Poverty and Social Exclusion in North and South

The rapid growth and acceptance of the concept of participation has been a key feature in development in the 1990s, and is central to the evolving discussion on social exclusion. While during the 1970s and 1980s, 'participation' was more the discourse of grassroots organisations or NGO, this decade has seen the concept being embraced at the institutional and governmental level. The World Bank Working Group on Participation is seen as an authoritative source on participation in development. The Bank has launched 18 flagship participation projects internationally An Inter-agency Group on Participation has been established to promote participation amongst aid agencies. The UNDP is incorporating participation as a critical path for poverty alleviation. Encouraged by aid organisations, national governments are being urged to decentralise, and to democratise through strengthening community participation and planfling at the local and regional levels. In this article, I will briefly discuss the links between the concepts of participation and social exclusion. Then, turning to the context of the United States, I will present a short history of three government programmes that have attempted to use participation to address poverty and social exclusion. Finally, I will conclude with themes which emerge from this history and which may be relevant for the South, as participation is increasingly used as an institutionalised strategy for addressing poverty

Can Participation ‘fix’ Inequality? Unpacking the Relationship Between the Economic and Political Citizenship

This paper, based on a lecture given at the University of Sussex, UK, takes on the issue of growing inequality. Arguing that we know more about how economic inequality affects political participation than we do about how participation and voice (for greater civic and political equity, for example) affect economic inequality, he describes on going work to identify participatory practices that offer some precedents for linking strategies for narrowing political and economic gaps from below. These combinations in turn contribute to challenging these intersecting inequalities and hold promise for transformative solutions across the global North and South

Democratising Economic Power: The Potential for Meaningful Participation in Economic Governance and Decision-Making

Participation is the act of people engaging in decisions that impact their lives. It has been widely promoted in social, political and civic spheres. However, the question of participation in economic governance is underdeveloped. This paper explores participation in economic decision-making – ranging from citizen engagement in economic policy, economic development, or the governance of economic institutions – through an analysis of 28 cases in 14 countries, from both the global South and the global North. It asks what constitutes meaningful participation, in terms of how economic activity is organised and how economic governance is practiced, and what are the conditions that enable these alternative structures and practices? It identifies five conditions for participation in economic affairs, many of these familiar from participatory practice elsewhere: distributed authority; mobilisation; networks and coalitions; deliberation and democratised knowledge. The paper then discusses wider social and political implications of participation in economic governance, in terms of the relationship between the economy and society, and the relationship between economic and political forms of participation. Finally, three key participation challenges are explored: who is participating, how are power relations affecting participation, and whether participation can permeate the mainstream. The overall aim of this paper is to learn from existing and emergent practice in order to deepen knowledge on participation in economic governance, contributing both to public debate and future research

Inequality, Power and Participation – Revisiting the Links

Drawing on the contributions from the World Social Science Report 2016, Challenging Inequalities: Pathways to a Just World, this article examines the relationship between economic inequality and political participation. In particular, using the lens of the ‘power cube’ approach (www.powercube.net), we argue that understanding the impact of inequality on political participation requires moving beyond the study of its impact on more conventional forms of participation found in voting and ‘voice’ through established or formal democratic processes. Indeed, this relationship is also influenced by hidden and invisible forms of power, at multiple levels from the local to the global, which affect the rules of the game as well as individuals’ aspiration to participate, shaping whether, where and how citizens engage at all. Despite the power of inequality to shape its own consensus, recent evidence also points to the emergence of levels and forms of resistance to inequality outside of traditional channels of participation, which in turn help to expand and prefigure notions of what the new possibilities of change might be. Exploring these dynamics, the article concludes with a brief reflection on possible lessons for activists, policymakers and scholars working to understand, unravel and challenge the knotty intersections of inequality, power and participation

Challenging the Asymmetries of Power: A Review of the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) Contribution

Despite the fact that power has been a key concept in social and political theory for decades, within international development a focus on understanding power relationships and how they are challenged and transformed has only recently become more central. In this article, we examine how the concept of power has been used and discussed in IDS Bulletin articles over the last five decades, reflect on IDS contributions to the concepts and practices of power in development, and speculate on what further work might shape and inspire work in this field in the future. We argue that an explicit analysis of power was largely absent from earlier issues of the IDS Bulletin, or considered in narrow economic terms. However, beginning around the 1990s, the analysis of power emerged more centrally to IDS work across many fields – including gender, knowledge, participation and livelihoods – such that today, understanding how power relations shape development is considered a core part of the IDS approach