Editorial


  

Participation or self-development?

Autodéveloppement – self-development – is a term being used in French development jargon. It has never been adopted in German, and is not, as far as I am aware, used in English either. Although it seems to set a different accent, it is basically used in French where we speak of participation. But does it mean the same thing? Autodéveloppement calls to mind the familiar appeal for an end to all development aid, to allow Africa to develop on its own, on the basis of African concepts and values. Such interpretation, however, is off the mark. Those speaking of autodéveloppement, too, presuppose the existence of help from outside – financial help, in the main, but also advice. Perhaps it is fair to say that participation is the more honest of the two terms because it embodies the notion that responsibility and initiative are shared between two partners.

Development occurs where challenge is followed by response. We learnt that from British historian Arnold Toynbee. And one of the ways in which challenge can be presented is through encounters with another civilisation , with a different system of values. As the French Islamist Jacques Pirenne famously pointed out, Post-Roman Europe was a civilisational desert until it was challenged to a new upswing by its encounter with Islam. The result of this stimulation was the Carolingian Renaissance. Japan in mid nineteenth century – under pressure from Europe and the USA – developed by adding European technological know?how to its system of traditional Confucianist-Buddhist-Shintoist values. The result was the Meiji Reformation. Japan in those days did not pledge to go back to its roots but to move forward to modernity – and so it did, giving modernity its own mark. The fact that Africa dreams itself back in time, has so far been a hindrance to its development. Only now is the continent starting to wake up and face the challenge of modernity. The latest Africa conference at Loccum, on the role of the intellectuals in development, made this very clear (see p. 215 of this issue).

So development requires external stimulation to be amalgamated with internal potentials. Development aid, however, has been something different, for decades: the imposition of ready-made recipes from outside – until we discovered that this way, development did not occur. A handful of countries did register economic upswings (the "newly industrialised countries" whom we call "threshold" countries today, which succeeded because they followed Japan's example and fostered this kind of amalgamation), but the vast majority of countries stagnated in poverty. Why? Gerald Braun gives a graphic explanation in this issue of D+C: "The projects were planned and executed top-down amid serene disregard of the real-life conditions of the people affected. The results: the target groups cooperate only haltingly, demonstrate at times a great degree of apathy and manifest an astonishing 'project resistance'." However, it is also not sufficient – as might be inferred from the words of the Indian farmer quoted by Braun – simply to consult people at the grass roots, who certainly know their own problems, but not necessarily the solutions. What has to be done, instead, is to involve them in the process of developing the solution strategies. The example Braun describes – intensive cooperation between civil society groups on the ground and ministry specialists, with low-key assistance from Germany – shows the right way forward.

For a long time, wherever participation was discussed, it was only in the context of grass roots projects, and it was difficult enough there, and often just a label. In the meantime, things have progressed, and one of the most interesting experiments at present is certainly the one launched by terre des homes: A full programme composed largely of grass roots projects, is designed in cooperation with terre des hommes partners from the South. This opens up the possibility of triggering trans-project learning processes on both sides, for the Germans as for their partners. Of course, we know today that change at grass roots level is not enough, that development is also conditional – fundamentally conditional – upon societal structural reforms. The difficult question whether and how participation is possible at that structural and institutional level is answered in the affirmative by the experiences made in reforming the Yemeni educational system. What that experience shows is that it is not enough just for German government advisers to cooperate with local ministry officials. While that may be a vital requirement, it needs to be flanked by participative cooperation between the partner government and its populace. Thus, Participation will not only lead to less patronage by the North but also to more grass roots democracy in the country itself. What is also clear, however, is that without the impulse given by the German advisers and their project support, the whole process would not have got underway – not self-development, but participation. Initiatives like the one described in Braun’s article are still very rare – they show how far participation can and should go.

Finally, Frank Bliss's article shows how difficult it is to find the right partners for participative processes. Over the years, the development organisations – with no exception of NGOs – have groomed or fashioned a network of partners which permits a kind of pseudo-participation that is hard to distinguish from the real thing. There is thus a risk of the concept of participation undermining itself in being implemented.


Von Reinold E. Thiel