbank.org/wbi/sourcebook/sbhome.htm
↑ 3 Thanks to John Fawcett for his incendiary reminders of the very real consequences of ignoring political and social context. He and Victor Tanner provide a disturbing analysis of the effects of this incognizance in Bosnia-Hercegovina in a recent case study of humanitarian assistance in the former Yugoslavia. Fawcett and Tanner have persuasively argued that donor agencies would do well to require a “political impact statement” of their implementers before a decision to engage is made. In Fawcett, John and Tanner, Victor, Review of Programs in the Former Yugoslavia, USAID: OFDA, April 2000.
↑ 4 Sometimes this means choosing to not intervene at all. As Rony Brauman describes it, humanitarian and development organizations often deliberately sideline political variables and are gripped by “the insouciance that permits agencies, in7
