Brazil's health councils appear to offer inspiring examples of what Fung and Wright term “empowered participatory governance.” But what happens in practice? This article narrates an episode in the life of a municipal health council in northeast Brazil, in which democracy itself came under deliberation. It seeks to locate normative assumptions embedded in theories of deliberative democracy and participatory governance in everyday conduct in one of these institutions. It suggests that assessing the democratizing potential of the myriad new spaces that (...) now populate governance landscapes the world over calls for far closer attention to be paid to power, political culture, and politics. (shrink)

The recent enthusiasm for “participation” in agricultural development has fueled the development of new approaches to research and extension. The rhetoric of “participation” extends the horizons of agricultural research and extension beyond technical problem-solving. Yet in practice few of the personal, political, and experiential aspects of this process are addressed. This paper aims to draw attention to these elements of practice and to locate research and extension within wider social processes. Through a critique of conventional methodological strategies, this paper considers (...) the possibilities offered by “participatory” alternatives. Considering the scope and objectives of agricultural development raises a series of methodological questions: What counts as knowledge? Who defines and represents this knowledge? Whose knowledge counts? Knowledge for what? Knowledge for whom?The paper goes on to assess a number of these “new” methodologies, within and beyond agricultural development. Through a consideration of their strengths and weaknesses, a series of further issues are highlighted for future methodological development. It is argued that for agricultural research and extension to acknowledge process, closer attention needs to be paid to context. The activities of research and extension need to be set in time. Strategies are needed to explore and address diversity and difference in communities. Situating the actors and agencies involved in development within relations of power involves addressing—and redressing—the nature of interactions between these actors. These changes require not an ever increasing array of methods, it is argued, but new approaches to learning. (shrink)

Over the course of the 1990s, donor enthusiasm for participation came to be institutionalized in a variety of ways. One particular methodology—Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA)—came to enjoy phenomenal popularity. New aid modalities may have shifted donor and lender concern away from the grassroots towards “policy dialogue.” But “civil society participation,” “social accountability,” and “empowerment”—some of the issues PRA grapples with—retain a place in the new aid discourse. PRA and its variants also continue to be used by government agencies, non-governmental, and (...) community-based organizations in local-level assessment, planning, monitoring, and evaluation, as well as in national-level poverty assessments. It has sometimes been conflated, by donors and critics alike, with doing participatory development, and has elicited critiques that often go far beyond the bounds of the methodological. Yet these critics have tended to be academics with little experience as practitioners or facilitators. In this article, we draw on an action research project with PRA practitioners. We explore, through their critical reflections, some of the conundrums and contradictions faced by those who were active as PRA practitioners in the early 1990s. We suggest that the story of PRA’s success and of subsequent concerns about abuse and misuse by mainstream development institutions offers broader lessons with continued salience for development. (shrink)