Empowerment, Deliberative Development and Local Level Politics in Indonesia: Participatory Projects as a Source of Countervailing Power

29 Pages Posted: 6 Aug 2008

See all articles by Michael Woolcock

Michael Woolcock

affiliation not provided to SSRN

Christopher Gibson

Brown University

Date Written: October 30, 2007

Abstract

The salience of the concept of "empowerment" has been more often deductively claimed than carefully defined or inductively assessed, by development scholars and practitioners alike. Using evidence from an in-depth, mixed methods examination of the Kecamatan Development Project (KDP) in rural Indonesia, we define it here as deliberative development interventions that build marginalised groups' capacity to engage local level governing elites using routines of deliberative contestation. Our data show that while KDP induced local level development conflicts, it also provided tools for peacefully resolving them, including associational spaces, incentives for marginalised group participation, and resources for argumentation such as facilitators. Ultimately, marginalised groups used these spaces, incentives, and resources to modestly but consistently shift local level power relations, regardless of the pre-existing institutional context. By contrast, marginalised groups in non-KDP development conflicts from otherwise similar contexts used "mobilisational contestation" to generate comparatively erratic and inconsistent shifts in power relations that depended greatly on the pre-existing context.

Keywords: empowerment, local decision-making, power relations, conflict, marginalised groups

Suggested Citation

Woolcock, Michael and Gibson, Christopher, Empowerment, Deliberative Development and Local Level Politics in Indonesia: Participatory Projects as a Source of Countervailing Power (October 30, 2007). Brooks World Poverty Institute Working Paper No. 8, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1204708 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1204708

Michael Woolcock (Contact Author)

affiliation not provided to SSRN

Christopher Gibson

Brown University ( email )

Box 1860
Providence, RI 02912
United States

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