Voicing noise: Political agency and the trialectics of participation in urban Malawi

Participation is promoted as the main engine for transformation in urban planning and slum upgrading in Malawi, despite the fact that most projects never get beyond the planning stage. Serious participation fatigue has been identified in many areas, but little is done to change the dominant script. This article comes out of an action research project with groups of urban poor and their organizations in Malawi. It analyses existing spaces in which participatory planning and slum upgrading take place, and reflects on what combinations of participatory spaces that might serve to enable change. The authors define political agency and locate potential transformation in agonistic spaces that open up for rupture and for people’s interest to be accepted as voice rather than noise. At the same time, participants in urban Malawi often wish to be included into existing frameworks rather than challenging them. The article therefore explores a third way between a programme of insurgent radical action and the more pragmatic consensus-based participation model practised in Malawi today. Here, the potential for transformation is to be found not within one group or one type of space, but in the ways in which different spaces of participation connect, overlap and partly constitute each other. To better understand the transformative potential of participation in the context of urban planning in Malawi, we thus propose a ‘trialectics’ of participatory spaces where ‘claimed’, ‘invited’ and ‘invented’ dimensions of participation connect, overlap, and open up for ways in which actors can meet

Action research in critical scholarship: Negotiating multiple imperatives

Critical scholars sometimes accuse action researchers of not being radical enough in their approach, while action researchers often see the work of critical scholars as elitist and not grounded in people’s everyday experiences. This article draws on an action research project with residents in urban informal settlements in Malawi and their partner organizations in the period 2013-2017 to discuss how research can negotiate and achieve its multiple imperatives of being critical and rooted, explanatory and actionable. It shows how the action research approach with its collaborative elements helped the research project avoid what Louis McNay (2014:4) calls “social weightlessness” in political theorizing – “an abstract way of thinking that is so far removed from the actual practices and dynamics of everyday life that, ultimately, its own analytical relevance and normative validity are thrown into question”. The article reflects on the possibilities and limitations of the integrated approach developed in the project and suggests that action research in critical scholarship is a way to avoid ‘social weightlessness’ in theorizing while at the same time responding to some of the critique made against action research for not engaging with structural inequality and systemic change at scale

IDPs redefined – Participatory ActionResearch with urban IDPs in Uganda

This dissertation investigates the discourse on Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) in Uganda and how IDPs in urban areas fit in to the discourse on both the theoretical and practical level. The dissertation reveals that although IDPs in urban areas by definition are included in both international and national IDP definitions, urban IDPs are seen as either economic migrants, or as former IDPs who have now reached a durable solution. The consequences of such exclusion from the IDP label are that IDPs outside camps are not considered for assistance or included in the return and resettlement frameworks or information activities. The formation of the IDP label in Uganda has been influenced by the government’s approach of control and military presence aimed at keeping people in camps in the north. Consequently, IDPs are perceived entirely as people residing in camps. The humanitarian community has been complicit with the government’s policy of keeping people in camps by limiting assistance to IDPs registered and residing within them. The obvious lack of resources dedicated to protecting IDPs also influences the way the label is shaped. It is challenging to identify IDPs in an urban setting because of lack of registration and information. It is also difficult to determine who are forced migrants, and which of them have reached a durable solution. Consequently, IDPs in Uganda has in practice been redefined to those staying in camps. Upon acknowledging how the voices of urban IDPs are marginalized within the dominant discourse, phase two of the fieldwork progressed towards influencing this discourse by revealing the political and bureaucratic agency in the processes of labelling creating greater awareness of the processes that serve to exclude urban IDPs from return and resettlement frameworks. By facilitating the mobilization of an urban IDP interest group I together with the community outreach organization Refugee Law Project worked together with urban IDP communities advocating for their rights

Reconfiguring research relevance – steps towards salvaging the radical potential of the co-productive turn in searching for sustainable solutions

In this lecture, I discuss the role of academia in addressing “fast policymaking” on sustainability. I suggest that the co-productive turn, whereby universities are increasingly expected to engage with a diverse set of actors, including citizens, can provide checks and balances to top-heavy bureaucracy, political elites, and market power in sustainability processes. However, if research relevance continues to be defined in neoliberal terms as meeting the needs of the economy and industry, this potential will not be realized. Drawing inspiration from the “slow research movement”, the call for more reflexive co-production in sustainability science, decolonial scholarship, and alternative debates on research impact, I propose a critical reconfiguration of research relevance that would respond better to the multiple imperatives of research to be critical, rooted, explanatory and actionable. However, this reconfiguration would be contingent on active scholarly engagement with the politics that condition relevance. Drawing on my experiences from participating in a collective named New University Norway, I end the lecture by offering some thoughts about the ‘new’ university in co-producing sustainable solutions

Voicing Noise: Action research with informal settlement groups and their partners in Malawi

Does participatory planning enable informal settlement groups in Malawi to realize citizenship rights such as housing, services and political voice? Is their participation really transformative? These are some of the questions this thesis attempts to answer. It does so by analysing different and overlapping participatory planning spaces and discussing what opportunities and barriers participants face in such spaces. The thesis shows that informal settlement groups are able to do quite a bit on their own or in collaboration with NGOs and municipal actors. Examples are information gathering, strategic community planning, negotiating for services, pooling of resources, implementation of services such as waste management and security, and building of minor infrastructure. What they were not able to achieve within the current participatory planning frameworks were larger infrastructure such as paved roads, bridges, and access to clinics and schools. The groups were also not able to secure for themselves the same services that were offered in the wealthier areas of the city, achieve complete security of tenure, or build political voice. One conclusion was therefore that the participatory planning processes studied were not transformative. They did in some instances increase the influence of marginalized groups in decision-making, but they did not confront the forces that were causing the social exclusion to begin with. Global discourses on community mobilizing and participatory planning are largely developed from major cities in India, South Africa and Latin America. In Malawi, limited national and local resources, disconnections from national and urban policies of redistribution, and a local politics shaped by both clientelism and democratic reforms limit the range of strategies and practices available to local groups. In this context, participatory planning tend to promise more than it can deliver. In order to avoid participation fatigue the thesis therefore suggests a framework for mobilizing that takes as its starting point existing capacities and identifies what informal settlement groups can solve with self-organizing, what they can do with better connections and technical advice at the city level, and what requires more systemic political change in terms of resource redistribution and inclusion in the city. Together with clear communication and long-term mobilization, such an approach could prevent transformative participation from deflating before it has begun. The PhD project was built using an action research approach. This means that the project has been heavily inspired by the priorities of participants and project partners, which were informal settlement groups, the Federation of the Rural and the Urban Poor, the Centre for Community Organization and Development and the latter’s Research Institute in Malawi. The project used an integrated approach that combined pragmatic and critical elements of action research in order to utilize the dynamics between theory and practice in addressing participatory planning issues beyond the immediate community level. The opportunities and dilemmas involved in employing such an approach are discussed both in the foundation and in the articles, and forms an important part of the thesis

Does Participatory Planning Promise Too Much? Global Discourses and the Glass Ceiling of Participation in Urban Malawi

This article discusses how global ideas on co-production and citizenship built from below are translated into community mobilization and participatory planning practices in urban Malawi. It shows how limited national and local resources, disconnections from national and urban policies of redistribution, and a local politics shaped by both clientelism and democratic reforms create a glass ceiling for what global models of community mobilization and participation are able to achieve. It calls for a more systematic and empirically diverse research agenda to better understand how participatory discourses and practices embedded in grassroots organizing are transferred and mediated in place

Does Participatory Planning Promise Too Much? Global Discourses and the Glass Ceiling of Participation in Urban Malawi

This article discusses how global ideas on co-production and citizenship built from below are translated into community mobilization and participatory planning practices in urban Malawi. It shows how limited national and local resources, disconnections from national and urban policies of redistribution, and a local politics shaped by both clientelism and democratic reforms create a glass ceiling for what global models of community mobilization and participation are able to achieve. It calls for a more systematic and empirically diverse research agenda to better understand how participatory discourses and practices embedded in grassroots organizing are transferred and mediated in place

Urban IDPs in Uganda: victims of institutional convenience

The reluctance of some humanitarian actors to address theneeds of IDPs inconveniently located in urban areas – incontrast to those in camps – belies their commitment toa rights-based approach to assistance and protection

Desplazados urbanos en Uganda: víctimas de la conveniencia institucional

La desidia de algunos actores humanitarios al gestionar las necesidades de los desplazados internos ubicados de manera inoportuna en áreas urbanas –y no en campos– eclipsa su compromiso con la ayuda y protección de los derechos de los desplazados