St Comp lilt Dev (2008) 43:151-180 DOI lo!l007/sl2116-008-9021-0
Christopher Gibson • Michael
Woolcock
Published
online: 10
May 2008
iC.) Springer Science + Business Media, LLC 2008
Abstract
The salience of the concept of "empowerment" has been deductively
claimed more often than carefully defined or inductively assessed by
development scholars and practitioners alike. We use evidence from a mixed
methods examination of the Kecamatan (subdistrict) Development Project (KDP) in
rural Indonesia, which we define here as development interventions that build
marginalized groups' capacity to engage local-level governing elites using
routines of deliberative contestation. "Deliberative contestation"
refers to marginalized groups' practice of exercising associational autonomy in
public forums using fairness-based arguments that challenge governing elites'
monopoly over public resource allocation decisions. Deliberative development
interventions such as KDP possess a comparative advantage in building the
capacity to engage because they actively provide open decision-making spaces,
resources for argumentation (such as facilitators), and incentives to
participate. They also promote peaceful resolutions to the conflicts they
inevitably spark. In the KDP conflicts we analyze, marginalized groups used
deliberative contestation to moderately but consistently shift local-level
power relations in contexts with both low and high preexisting capacities for
managing
This article
is part of a larger study on local-level conflict and participatory development
projects in Indonesia. For generous financial assistance, we are grateful to
DfID, AusAID, the Norwegian Trust Fluid (Measuring Empowerment Study), the
World Bank's Conflict Prevention and Reconstruction Unit, and Development
Economics Vice Presidency (Research Support Budget). Patrick Barron, Claire
Smith, Rachael Diprose, and Adam Satu were key members of the research team and
played an integral role in developing the ideas explored here. Other
field-level researchers provided ideas throughout the study. We are also
indebted to Scott Guggenheim and Ruth Alsop for their active support and feedback,
and to Dan Biller, Patrick Barron, and three anonymous referees for helpful
comments. The views are those of the authors, and should not be attributed to
the organizations with which they are affiliated.
c. Gibson
Department
of Sociology, Brown University, Box 1916, Providence RI 02912-1916, USA
e-mail: christopher_gibson@brown.edu
M.
Woolcock (ED)
Brooks World Poverty Institute, University of Manchester, Bridgeford
Street Humanities Building, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL, UK e-mail: michael.woolcock@manchester.ac.uk
conflict. By
contrast, marginalized groups in non-KDP development conflicts from comparable
villages used "mobilizational contestation" to generate comparatively
erratic shifts in power relations, shifts that depended greatly on the
preexisting capacity for managing conflict.
Keywords
Empowerment - Deliberative development - Indonesia
Empowerment—the process of
enhancing individual or group capacity to make choices and transform those
choices into desired actions and outcomes—is an increasingly familiar term within
the international development community. Its increasing popularity suggests an
emerging, shared understanding that marginalized individuals and groups often
possess limited influence in shaping local-level, decision-making processes
that affect their well-being. Yet, relatively little reliable empirical work
exists to show whether and how development-related, decisionmaking processes
orchestrated by participatory development projects[1]
ultimately build this influence and, in so doing, improve development processes
and outcomes (Mansuri and Rao 2004). Based on
empirical evidence from a mixed methods analysis of the Kecamatan Development
Project (KDP) in Indonesia, this article represents one attempt to make headway
on these fronts. We aim to carefully conceptualize "empowerment,"
using two hitherto unconnected strands of theory and by comparing cases of local
conflicts sparked by KDP and comparison cases of development conflicts from
otherwise similar contexts, which were not sparked by KDP. From this approach,
we conceptualize empowerment as development interventions that build
marginalized groups' "capacity to engage"[2]
local-level governing elites—and, more generally, to shift power relations—using
routines of (drawing on Jiirgen Habermas) "deliberative
contestation."
Our cases of
marginalized groups influencing development conflicts, sparked by KDP, mirror
what Peter Evans terms "deliberative development" (Evans 2004:
36-37), a concept that highlights joint planning processes in
which ordinary citizens articulate and solve development problems through
heated argumentation and debate. We argue that marginalized identity groups use
KDP's deliberative spaces, incentives, and resources to incrementally shift
intergroup power relations, shifts that both depend upon and generate the
capacity to engage governing elites. A hallmark of this capacity is heightened
associational contact between groups in formalized settings, as well as a brand
of highly discretionary and transaction intensive decisionmaking (Pritchett and
Woolcock 2004) that requires new forms of
cooperation. In this sense, the capacity to engage using deliberative
contestation is both a quintessential "collective capacity" (Evans 2002)
and a deliberative capacity, dependent upon a form of
contestation in which argumentation and rhetorical challenge feature more
prominently than adversarial tactics associated with mobilizational
contestation. Yet this conceptualization also underscores that empowerment is a
fundamentally conflictual process in which marginalized groups use such
rhetorical challenges to contest long-standing, inequitable power relations.
The article proceeds in five sections. The
first section, "Conceptualizing Empowerment," briefly reviews
theories and evidence on the conceptualization of empowerment in the context of
local-level development and conflict. The second section, "Measuring
Empowerment," describes the methodology we used for assessing empowerment
in this study. The third section, "Data," summarizes four conflict
pathways cases in which we observed different processes by which local- level
power relations changed over time. The fourth section, "Comparative
Analysis," comparatively analyzes the cases. The final section concludes
and discusses implications.
Since the publication of Amartya
Sen's Development as
Freedom, a growing intellectual tradition within the social sciences has
come to recognize the importance of capability-enhancing institutions for
development (1999). Sen popularized the notion that intrinsic and
instrumental justifications for development are deeply intertwined: the work of
advancing people's basic freedom of capability is simultaneously a means and
end of development. Because poverty is a form of "unfreedom"
characterized by the absence of choice, it is both ethically disconcerting as
well as functionally problematic for societies, governments, and development
institutions. The poor in some very practical sense lack the capabilities
required to first develop their interests fully and then devise and choose
between options for pursuing them. Martha Nussbaum further describes the
resulting tendency to form "adaptive preferences," or narrow
practical aspirations regarding life possibilities (2000). Deliberative
institutions possess great potential to confront this pattern since they
actively promote public discussion and exchange of ideas, information, and
opinions about the desired ends of development. In addition to providing a more
legitimate basis for development, they "offer an opportunity to exercise
one of the most important human capabilities of all—the ability to
choose" (Evans 2004: 36). Furthermore, this process of
acquiring the ability to choose is far from an individual process.
"Organized collectives—unions, political parties, village councils,
women's groups, etc.—are fundamental to people's capability to choose the lives they
have reason to value. They provide an arena for formulating shared values and
preferences and instruments for pursuing them, even in the face of powerful
opposition" (Evans 2002: 3).
A promising
line of analysis concerns not so much whether, but how and how much
institutions of "deliberative development" encourage marginalized
groups to collectively acquire and exert the power to make effective choices.
Recent research indicates that two causal frameworks are required: the first
must explain the causes
Springer
of a form of empowerment, while
the second should model the effect of that form of empowerment on certain
development outcomes.[3]
This article addresses the former. We first argue that empowerment is a
fundamentally conflictual process of revising the routines by which more and
less powerful groups interact, a process that promotes more equitable
allocations of material and symbolic resources[4]
over time. Everyday conflicts exhibit what relational sociology and theorists
of democracy from Charles Tilly to Roberto บทger have suggested are the
face-to-face, dynamic relations by which groups define and defend their
interests.[5]
As our cases demonstrate, the creation and re-creation of bounded social
categories play a decisive role in reproducing and activating group interests
in the course of development conflicts. But by proposing that groups manage
conflict using routines, we also invoke the relational sociological tenet that
bounded categories such as gender, ethnicity, and class begin as
problem-solving inventions or byproducts of social interaction and practices.
As Mustafa Emirbayer (1997) describes it, a typical scenario
is that in which members of a categorically bounded network acquire control
over a valuable resource, hoard their access to it, and develop practices that
perpetuate this restricted access.
Empowerment
also involves marginalized groups developing routines of contestation that
expose and weaken the practices that crystallize such improvised solutions into
bounded categories. More specifically, borrowing from Tilly, we argue that
empowerment involves undermining at least one of four causal mechanisms that
drive durable inequality: exploitation, opportunity hoarding, borrowing (a
subtype of emulation), and adaptation. For Tilly, exploitation "occurs wherever
well-connected people control valuable resources from which they extract
returns by deploying the efforts of others, whom they exclude from the full
value added by that effort" (1998: 91). Undermining exploitation involves
revising the routinized, face-to-face interactions by which more powerfully
connected groups deploy the efforts of less powerfully connected groups to
extract returns from them. Yet doing so may involve challenging such
fundamental institutions as land tenure regimes and basic definitions of
property and ownership—tall tasks that represent perhaps the most far-reaching
transformations in an underlying political economy.
Second, and
perhaps less sweeping in its scope than outright exploitation, opportunity
hoarding "operates when members of a categorically bounded network acquire
access to a resource that is valuable, renewable, subject to monopoly,
supportive of network activities, and enhanced by the network's modus
operandi" (Tilly 1998: 11). Exploitation
denotes insiders enlisting the efforts of outsiders, whereas opportunity
hoarding denotes insiders excluding outsiders. Applied to our cases,
contestation of opportunity hoarding involves disrupting monopolies over the
opportunity to control public resources by engaging the governing elites who
typically hold such monopolies. One time-tested method of weakening these
decision-making monopolies is collective mobilization that induces bargaining
with elites, typically by credibly threatening them with the specter of costly
protest actions or the withdrawal of labor from productive processes. Yet
relatively little has been written regarding whether and how less adversarial
processes of deliberation might also break up opportunity hoarding by political
elites.
A third
mechanism of durable inequality-borrowing-involves importing chunks of social
structure and group categories into localized situations, where they help
elites reduce the organizational costs of exploitation and opportunity hoarding
(Tilly 1998: 61, 95). Across much of Indonesia, the
erstwhile appointees of Suharto's centrally administered state have often
persisted as local-level governing elites and benefit greatly from importing
the rigidly hierarchical and exclusive organizational model of public
decisionmaking that was so ubiquitous during the authoritarian era. Disrupting
this form of borrowing may involve the improvisation and invention of new, less
exclusive categories (Tilly 1998 : 67 ) of
public decisionmakers, potentially through incremental but sustained
associational interactions. If borrowing reproduces familiar clumps of social
ties, a fourth mechanism—adaptation—knits those ties into larger,
surrounding webs of connection. In short, adaptation keeps systems of
categorical inequality in place by inventing procedures of day-to-day
interaction and elaborating valued social relations around existing,
potentially "borrowed," social divisions (Tilly 1998:
81, 97). In local, public decision-making arenas, mechanisms of
adaptation may include norms that exclude some groups from speaking, norms that
demand a nonconfrontational tone from such groups, and collusive agreements by
elites to dismiss such groups' voices when decisions are made. Undermining
adaptation requires disruptions of such procedures—at first
fleeting disruptions—whose later repetition may denaturalize the social divisions
that these practices deepen.
We argue that
routines of contestation used to undermine these mechanisms of durable
inequality comprise at least two distinct types: deliberative and mobiliza-
tional. Both types can in theory undermine exploitation, opportunity hoarding,
borrowing, and adaptation, but each does so differently. By
"mobilizational contestation," we mean patterns of group formation
and defense that are best known within the protest and conventional interest
group politics of hierarchically organized, adversarially oriented institutions
such as political parties, labor unions, and so-called "old" social
movements.[6]
Common features of mobilizational routines are the use of protest tactics,
withdrawal of labor, and obstruction of public services to demand
redistribution from the state. Ultimately, mobilization involves marginalized
groups that acquire and exercise countervailing power through adversarial
means. As first popularized by John Kenneth Galbraith, the notion of
countervailing power grew largely out of the analysis of interest group
politics in adversarial arenas. It referred to the ability of trade unions,
consumer organizations, and other organized interest groups to use the threat
of obstructive protest to influence government rales and regulations that kept
highly concentrated American industries in check following World War II
(Galbraith 1956). A chief concern was the goal of
redistribution; the primary tactics employed to achieve the goal were
adversarial.
By contrast to
mobilizational contestation, "deliberative contestation" refers to
marginalized groups' practice of exercising associational autonomy in public
forums using fairness-based arguments that challenge governing elites' monopoly
over public resource allocation decisions. We argue that KDP promotes
deliberative contestation by actively providing open decision-making spaces,
resources for argumentation (such as facilitators), and incentives to
participate. In formulating this complementary concept, we draw on two
literatures, beginning with recent theory and research on processes of
recognition in politics. Accentuating what was perhaps always present below the
surface of "old" social movements, but had been more prominently
associated with "new" social movements, this research describes a
mode of contestation oriented as much toward recognition as redistribution, and
propelled more by reason-giving and a search for intersubjectively generated
understanding than by adversarialism alone.[7]
Arjun
Appadurai's (2004) study of the Mumbai Slum and
Shack-dwellers Movement provides one particularly salient empirical example of
contestatory practices that culminate in redistribution, but draw their
strength from first achieving greater recognition from more powerful groups in
society and from the state. Toilet festivals, which expose the squalor and
inhuman living conditions of Mumbai's slums, address a key form of
powerlessness for the poor: living with "negative terms of recognition,"
or the subordinate position from which the poor negotiate the very norms that
shape their lives and are often opposed to accessing services and resources, as
well as achieving some dignity. Improving terms of recognition starts with the development
of more broadly accessible currencies of associational interaction that
eventually build the "capacity to aspire." Contextually relevant
public actions and performances such as toilet festivals often serve as a
starting point for powerless groups to express voice, contest dominant norms,
and "get recognized" by different and more powerful groups, which
might otherwise lack a motivation to acknowledge them at all. These practices
better fit the rubric of mobilizational contestation and for many in external
agencies, who take these findings seriously and set out to design interventions
accordingly, the implications are not altogether clear. We aim to not only
distinguish deliberative contestation from mobilizational contestation, but
also show that it is complementary to—and not prohibitive of—mobilizational
contestation.
Drawing on
Habermasian theory of communicative action and deliberative democracy (as well
as its later adaptations and many criticisms),[8]
Archon Fung and Erik Wright (2003) make an
important but incomplete contribution to specifying and integrating what we aim
to capture with the concepts of mobilizational and deliberative contestation.
In particular, they develop the concept of "collaborative countervailing
power," which at the local-level supports less organized, more diffuse,
nonexperts in acquiring rhetorical and other capacities to engage in
deliberation, thereby inducing collaboration by lowering its cost for lay
participants. Institutionally, it promotes reason-based fairness as a procedural
norm for group decisionmaking by "enlarging access for countervailing
interests at the local level, establishing means of support and capacity
development for them, establishing incentives for local collaboration, and
adjusting non-collaborative default outcomes" (Fung 2002: 57-58). In
this view, the convergence of local and institutional collaborative
countervailing power with participatory collaboration may weaken the ability of
preformed elite groups to pursue their prefabricated interests. While this
framework suggests that durable forms of empowerment require both collaborative
countervailing power and participatory forums, it generally undertheorizes the
sources of collaborative countervailing power.
More
specifically, Shubham Chaudhuri and Patrick Heller (2005) note
that this dominant understanding of deliberative democratic institutions takes
for granted the basic associational autonomy of individuals and members of
groups. It is hazardous to assume that marginalized groups influence decisions
simply because such forums or deliberative norms exist—and it remains
unclear just how marginalized groups gain such influence in deliberative
settings over time. The assumption of preexisting associational autonomy proves
especially problematic in many developing world settings. In Indonesia's new
democracy, it falls apart under empirical scrutiny, as our data repeatedly
demonstrate. The Indonesian case of democratization is one of a rapid
transition from authoritarianism, in which institutional vestiges of the
rigidly hierarchical and clientelist authoritarian state endure among villages,
where they often undermine the actual practice of rights to democratic
participation in decisionmaking. Marginalized groups wield little clout and
possess little rhetorical power to influence public decisionmaking, in part
because they have had few past collective experiences of forging and
confidently representing their preferences in such associational settings. In
this political and social context, exercising basic rights of argumentation in
associational forums and especially in local governance involves struggle,
contestation, and conflict, the modalities of which are discounted in the much
of the literature on deliberative democracy.
In short, although several theoretical
frameworks describe how marginalized groups have used mobilizational
contestation to acquire associational autonomy in the context of representative
democratic institutions, no such framework exists to explain whether and how
deliberative contestation generates similar outcomes in the context of local
participatory democracy. Yet, especially in large developing world democracies
such as India, Indonesia, and Brazil, marginalized groups may rely heavily on
deliberative contestation to navigate within the rapidly proliferating, local
institutions that accompany decentralization. Much research remains to be done
to create an integrated theoretical framework of mobilizational and
deliberative contestation that can account for how these different tactics affect
changes in power relations over time. This project takes on a special
significance in "an age of decentralization" (Snyder 2001:
93), which questions whether the logic of mobilization (given a
large, centralized state) remains the only or the most effective mode of
contestation for marginalized groups where they encounter the state most
intensely: in the struggles of local politics. The evidence we present on KDP
suggests that deliberative spaces, human resources (especially facilitators),
and a set of programmatic incentives for participation together encourage
deliberative contestation by women, the poor, and marginalized groups.
The larger study for which this data was collected—the
Kecamatan Development Program and Community Conflict Negotiation Study—is
partly an assessment of the impact of the KDP on communities' ability to manage
local conflict. While KDP was not designed as a conflict resolution program,
the core question of the study is whether KDP builds the conflict management
capacity of villagers through unexpected spillovers from the deliberative
processes it initiates. The purpose of this article is to reconsider and expand
understandings of empowerment based on a dialogue between social theory and the
rich data generated by the overarching study.
Background on the Kecamatan Development Project
Begun in 1998, KDP is a
massive community development project, the largest in Southeast Asia, operating
in more than 28,000 villages (40% of the total) across Indonesia. It
represents a conscious movement away from the notion of projects as the
deliverer of a particular product and toward a model of projects as a way to
trigger and support social processes in which villagers exercise discretion in
solving self-identified development problems (Guggenheim 2006). As
a major nation-wide participatory development project, the project has
systematically opened the exercise of state power[9]
to collective decisionmaking and influence by groups on the local level. KDP
distributes US$60,000-$110,000 block grants directly to kecamatan (subdistricts) and then to
villages for almost anything villagers themselves feel is a development
priority, typically small-scale infrastructure, social, and economic
activities. Unlike most decentralization projects, KDP requires and provides
spaces, incentives, and resources with which villagers convene a series of
facilitated forums and meetings in hamlets, villages, and subdistricts to
encourage and institutionalize broader community participation in
decisionmaking and setting priorities.[10]
In this article, we propose that these spaces, incentives, and resources, in
addition to KDP's complaints mechanisms, can help incrementally shift power
relations in favor of local marginalized groups.
KDP works as follows. First, villagers
develop proposal suggestions at a series of facilitated meetings at the hamlet
level (MUSBANGDUS) and then take them to a series of village meetings
(MUSBANGDES), where participants democratically decide (through deliberation
ending in voting or consensus) which two proposals are most worthy to be
discussed at the subdistrict meeting (MAD—Musyawarah Antar Desa). At the
subdistrict meeting, delegations (which must consist of at least two women and
one man) present their proposals and together decide on which proposals will be
funded. Since KDP purposefully does not fund all proposals, this forum produces
vigorous negotiations among different groups of villagers. A large network of
facilitators help to socialize the program, organize the meetings, link the
community with outside assistance if necessary, and ensure project
implementation runs smoothly. In each KDP village, two elected village
facilitators (FDs) introduce the project to village institutions. Among
subdistricts, one appointed facilitator (FK) focuses on social issues, while
the other FK attends to technical matters. Because FKs have institutional
backing but are relatively independent of local power structures, they are
typically well placed to troubleshoot and facilitate problems that may arise.
Once the proposals are selected after 6-8 months, each successful village
elects an activities implementation team (TPK), which writes a draft project
budget (RAB) that is posted in an easily visible public place. Village
representatives together form a financial management team (บPK) for the
entire kecamatan. Village technical staff (TTD ) provide engineering and other
forms of technical expertise and oversight during project implementation.
Villagers often provide wage or in-kind labor.
Research
Design
To study the processes by which KDP
influences local conflict, trained local researchers generated 68 "conflict
pathways case studies"—that is, case studies of how particular social
tensions and incidents of conflict played out in their local context.
Researchers wrote these case studies based on more than 800 focus group
discussions, in-depth interviews, and participant observations. This approach
permitted researchers to establish ongoing conflicts as the primary unit of
analysis to be studied. Each case examines how different actors—villagers,
facilitators, local leaders, etc.—together manage (or fail to manage) different
types of conflict in different settings. Using a version of case-based process
tracing (George and Bennett 2005; Varshney 2002
), conflict pathways describe discrete stages in the evolution of
conflict, including conflict triggers and factors or mechanisms that sustain
conflict, allowing it either to escalate, stagnate, or move toward resolution.
By following cases of everyday conflict, the factors that transform underlying
tensions into different outcomes—violence, stagnation, or peace—become evident.
In essence, the cases work backward from an outcome by asking what led to what.
They were selected especially so that they control for some of the traditional
weaknesses of qualitative approaches[11]while
capturing each stage of a conflict, attempts at its resolution, and events that
linked different stages. Each case study includes a summary of the case, its
"prehistory," evolution, attempts at resolution, impacts, and aftermath.
Selection of
the sites in which this research was conducted observed a quantitatively
oriented sampling strategy for constructing a plausible counterfactual. This
strategy builds in three levels of variation to the cases we observed. First,
selection of the provinces of East Java and Nusa Tengarra Timor maximized
differences in geographical centrality and overall population density, yet
space constraints require that we only present cases from East Java here.
Second, to control for endogenous factors contributing to conflict management,
matching of villages was conducted within districts with high and low
capacities for conflict management (see Fig. I).[12] Conflict
management capacity roughly refers to the presence or absence of various formal
Weberian institutions for conflict resolution such as functioning, impartial
courts and police, as well as informal institutions such as adat (traditional
law) and religious institutions that arbitrate disputes. Conflict management
capacity is a theoretically interesting stratum of variation because it allows
us to more systematically examine anecdotal evidence suggesting that KDP
provides deliberative spaces and argumentative resources (facilitators) to
marginalized groups, as well as incentives to participate in project
decisionmaking—even in local contexts with histories and norms of widespread,
non state violence. This stratification permits a comparison of KDP and non-KDP
conflicts, not just within high-capacity districts, where existing theory and
evidence on participatory development leads one to expect that KDP works
effectively, but also within low capacity districts where existing theory leads
one to expect KDP's failure in involving marginalized groups.
Third,
propensity score matching[13]
was used to "match" subdistricts and ultimately villages that
received KDP with those that would have been likely to
Fig. 1 District and subdistrict qualitative
sampling frame with cases selected
|
receive it but did not. Researchers
verified the accuracy of those statistical matches using qualitative
interviews.[14] Thus, within
both "high-" and "low-capacity" districts, we constructed a
counterfactual that permits meaningful comparisons between: (a) cases of
conflict from "program" villages in which KDP operated for at least
three years and (we hypothesize) influenced conflict processes and outcomes;
and (b ) conceptually similar cases of conflict from "comparison"
villages that would have been statistically likely to receive KDP, but did not.
This provides a rigorous logic of comparison from which we can draw inferences
about KDP and its influence on the unfolding of power relations in development
conflicts.[15]
After conducting preliminary investigations and devising this sampling strategy
in a first stage of research, we then applied it in two stages of fieldwork.
To conceptualize empowerment, we select two
matched pairs of cases for discussion from the overall frame of 68. These
selections represent the full range of observed variation in the explanatory
variable—"routines
of contestation" (deliberative versus mobilizational), three intervening
variables—"spaces,"
"incentives," and "resources", and the trichotomous
dependent variable of non-, fully, and partially transformative power
relations. Therefore, our case selections avoid selecting on one value of the
dependent variable. The first pair includes a non- KDP related development
conflict (see "Case 1" below) and a KDP-induced
development conflict (see "Case 2") from
the same village (Biting) in the high- capacity East Java district of Ponorogo.
The comparison between these first two cases is a theoretically interesting
one, given recent debates about whether participatory development projects
depoliticize development processes beyond the realm of the project. The second
matched pair includes a non-KDP related development conflict (see "Case 3")
and a KDP-induced development conflict (see "Case 4")
from different villages in different subdistricts, but from the
same low- capacity East Java district of Pamekasan (see below for
descriptions). Next, we present concise summaries of these four conflict
pathways case studies.
Although space constraints preclude full descriptions of the
four cases considered here, following is a brief synopsis of the central
sequence of events in each. We outline the key events and actors within each
conflict pathway case study, which provides the basis for the comparative
analysis of cases provided in the next section.
Case 1: Conflict Surrounding the Sumorobangum Dam
In one case unrelated to KDP, but
from the KDP-receiving village of Biting (mentioned above), an extended
conflict over the repair of a leaky dam served as a flashpoint for the
mobilization of farmers and other villagers dependent on its empty reservoir
for crop irrigation.[16]
Toward the beginning of the conflict in 1998, elements of the group mostly used
bureaucratic channels to request repairs of the Sumorobangun Dam. After writing
a series of letters to the District Legislative Assembly (DPRD) head and the
district head, starting in 1996, the farmers' group felt their demands for
action were being ignored and began expressing their sense of rejection and anger
destructively. As farmers suffered increasingly from the water scarcity,
frequent arguments and limited small-scale violence broke out, including a hoe
fight between two family members that resulted in head injuries but no deaths.
As unrest peaked in 2001, the
farmers' group changed its tactics. In organizing a public demonstration, the
group mobilized a broad web of actors that included teachers, police, civil
servants, rice paddy owners and farmers, and paddy workers from four
subdistricts. This protest mobilization was noticed by a candidate from a
locally weak political party who was running for a DPRD seat and who took the
opportunity to pressure the incumbent. Together, hundreds of villagers
blockaded a key road connecting two districts and, in the middle of the road,
set up two chairs facing the dilapidated dam. By insisting that the two
officials occupy the chairs, view the condition of the dam, and witness the
hundreds of villagers demanding its repair, the farmers' group finally
solicited a response. The DPRD deputy head arrived on the scene and committed
to fixing the dam, a promise the district government finally fulfilled one year
later. Additionally, a continued pattern of peaceful and fruitful activism—and the
implicit, credible threat of protest—won governing elites' support for
compensation to villagers living in lands to be inundated by the repair of the
dam. In the process of this mobilizational contestation, the farmers' group
redefined and expanded its boundaries so that it exposed shared interests
between natural allies. By circumventing dead-end bureaucratic channels using
the highly symbolic, extra-verbal symbol of vacant chairs overlooking a
neglected public resource, the coalition garnered both recognition and
concessions from governing elites.
Case 2 : KDP Conflict in Biting Village
This case describes conflict
sparked by KDP in Biting Village, the same village discussed in the previous
case.[17]
Although Biting received KDP funding in 2000 for a road and retaining wall, and
in 2001 for
a market kiosk construction project, both the decision-making process leading
up to Biting's success in receiving funding and the project implementation
phase deviated from KDP procedures. In 2000, nearly all of the incentives for
transparency and openness in decisionmaking failed to operate, largely due to
inadequate socialization by the village facilitator. All FD candidates were
family members or close friends of the village head since nonelites had no
opportunity to nominate candidates. The FD described it this way: "Back
then at the selection I didn't actually know anything. I was just approached by
the pak lurah [village
head].. .It
wouldn't have been good to refuse" (Anggraini 2003: 60). The
FD underwent no facilitator training and undertook an incomplete socialization
of KDP in only two of three hamlets (Temon and Brangkal), which ultimately
discouraged their residents from submitting a proposal by misinforming them of
the proper procedures for doing so. This led to the other hamlet's (Kresek) suspicion
of corruption by the project implementation team as it worked on a road and
retaining wall construction project in 2000. In 2001, tensions grew as the FD only
socialized KDP in Kresek and accusations of corruption by the technical advisor
(TTD) abounded.
Nevertheless,
groups of nonelite villagers, particularly women, began to contest proposals
put forward by the village head and other governing elites in the second
MUSBANGDES, instead proposing their own projects. For example, the camat (subdistrict
head) and the FD attempted to persuade a group of Temon and Brangkal housewives
to submit under their name a proposal he had written. The housewives group
initially refused to cave in, proposing instead to repair a broken bore that
would restore running water to Temon and Brangkal. In MUSBANGDES II, the
housewives group vociferously refused to accept as their own the subdistrict
head's proposal to build tourist kiosks. Eventually the meeting ended in
deadlock and had to be repeated. The FD (herself a resident of Kresek) then
persuaded a group of Kresek housewives to attend the repeated forum, where they
lobbied and subtly threatened the Temon and Brangkal housewives to drop their
bore repair proposal. In part, because the Kresek housewives had access to a different
bore as a water source, they had no interest in the proposed bore project. But
more important, they considered themselves part of "the lor kali
[north of the river] community" and the Temon and Brangkal housewives part
of "the kidul
kali [south of the river] community."
Instead of facilitating deliberation across
an identity group cleavage with an acrimonious history, the FD promoted her own
and governing elites' interests by exacerbating that boundary and mobilizing
the Kresek housewives around their own ascriptive geographic identity. The
Temon and Brangkol housewives eventually backed down and supported the kiosk
proposal as their own. That proposal went forward and received funding with
little resistance, and almost no competition from other villages, thanks to a
series of additional maneuverings by the FD and subdistrict head to preempt
competition and quash opposing proposals. In the end, the Temon and Brangkol
housewives group discovered that the FD had been rewarded for her loyalty to
governing elites with control over one of the newly built kiosks, even though
none were publicly available or occupied by 2003 . Meanwhile, running water remained
scarce for the Temon and Brangkol housewives.
Case 3: Slaughterhouse Conflict in Banyupelle
This case follows two stages of
non-KDP development conflict in Banyupelle[18]village
in the low-capacity East Java district of Pamekasan. Unilateral attempts by the
village head to construct a slaughterhouse in Banyupelle Village sparked
preexisting, underlying tensions between two preexisting identity groups. One
group was composed of
panjagal (butchers, who work in a slaughterhouse) that directly
adjoins the Aengnyonok market and a musholla (Islamic prayer house). The
second group was a coalition of santri}9 vendors, and
customers in that market, all of whom were adversely affected by cattle remains
from the slaughterhouse that polluted the immediate vicinity and ran off into a
stream used by santri for air ■พนdhน (ritual ablutions) and sholat
(ritual prayers). In the first stage, the conflict became mildly violent when a
500-person mob demolished the slaughterhouse on December 31, 1998 and
threatened the lives of the butchers. In the second stage, the village head
autonomously decided to build a new slaughterhouse, which was never used
because of the highly inconvenient location he chose for it, a location that
maximized the rents he could collect from it. This act only deepened the
butchers' fear of attack and suspicions of vigilante threat by the santri
group.
Understanding
how marginalized groups contest power relations in this conflict first requires
an understanding of the social and political context of Pamekasan District.
Initial fieldwork identified Pamekasan, on the island of Madura, as a
"low- capacity" conflict management capacity district. Researchers
based this estimate on higher (relative to comparable, high-capacity districts)
rates of vigilante and other violence, as well as more detailed evidence on the
prominence of violent Madurese norms, especially carok (pronounced cha-rock). Carok is a
Madurese tradition of dueling in which male combatants use sickles and often
fight to the death, typically following otherwise nonviolent verbal
altercations in which at least one combatant perceives a blemish on his social
reputation. Researchers identified several recent occasions in which carok
expanded beyond two combatants to include family members and culminated in as
many as 10
deaths. Carok often arises following paternalistic verbal disputes
between men concerning the behavior and control of women, although in our data
it also broke out following other disputes. Although kyai (Islamic
religious authorities) sometimes attempt to mediate such disputes to prevent
it, respondents complained that neither kyai nor the village head routinely
prevent or resolve such disputes. Furthermore, a key feature of local contexts
in Pamekasan district is the general inability of governing elites and
prevailing institutions to ensure order. One male villager reported that
"the Kleybun [village head] used to be a bajingan, and was a senior person in
the village administration [during the authoritarian era] and he's very strong
so the village became safe... [P]eople say it doesn't matter if there's no aid,
provided the village is safe" (Ashari 2003: 81). Though
used differently by different groups, bajingaan in Pamekasan generally refers
to villagers who routinely break religious, legal, and social norms, and laws.
Respondents understood "bajingaan" to include gamblers,
cock-fighters, thieves, robbers, and hired killers.
In late 1998, tensions peaked over the pollution
of the village market and nearby river. One villager reported that "the
problem of the abattoir [slaughterhouse] waste had been reported countless
times by the community to the village and the Village Head didn't pass it on to
the camat
or dinas.
Because there was no follow-up and because reformasi was in full swing at that
time, the people were brave enough to destroy the abattoir" (Ashari 2003
: 83). The demolition on December 31 and another attempt several weeks
later failed to completely raze it, and the butchers continued their work for
at least six months more before an armed group threatened them into halting
their operations temporarily. During 2001, a new slaughterhouse was
constructed on the site, but it was not used because butchers felt its distance
from the village center would subject them to future attacks. While some of the
butchers built new slaughterhouses in more contained places and pollution
run-off lessened, tensions between butchers, santri, market vendors, and
governing elites worsened as the government-built slaughterhouse went unused.
Moreover, evidence surfaced that the village head had embezzled Rp. 3 million
from its construction.
Case 4: KDP Conflict in Sana Daya
Within the localized context of
the male-dominated conflict management norms of Pamekasan described above, the
open forums that KDP introduced in villages such as Sana Daya[19]
in Kecamatan Pasean quickly became controversial. In Sana Daya, as elsewhere,
KDP required that women devise and verbally represent at least one of the
project proposals that the village put forward in the MAD forum, where projects
are funded or rejected. This injected an all-women's yasinan (Koranic recital group) into a
conflict over the content of development projects, when they were more
accustomed to being nonparticipants in such decisions. The yasinan group gained
not just greater access to decision-making spaces in KDP forums, but also
influenced the outcomes (i.e., actual projects chosen). Members of the yasinan
who attended project brainstorming meetings reported with some pride that
although they had never been invited to attend any village meetings before and
were typically embarrassed to do so, more than 70 women attended in the case of KDP
meetings in their village. One member commented: "You could say this [70 women]
is quite a lot for a village meeting because women are not usually invited to
attend to attend village meetings... generally they're embarrassed to
attend" (Probo 2003: 9).
Furthermore,
women from the yasinan were not merely passive attendees; they spoke, made
proposals, and actively resisted the village head's efforts to unilaterally choose
projects. One yasinan member and KDP participant in Sana Daya reported that
women "usually stayed quiet at meetings, [but] now they've begun to
propose things. Perhaps this can be interpreted as indicating that after KDP
women have become bolder" (Probo 2003: 8). Even
though KDP did not run perfectly, the yasinan group at one point rejected a
development proposal put forward by the village head, remarking that
"...since the KDP came to this village the community has begun to accept
differences of opinion, for example the road development proposal from the Laok Gummg
hamlet, where the
kleybun [Madurese term for village head] lives, lost in the MD
forum to proposals from other hamlets. When the proposals were voted on, the kleybun did
not have the right to vote in that process" (Probo 2003: ท ).
This all suggests that the deliberative
contestation by yasinan members was both a cause and effect of the greater
recognition from governing elites that can occur within well-functioning KDP
forums. The Sana Daya FD reflected upon the requirements of his role as
following: "Actually the key to success of the program for the
facilitators, both the FD and the FK, was their education and awareness-
raising program to the community. When the FD or the FK are able to involve all
layers of society in everything at implementation time I'm convinced there'll
be no problems in the community" (Probo 2003 : 13 ). On
the one hand, this may overstate how much KDP facilitators influenced power
relations between yasinan members and governing elites. On the other hand,
members of the yasinan group spoke in and influenced KDP decisions, all the
while using argumentative challenges to contest and later undermine the power
of the village head to direct development processes and decisions. Though far
from systematically transcending durable power inequalities, their winning
fight for a say in KDP processes achieved what they lacked in almost all other
spheres of village life, namely, an extended moment of heightened associational
autonomy.
In this section, we describe our
analytical findings about the previous cases (summarized below in Table 1)
to develop three arguments. First, we argue that KDP-induced
deliberative routines consistently generated partially transformative power
relations across cases, regardless of whether the preexisting institutional
capacity for conflict management was high or low. Second, in comparison to
deliberative routines, mobilizational routines generated either high or low
degrees of transformation in power relations across cases, outcomes that
covaried with the preexisting conflict management capacity of a village. In the
Sumorobangum Dam case, mobilizational routines generated fully transformative
power relations in a district with a high preexisting capacity for conflict management.
In the slaughterhouse case, mobilizational routines generated nontransformative
outcomes
Springer
|
Table 1 Case scoring on context, explanatory,
and outcome variables
Case Type of Conflict
Explanatory variable: Dependent
variable: transformation in
conflict
mgmt. routine of contestation power
relations
|
in a
district with a low preexisting capacity for conflict management. In both KDP
cases, routines of deliberative contestation generated more moderate effects on
the equity of power relations. Third, we argue that the equalizing effects of
mobilizational routines on power relations seem more dependent on a preexisting
high- capacity context than those of deliberative routines. Next, we discuss
the analytical strategy we use to support these arguments.
Operationalizing
Variables in the Analysis of Empowerment
The review of theory and evidence in the second section
suggested that empowerment is an ongoing process of transforming power
relations by engaging and uprooting causal mechanisms of durable inequality.
Yet the cases described in the section above exhibit widely ranging variation
in how extensively such transformative processes actually unfolded. Put simply,
at the conclusion of some cases, power relations had shifted substantially,
while in others, they had not shifted at all, and in others still, moderate
shifts had occurred. We capture this variation by first defining an ordinal
dependent variable, "transformation in power relations," with three
values: "transformative," "partially transformative," or
"nontransforma- tive." These are values that permit scoring our four
cases, relative to each other, but in a way that captures theoretically
relevant threshold conditions for each value. Table 2 summarizes
how we construct these three values.
|
Table 2 Construction of dependent variable:
"Transformation in power relations"
|
The building
block of this variable is our qualitative assessment of whether, by the end of
the conflict, marginalized groups had effectively contested each of three
mechanisms of durable inequality: adaptation, borrowing, and opportunity
hoarding.[20]"Nontransformative
conflict" describes conflict case outcomes in which marginalized groups
effectively contested none of these four mechanisms of durable inequality.
While conflicts occurred in such cases, power relations had not changed by the
end of the case, as evidenced by the persistence of adaptation, borrowing,
opportunity hoarding, and exploitation. "Partially transformative
conflict" describes outcomes in which marginalized groups effectively
contested adaptation and borrowing, the mechanisms that generalize the
influence of exploitation and opportunity hoarding. In this outcome, opportunity
hoarding and exploitation persisted. "Transformative conflict"
describes outcomes in which such groups contested opportunity hoarding (in
addition to adaptation and borrowing).[21]
To formalize our explanations of how and
why these different outcomes occurred in different cases, we define a
basic-level, nominal explanatory variable, "routines of
contestation," which has two values: "deliberative" and
"mobilizational." Routines of contestation capture two different
approaches to challenging existing distributions of power. By deliberative
routines of contestation, we mean marginalized groups' use of public
argumentation—particularly the use of reason- and justice-based arguments—to gain
recognition and redistribution from more powerful groups. Mobilizational
routines, by contrast, refer to the use of strategic negotiations, protest, and
other adversarial tactics for gaining recognition and redistribution from
elites via bargaining, typically through credible threats. The narrative
appraisals provided below in our case comparisons describe the secondary-level
variables[22]
that constitute these routines. We place special emphasis on how spaces,
incentives, and resources affect unequal power relations indirectly by
constituting the routines of deliberative contestation that marginalized groups
create in the course of development conflicts.
Explaining
Partially vs. Fully Transformative Power Relations in a High-Capacity Ponorogo
Village
In its partially transformative
outcome and process of deliberative contestation, the conflict involving KDP in
Biting village contrasts sharply with the fully transformative outcome and
process of mobilizational contestation that drove the conflict surrounding
redevelopment of the Sumorobangun Dam in the same village. In the dam case, the
farmers' group substantively contested the configuration of opportunity
hoarding, emulation, and adaptation that reproduced group boundaries between
governing elites and a coalition of marginalized groups (although exploitation
persisted unabetted). In the KDP case, by contrast, a marginalized group of
housewives managed only to disrupt governing elites' borrowing of an exclusive
institutional model and to raise the costs of adapting it to local conditions.
Ultimately, they were unable to contest mechanisms of exploitation and
opportunity hoarding. We explain these different outcomes by arguing that
Biting prepossessed a necessary precondition for the effectiveness of
mobilizational contestation in our cases: a high-capacity, formal institutional
context. Conversely, deliberative contestation proved less effective than
mobilizational contestation (but still moderately effective overall) because of
internal constraints, the effects of which were not dependent on context.
First, why and
how, in the KDP case, were the Temon and Brangkal housewives able to disrupt
borrowing and adaptation but unable to uproot exclusion and opportunity
hoarding by governing elites? We preface our explanation by noting an initial
skepticism regarding just how extensive the disruption of emulation and
adaptation was in this case. After all, governing elites partially co-opted
KDP's open spaces, dulled incentives for participation by marginalized groups
by suppressing information about KDP's proper procedures, and eventually
captured the most important resource for argumentation that KDP provides (i.e.,
village and subdistrict facilitators). Local governing elites used a familiar
routine of borrowing and then adapting the exclusive social organizational
model of central administration held over from the authoritarian era. They did
so by subverting the election of the FD and appointing her instead, thereby
ensuring her accountability to them rather than the KDP participants meant to
elect the FD. While this limited the extent to which deliberative contestation
by the housewives could revise power relations, it did not nullify their
efforts entirely. The housewives' both hotly contested this form of borrowing
within KDP spaces, and used those spaces to successfully demand more public
accountability meetings in which to advocate for their proposal.
The effective
modality of contestation in this case was direct argumentation— with the FD
herself, the subdistrict head, and other (more powerful) governing elites—using
reason- and justice-based arguments about the housewives' right to an election,
a fair and accessible decision-making process, and a say in the choice of a
project.[23]
Deliberative contestation succeeded in large part because the housewives used
this tactic in a KDP space that operated relatively independently of the formal
institutions in which these elites exercised great authority (we later show
that deliberative contestation succeeds in low-capacity institutional contexts,
too, for similar reasons). This weakened the preexisting advantages that
governing elites could use to limit argumentation and dominate decisionmaking
by exerting their formal authority. In this way, the housewives countered the
village head's inclusion of the subdistrict head in KDP decisionmaking and
exposed his co-optation of the FD as a violation of KDP rules, all of which
exacted nontrivial costs on the village head's silencing of weaker voices.
This not only
indicates that the housewives used deliberative routines to contest borrowing
by rejecting "familiar clumps of social ties" (Tilly 1998:
81) as illegitimate decisionmakers, it also suggests that the
housewives effectively resisted adaptation. In short, they undermined the
village head's knitting of these webs of connection into a cost-saving network.
They achieved this first by disrupting the old, exclusive procedures that eased
day-to-day interaction (Tilly 1998: 97) between
governing elites in villages, subdistricts, and districts. They could then
establish their own voices as legitimate ones whose reception KDP's procedures
demanded. Before this, adaptation had partially relied upon the housewives'
silent and resigned acceptance of the exclusive social relations that governing
elites had built around their hoarding of public power. Yet the housewives disrupted
this procedure by broadening the consideration of project proposals beyond
governing elites to include their own. This visibly contradicted the publicly
perceived inability of women to speak at—much less attend—public
meetings. In what appears to be a reflection of the observation that democracy
begets more democracy, KDP created initial deliberative spaces that produced
more improvised deliberative spaces, spaces in which such conflicts could
peacefully play out rather than be swept under the rug immediately, as was more
conventional. Even with a "captured" FD, the housewives nontrivially
raised governing elites' costs (in terms of time and energy spent on
reorganizing their group boundaries) of rejecting their proposal and ramming
through their own preformed proposal.
The
housewives' response to governing elites' attempts to generalize their bounded
category through borrowing and adaptation was one of resistance and reinvention
rather than resigned acceptance of elite circumscription of public power. The
housewives proved largely unable to disrupt exploitation or opportunity
hoarding. One might not expect routines of deliberative contestation to uproot
opportunity hoarding and adaptation in five short years of KDP. Even if the
housewives disrupted the mechanisms that generalized their exclusionary
influence, disrupting exploitation and opportunity hoarding by governing elites
itself would have required deeper and more sustained resistance of political
elites.
In the
Sumorobangum Dam case, by contrast, the farmers' routine of mobiliza- tional
contestation was highly effective in contesting borrowing, adaptation, and
opportunity hoarding although exploitation remained firmly entrenched. Before
mobilization, governing elites' reproduction of their bounded category thrived
upon adaptation. This included commonly accepted procedures such as letter
writing and formal requests for repairs of the dam, procedures that then
limited the quality and quantity of face-to-face interactions between farmers
and governing elites. Mobiliza- tional contestation exposed and undermined
those procedures as social artifacts, which governing elites had used to
sidestep their responsibility for maintaining the dam. At the same time, it
replaced the old procedures with new and different procedures of highly
symbolic, counter-hegemonic performance. These included the protest featuring
two unoccupied chairs in which governing elites were made to sit, facing the
dilapidated dam. Although it mobilized throngs of protestors who closed down the
road abutting the dam, mobilizational contestation became more than just an
effective change of tactics; it lent credibility to future threats of protest.
Furthermore, these new, performative procedures effectively demanded
recognition from governing elites by uprooting a formerly accepted routine that
had minimized meaningful day-to-day interactions between the groups. Elites had
lost an important tool for articulating and hardening the relational divisions
that defined their group, a loss that raised their longer term costs (in terms
of time and energy required to quell discontent) of maintaining a stranglehold
on public development decisions.
In addition to
weakening ties among governing elites, the farmers' coalition disrupted the
borrowing of social ties within their own category, too. Early in the conflict,
bureaucratic stonewalling by governing elites had effectively transplanted to
the villages the same social hierarchy and organizational models of problem
solving that sequestered public power in governing elites' hands in the
districts and subdistricts. Under this model, governing elites delivered
development projects to a very small, exclusive group of farmers in exchange
for extracted rents. But, as the farmers' group expanded itself into a broader
coalition of marginalized groups, it rejected this old model and the
clientelistic ties it preserved. Thus, internal disruption of borrowing
disarticulated a clump of social ties that had undermined the larger
coalition's interests in mobilizing natural allies (particularly farmers and
civil servants). The reflections of a civil servant in Biting spoke to this
expansion: "The farming group does not just include the farmers!... There
are teachers, police, all kinds of professions" (Rasyid and Probo 2003
: 25 ). In the end, this breadth led the farmers' coalition to
effectively pursue additional activism around related conflicts over
compensation for inundated lands resulting from the dam's repair.
Because the
disruption of borrowing occurred internally within the farmers' group, it also
led to a more fundamental contestation of opportunity hoarding by the
relatively small but nonelite farmers who had previously had clientelistic
relations with governing elites. Over time, as the farmers' coalition expanded
to include teachers, civil servants, paddy workers, and others, these few
farmers and clients became increasingly less able to exclude other members from
the opportunity to negotiate with governing elites—and to
adversarially force such negotiations through the credible threat of protest.
Only when they had been supplanted by a larger group of farmers, with no
previous strong ties to elites, did the coalition grow into a political
constituency to be reckoned with, a voting bloc in local politics that elected
officials could not ignore in the coming election. Despite this, exploitation
persisted due to the inability of the coalition to transform the more
fundamental, material relations of agricultural production in which they were
profoundly entangled.
Crucially, the effective modality of
mobilizational contestation in the dam case was credible threat making and
public protest, a modality predicated on the presence of minimally responsive
electoral institutions and representative. For these tactics to work, a
necessary condition was a preexisting, high-capacity institutional contest in
which the authority of governing elites rested on functioning electoral
institutions. (This condition was not present in Pamekasan, where we turn
momentarily.) As many theories of the state establish, it is precisely this
institutional context—and the longer term responsiveness it offers—which holds out
the promise of payoffs to mobilizational contestation. Specifically,
high-capacity contexts hold out benefits to smaller groups, who confront
emulation, adaptation, and opportunity hoarding within their own boundaries to
expand into a more powerful and broader coalition. By contrast, such a context
has no similar effect on groups organizing within KDP since it is only a
development project, not a political institution. This outlines important
limitations and strengths of KDP, which is obviously not a replacement for
legitimate, representative democratic institutions locally (nor did its
creators think it could be). There is no obvious bridge between, on the one
hand, contestation of borrowing and adaptation within decisionmaking about KDP
resource allocation and, on the other hand, more fundamental and ongoing
challenges to opportunity hoarding of public power by governing elites. This
constraint contrasts sharply with the dam case, where such bridging did occur.
Yet there is no evidence to suggest that deliberative contestation in KDP
processes hindered mobilizational contestation and conventional organizing
outside of it. In fact, the very concurrence of the KDP and dam cases in the
same village suggests that mobilizational and deliberative contestation are—at the
very least—not
incompatible and quite likely complementary.
Explaining
Partially vs. Nontransformative Power Relations in Low-Capacity Pamekasan
Villages
In its partially transformative
outcome and process of deliberative contestation, the conflict involving KDP in
Sana Daya contrasts sharply with the nontransformative outcome and process of
mobilizational contestation that drove the Banyupelle slaughterhouse conflict.
In the slaughterhouse conflict, two groups mobilized separately—the santri and
Aengnyonok vendors by mobilizing to halt pollution from the slaughterhouse, and
the butchers group by selecting the construction site of the new
slaughterhouse. Yet neither successfully contested any mechanism of durable
inequality. Whereas, in the KDP case in Sana Daya, a similarly marginalized but
united group of women yasinan members used deliberative routines of
contestation to substantially undermine borrowing and adaptation, although
exploitation and opportunity hoarding by governing elites continued unabetted.
What explains these sharply divergent outcomes? We argue that the same decisive
qualities of the low-capacity institutional contexts, which characterized both
villages, affected transformations in power relations more in Banyupelle than
in Sana Daya. The reason was that the routines of mobilizational contestation
used by marginalized groups in Banyupelle required a preexisting high-capacity
institutional context to succeed, while the internally constrained but
self-contained routines of deliberative contestation used in KDP by
marginalized groups in Sana Daya did not depend on such a context to be
effective.
In the case of
KDP in Sana Daya, how and why were deliberative routines relatively unaffected
by the preexisting context, and how did this contribute to the yasinan group's
contestation of borrowing and adaptation by governing elites? Here, too, we are
cautious about overestimating just how extensive the disruption of emulation
and adaptation really was. Governing elites partially co-opted KDP's open
spaces and may have dulled incentives for participation by marginalized groups.
Yet these were incomplete deviations of KDP procedures that did not nullify the
group's efforts. Rather, KDP spaces and facilitators, in particular, still
provided an opportunity for them to effectively contest the kleybun and his
attempts to capture KDP funds for a pet road construction project in his
hamlet. The form of adaptation contested was the locally accepted procedure of
permitting the village head to control all decisions regarding development
projects. The mechanism of contestation
Springer was
direct argumentation between the yasinan group and the village head in KDP's MD
forum, argumentation that publicly exposed his attempts to circumvent KDP
procedures as illegitimate ones to be resisted. If the KDP facilitator helped
create an open, inclusive space in Sana Daya, the yasinan group used it to
develop and leverage persuasive reason- and justice-based arguments, which
resonated publicly and persuaded the forum to disallow the village head's pet
proposal. Finally, the yasinan group used KDP's spaces and facilitators to
reject old, exclusive decisionmaking procedures and to introduce newer, more
inclusive procedures centered on argumentation.
If, through
deliberative contestation, the yasinan group effectively resisted adaptation,
it also undermined borrowing processes in important ways. The group used the
new deliberative procedures they developed in KDP to undermine village
governing elites' attempt to capture a separate development project in Sana
Daya. One respondent described the prevailing sentiment as follows: "Last
year [2003]
the P2MPD [Community and Village Government Empowerment Program] also
wanted to enter [Kecamatan] Pasean but ultimately it didn't happen because the
community wanted the program entering their villages to follow an
implementation processes like the KDP's that involved the lower level of
society as main players..." (Probo 2003: 9). Following
the experience of KDP, yasinan members and other villagers rejected the P2MPD
on the grounds that it would only strengthen ties between rent- seeking elites
in villages and those in districts and subdistricts. This, they argued, would
undermine the participation of lower classes in development decisionmaking.
Whatever its broader implications, the group's rejection of P2MPD on these
grounds prevented village-governing elites from importing an exclusive social
network through which they could capture project rents. As a result, routines
of deliberative contestation developed in KDP helped the yasinan group to
interrupt the "transfer of chunks of social structure that happen to include
unequal categories." (Tilly 1998 : 95 )
These small
wins aside, the yasinan group proved largely unable to disrupt exploitation and
opportunity hoarding. We would not have expected them to do so, using
internally constrained routines of deliberative contestation during the five
years of KDP. As with the housewives in our KDP case from Biting, disrupting
the model of exploitation and opportunity hoarding developed by governing
elites— as
opposed to merely disrupting the generalization of its effects—would have
required deeper and more sustained resistance to more fundamental structures by
which elites hoarded the opportunities of public power and maintained
exploitative relations of production.
To compare,
both marginalized groups in the Banyupelle slaughterhouse conflict failed to
shift power relations because their routines of mobilizational contestation
succumbed to external constraints imposed by the institutional context. Both
the santri and Aengnyonok vendor coalition, and the butchers, separately and
ineffectively mobilized to contest the stranglehold on public power held by the
bajingaan village head. But both were ineffective in part because Banyupelle
remains largely beyond the reach of the Weberian state, leaving no electorally
accountable governing elites with whom bargains and compromises could be
struck, given a credible threat. In the end, mobilizational contestation in the
slaughterhouse case failed because governing elites were primarily vigilantes,
a common fact in many parts of rural Indonesia following the end of
authoritarianism and the power vacuum it left initially. Since his legitimacy
revolved around ensuring order through coercion, the village head's incentives
were mainly aligned with anticipating and responding to credible threats from
rival gangsters, not from interest groups with no appreciable bargaining power.
Similarly, this built-in lack of responsiveness generated little incentive for
the separately organized santri, vendors, and the butchers groups to form a
larger coalition. In such a context, emulation, adaptation, opportunity
hoarding, and exploitation were particularly durable and impervious to
challenge by mobilizational contestation. In this sense, the
(nontransformative) outcome and routines of mobilizational contestation in
Banyupelle proved to be strongly dependent upon context.
In Sana Daya,
the similar absence of a commonly accepted, preexisting institution or
authority for reconciling popular demands had different effects. More
precisely, it had no appreciable effect on the routines of deliberative
contestation developed by marginalized groups. The reason was that KDP provided
a relatively self-contained set of spaces, incentives, and resources within
which they could contest governing elites. In this sense, the (partially
transformative) outcome in Banyupelle occurred relatively independently of the
low-capacity context, although other, internal constraints within the logic of
deliberative contestation limited their efficacy. Far from a replacement for
legitimate, representative democratic institutions at the local level, KDP
provided tools for uprooting borrowing and adaptation, but not for more
fundamentally and sustainably challenging opportunity hoarding and exploitation
by governing and other elites. Nevertheless, deliberative contestation proved
moderately effective in this low-capacity context for the same reason it did
in high-capacity contexts. Because KDP's deliberative spaces, incentives, and
argumentative resources are easily adapted to local contexts, they become
relatively resilient to the most destructive tactics of governing elites. This
provided an indispensable tool to marginalized groups attempting to counter the
preexisting agenda setting and bargaining power of governing elites.
In sum, our analysis shows that both
deliberative and mobilizational routines of contestation were leverage points
for marginalized groups in their straggles to shift local power relations. Over
the short periods of time we studied, deliberative routines were much less dependent
for their efficacy on more formally institutionalized contexts in which
preexisting context management capacity was already relatively high. Although
marginalized groups using deliberative contestation neither fully transformed
power relations, nor did such strategies lead to nontransformative outcomes in
our observations. Instead, deliberative contestation consistently generated
partially transformative outcomes, regardless of whether the preexisting
context featured high- or low-conflict management capacity. Mobilizational
contestation, conversely, generated highly variant outcomes—either
nontransformative or fully transformative power relations—but never
partially transformative ones.
We have argued that KDP provides three essential tools that influenced
marginalized groups in local development conflicts: incentives to participate,
deliberative spaces in which to do so, and argumentative resources (especially
facilitators) for engaging
Springer governing
elites through deliberative contestation, and argumentative challenge. KDP's
spaces provided open, accessible forums in which marginalized groups contested
the power of governing elites to make development decisions unilaterally by
engaging them in face-to-face relations of deliberative contestation, often for
the first time. The prospect of choosing, managing, and evaluating a shared,
tangible development project provided a material incentive for engaging in such
relations, an incentive that opened the possibility for preference
transformation through deliberation and the beginnings of prescriptive identity
group formation around a shared undertaking. Locally knowledgeable and socially
legitimate facilitators served as custodians of those deliberative spaces by
incrementally encouraging the use of a communicative procedure based on
argumentation, not just on bargaining based on credible threat making.
Together, KDP's spaces, incentives, and resources were tools that marginalized
groups used to effectively develop and leverage reason- and justice-based
arguments with a persuasive influence of their own. The willingness and ability
of external agents to introduce new resources into communities, along with
deliberative and administrative tools for managing the inevitable conflicts
that arise over them, in many respects, represents a radical departure in the
development practice of (and the theory that informs) large multi- and
bilateral agencies.
Clearly, KDP
is not without its flaws.[24]
Especially where the most disenfranchised villagers are concerned, bringing
about greater empowerment—especially confronting the deep roots of
exploitation and opportunity hoarding—depends on more than just deliberative
contestation within development projects. Yet, in otherwise dark scenarios of elite
capture, anonymous complaints mechanisms and other accountability measures
within the program (such as the requirement to post budgets and allocation
decisions on community bulletin boards) allow those otherwise cut out of
decisionmaking to "defensively" express their voices. In more than
one case, those using this kind of recourse initiated a slow broadening of
involvement and lessening of elite capture (e.g., the reinstatement of
elections where previously they had been skipped illegally). In a country whose
village institutions are still emerging from underneath the decades-long shadow
of national and district political hegemony over neighborhood and village
decisionmaking (Guggenheim 2006 ), this
is no small achievement. Nevertheless, the challenge of providing spaces,
incentives, and resources for more positive intragroup countervailing power
will always remain for any development project.
Where KDP
cultivates "managed" conflicts in which marginalized groups tangibly
develop points of political power through collaboration and contestation, the
result can be as much a style of solidaristic group interest definition and
defense as it is a well-functioning school or medical clinic. The beginning
stage of such a transformation—in which unequal groups build the capacity to
engage one another peacefully and substantively in conflict, and in which
deliberation and shared intergroup decisionmaking have been followed by
incremental steps toward more equitable zones of engagement between more and
less organized and influential actors—is, we contend, a humble but nontrivial
outcome for a development project.
At least three
conceptual implications emerge from these findings. First, the overarching
argument we have developed—that marginalized groups use KDP spaces,
incentives, and resources to challenge governing elites using deliberative
contestation—demonstrates that such groups do not typically prepossess
associational autonomy; rather, they must agitate for and acquire actionable
rights of associational autonomy. This conflictual process of building the
"capacity to engage" governing elites, using deliberative
contestation, exposes an apparent antinomy within deliberative institutions as
far as dominant theories of deliberative democracy are concerned. In short, the
capacity to engage involves a subtle intermingling of moments of deliberative
contestation with moments of mobilizational contestation.
On the one hand,
arguments leveraged by marginalized groups within the KDP's deliberative spaces
sometimes defused the influence of more powerful governing elites and, at
times, replaced a normative, power-politics logic of bargaining and threat
making with the communicative standard of reason-based argumentation. In other
words, the force of the better argument—often arguments featuring social
justice-based justifications—sometimes won the day (even if preexisting
dynamics of elite power eventually overcame such micromoments during repeated
forums). This echoes Gianpaolo Baiocchi's observation that deliberation may take
place, not just under the aegis of rationality and problem solving and with the
goal of reforming government, but also with the goal of empowerment of the poor
and social justice (2001: 65-66 ). On the other hand, if marginalized groups
succeeded (at least, fleetingly) in substituting reason-based argumentation as
the accepted procedure for decisionmaking within deliberative spaces, it was
generally because they supplemented these arguments with the understated power
of their obstinance— a defining quality of mobilizational tactics. The moral
authority of these arguments became powerful in part because the marginalized
groups that leveraged them were willing to participate in one forum after
another. This obstinance, persistence, and refusal to have one's voice ignored
is not always associated with deliberation, yet it played a large role in the
efforts of marginalized groups to disrupt the mechanisms of durable inequality
(particularly adaptation and emulation) that had perhaps silenced their voices
in the first place. Alongside more deliberative moments, these mobilizational
moments denaturalized the social boundary maintaining governing elites as the
sole decisionmakers in local development processes.
We note a second
(related) implication, namely, that contrary to much of the theory of
deliberative democracy and public spheres, deliberative contestation within KDP
spaces was indeed marked by power relations. Yet such spaces privileged a type
of power—the
capacity to engage—that may be endemic to deliberative institutions. Marginalized
groups acquired a capacity to engage governing elites through the collective
practice of formulating and leveraging rights-based validity claims in public
settings. Crucially, within these settings, the social legitimacy of their
claims gave them a comparative advantage over the claims-making of governing
elites. Thus, the concept of the capacity to engage using deliberative
contestation explains why, although deliberative settings are shaped by quite
palpable power differentials, such settings can be made to privilege
rights-based claims-making as the favored currency of exchange between
participants. Carefully cultivated spaces, incentives, and resources play a
decisive role here, but where they operate effectively, marginalized groups may
find themselves better endowed with the preferred currency of exchange and
public decisionmaking.
A third implication for future research on
deliberative development is that promoting deliberative contestation and the
practice of participatory democracy more broadly may require a new breed of
bureaucrats with fundamentally distinct qualities, skills, and orientations
than those we associate with representative democracy. If a class of
rule-upholding, Weberian bureaucrats is an indispensable component of
functioning representative democratic institutions, something like a
"Habermasian bureaucrat" analog may be requisite for the functioning
of participatory democracy, especially in countries just embarking on
democratic forms of governance. In our data, to effectively introduce
deliberative spaces that remained open to the influence of marginalized groups,
facilitators required not just "local knowledge" (or metis-, see
Scott 1998), but also a capacity to adjust to some local norms
and resist others. How they did their job in the highly diverse social and
cultural contexts of our research areas (and of Indonesia more broadly) was
highly discretionary and transaction intensive (Pritchett and Woolcock 2004).
Both the microrelations between them and participants—as well
as the introduction of spaces, incentives, and resources that marginalized
groups can use to modify them—involve fundamentally dynamic processes and
interactions, the facilitation (and assessment) of which is as much an art as
it is a science (Whiteside, Woolcock, and de Sousa Briggs 2005).
As custodians of deliberation, facilitators faced the daunting
task of upholding the general but radical principle of creating openness in
decisionmaking for the most marginalized groups in village life. The
competencies and the sources of identity that they required to go about this
work differentiate them in important ways from the impartial and impersonal
ideal type of the bureaucrat that Weber had in mind. Focusing analytical
attention on these differences is a promising area for future research on
deliberative development.
Alsop R., Heinsoliii N, Somma A. 2003. Measuring
empowerment: an analytic framework. Iittp://lnwebl8. worldbank.org/ESSD/sdvext.nst768ByDocName/CurrentInitiativesMeasuringEmpowemientStudy.
Aiggraini NC. Caught between a rock and a hard
place: the dilemma for KDP facilitators in the kucur tourism market Case.
Translated by Joanne Sharpe. Mimeo. World Bank Office Jakarta; 2003.
Appadurai A. The capacity to aspire: culture and
the terms of recognition. In: Rao V, Walton M. editors. Culture and Public
Action. Stanford: Stanford University Press; 2004. pp. 59-84.
Ashari L. My Old Friend Has Forgotten Himself:
when the Kyai Call Something Red, Then All Madura is Red! Translated by Suzan
Piper. Mimeo. World Bank Office Jakarta; 2003.
Avritzer L. Democracy and the
public space in Latin America. Princeton: Princeton University Press; 2002.
Baiocchi G. Participation, activism, and
politics: the Porto Alegre experiment and deliberative democratic theory. Polit
Soc. 2001;29(l):43-72'
Baiocclii G. Emergent public
spheres: talking politics in participatory governance. Am Sociol Rev.
2003;68(l):52-74.
Baiocclii G. Militants and
citizens: the politics of participatory democracy in Porto Alegre. Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press; 2005.
Baker J. Evaluating the impact
of development projects on poverty: a handbook for practitioners. Washington,
DC: World Bank; 2000.
Barron p, Madden D. Violent
conflict in 'non-conflict- regions: the case of Lampung, Indonesia.
East Asia and pacific region working paper. Washington, DC: World Bank; 2004.
Barron p, Clark ร, Mawardi A.
The links between KDP and local conflict: results from a key informant survey
in East Java and NTT. Mimeo. World Bank Office Jakarta; 2005.
Barron p, Diprose R, Madden D,
Smith c
Q, Woolcock M. Do participatory development projects help villagers manage
local level conflicts? a mixed methods approach to assessing the Kecamatan
development project, Indonesia, conflict prevention and reconstruction unit
working paper No. 9, Washington, D.C.: World Bank; 2004.
Barron p, Diprose R, Smith CQ,
Whiteside K, Woolcock M. 2004. Applying mixed methods research to a
community driven development project and local conflict mediation: a case study
from Indonesia. March 2. Available at: www.conflictanddevelopment.org.
Barron p, Smith c Q, Woolcock
M. Understanding local level conflict pathways in developing Countries: Theory,
Evidence, and Implications from Indonesia. Working Paper No. 19, Conflict
Prevention and Reconstruction Unit, World Bank; 2004.
Barron p, Diprose R, Woolcock
M. Local conflict and community development in Indonesia: assessing the impact
of the Kecamatan development program. Indonesian social development paper No. 10. Jakarta:
World Bank; 2006.
Benhabib ร. Democracy and
difference: contesting the boundaries of the political. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press; 1996.
Bonham J, Rehg
พ. Deliberative
democracy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press; 1997.
Bourdieu p.
The social space and the genesis of groups. Theory Soc. 1985;14:723^4.
Carroll T. The world Bank's
socio-institutional neoliberalism: a case study from Indonesia. Mimeo: Asia
Research Centre, Murdoch University; 2006.
Chaudliuri ร, Heller p. The
plasticity of participation: evidence from a participatory governance
experiment. Mimeo: Brown University; 2005.
Cohen J, Arato
A. Civil society and political theory. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press; 1992.
Cohen J,
Rogers J. Associations and democracy. London: Verso; 1995.
Diprose R. The dynamics of
difference: contested identity at the local level World Bank Jakarta Office:
Mimeo; 2003.
Diprose R. Conflict pathways
in Indonesia: conflict, violence, and development in East Java. Mimeo. World
Bank Office Jakarta; 2004.
Elster J.
Deliberative democracy. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press; 1998.
Emirbayer M.
Manifesto for a relational sociology. Am J Sociol. 1997;103(2):281-317.
Evans p. Collective
capabilities, culture and Amartya Sen's development as freedom. Stud Comp lilt
Dev. 2002;37(2):54-60'
Evans p. Development as
institutional change: the pitfalls of monocropping and the potentials of
deliberation. Stud Comp lilt Dev. 2004;38(4):30-52.
Fraser N. Rethinking the
public sphere: a contribution to the critique of actually existing democracy.
In: Calhoun c,
editor. Habermas and the public sphere. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press; 1992. p. 109^3.
Fraser N. Social justice in
the age of identity politics: redistribution, recognition, and participation in
redistribution or recognition?: a political-philosophical exchange. In: Fraser
N, Honneth A, editors, translated by Joel Golb, James Ingram, and Christiane
wilke. London: Verso; 2003. p. 7-109.
Fung A. 2002. Collaboration
and countervailing power: making participatory governance work. www. archoniung.net..
Fung A, Wright EO. Deepening
democracy: institutional innovations in empowered participatory governance.
London: Verso; 2003.
Galbrait JK. Anerican
capitalism: the concept of countervailing power. New York: Houghton Mifflin; 1956.
George A, Bennett A. Case
studies and theory development in the social sciences. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press; 2005.
Goertz G, Mahoney J. Two-level
theories and fuzzy-set analysis. Sociol Methods Res. 2005;33(4):497- 538.
Guggenheim SE. Crises and
contradictions: explaining a community development project in Indonesia. In:
Bebbington A, Guggenheim SE, Olson E, Woolcock M, editors. The search for
empowerment: social capital as idea and practice at the world bank. Bloomfield,
CT: Kumarian Press; 2006. p. 111—44.
Gutmann A,
Thompson D. Democracy and disagreement. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press; 1996.
Habermas J. The theory of
communicative action 1. Translated by Thomas McCarthy. Boston, MA:
Beacon; 1984.
Habermas J. Between facts and
norms: contributions to a discourse theory of law and democracy. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press; 1998.
Heller p, Isaac TMT. The
politics and institutional design of participatory democracy: lessons from
Kerala, India. In: de Sousa Santos B, editor. Democratizing democracy: beyond
the liberal democratic canon. London: Verso; 2005. p.405-46.
Jakarta Post The. Government
of Indonesia unveils plan to empower the poor, accessed at www. worldbank.org. August
9, 2007, September
4, 2006
KDP National Secretariat and
National Management Consultants. Indonesia: Kecamatan Development Program.
December, 2003.
Li TM. The will to improve:
govemmentality, development, and the practice of politics. Durham, NC: Duke
University Press; 2007.
Mahoney J, Goertz G. The
possibility principle: choosing negative cases in qualitative research. Am
Polit Sci Rev. 2004;98(4):653-70.
Mahoney J, Rueschemeyer D.
Comparative historical analysis in the social sciences. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press; 2003.
Mansuri G, Rao V. Community-based
(and Driven) development: a critical review. World Bank Res Obs. 2004;19(1):1-39.
McAdam D,
Tarrow ร,
Tilly c.
Dynamics of contention. New York: Cambridge University Press; 2000.
Nussbaum M. Women and human
development: the capabilities approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; 2000.
Olson M. The logic of
collective action: public goods and the theory of groups. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press; 1965.
Petesch p, Smulovitz c, Walton M. Evaluating
empowemient: a framework with cases from Latin America. Washington: World Bank;
2005.
Piven FF, Cloward R. Poor
people's movements: why they succeed and how they fail. New York: Pantheon
Press; 1977.
Pritchett L, Woolcock M.
Solutions when the solution is the problem: arraying the disarray in
development. World Dev. 2004;32(2):191-212.
Probo E. Coastal community sea
change: Spillover effects from implementation of Kecamatan development program
in Kecamatan Pasean, Kabupatan Pamekasan, East Java. Translated by Suzan Piper.
Mimeo' World Bank Office Jakarta; 2003.
Rao V. Symbolic public goods
and the coordination of collective action: a comparison of local development in
India and Indonesia. In: Bardlian p, Ray I, editors. The contested commons:
conversations between economists and anthropologists. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley
and Sons; 2008.
p. 168-86.
Rao V, Walton M. Culture and
public action: relationality, equality of agency, and development. In: Rao V,
Walton M, editors. Culture and public action. Stanford: Stanford University
Press; 2004.
p. 3-36.
Rasyid I, Probo E. A cracked
social edifice: conflict between government, contractors and the community in
the development of the Sumorobangun Dam. Translated by Joanne Sharpe. Mimeo.
World Bank Office Jakarta; 2003.
Santos B de Sousa (ed).
Democratizing democracy: beyond the liberal democratic canon. London: Verso; 2005.
Scott J. Seeing like a state:
how certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed. New Haven: Yale
University Press; 1998.
Sen A.
Development as freedom. New York: Random House; 1999.
Snyder R.
Scaling down: the subnational comparative method. Stud Comp lilt Dev.
2001;36(1):93-110.
Tilly c. Durable
inequality. Berkeley: University of California Press; 1998.
Unger RM.
Democracy realized. New York: Verso; 1998.
Varshney A. Ethnic conflict
and civic life: hindus and muslims in India. New Haven: Yale University Press; 2002.
Whiteside K, Woolcock M, de Sousa Briggs X.
Assessing social development projects: Integrating the art of practice and the
science of evaluation. World Bank, Development Research Group, liiimeo; 2005. World
Bank. 2005.
Community driven development website of the World Bank. http://liiwebl8. worldbank.org/ESSD/sdvext.nsf/09ByDocName/CommunityDrivenDevelopment
Accessed My 16, 2006.
Christopher Gibson is a Ph.D. student in
sociology at Brown University. His research interests include comparative political
economy, participatory democracy, contemporary sociological theory, qualitative
methodology, and long-run causes of development and inequality in large
developing countries. He is currently exploring the relationship between
democratic participation and redistribution in Kerala, India.
Michael Wooleoek
is professor of social science and development policy, and research director of
the Brooks World Poverty Institute, at the University of Manchester. He is
currently on external service leave from the World Bank's Development Research
Group.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner.
Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
19 Santri are typically Islam students,
many of whom study in
pondok pesantren, or Islamic boarding schools, under the guidance
of kyai,
or Islamic clerics. In this case, santri includes nonresident students and
convocants, who attended and sometimes described themselves as having deep
spiritual bonds to kyai.
[1] Such projects are part of a larger category of interventions
known as Community Driven Development (CDD). According to the World Bank (2005),
CDD goes beyond treating poor people and their organizations as
targets of poverty reduction, instead regards them "...as assets and
partners in the development process. CDD approaches give control of decisions
and resources to community groups and local governments."
[2] This phase, discussed in more detail below, draws
on and extends Appadurai's (2004) concept
of building a "capacity to aspire."
[3] Petesch, Smulovitz, and Walton
(2005). The second question is the subject of a separate
program evaluation; see Barron, Diprose and Woolcock (2006).
[4] See Rao (2008) for an interesting
comparison of symbolic public goods and local level participatory institutions
in Indonesia versus India.
[5] According to his duality thesis, Roberto บทger
suggests that some ways of defining and defending group interests are more
"transformative and solidaristic," while others are more
"conservative and exclusive." The latter "take the established
institutional arrangements and the existing social and technical division of
labor for granted" and lead each group "to identify its interests
with the preservation of its niche, and to see the immediately contiguous
groups in its social space as its greatest enemies." The former
"propose a way of realizing the interests and ideals through the
step-by-step change of a set of arrangements," which over time
"revise the content as well as the context of recognized interests and
professed ideals" (บทger 1998: 11).
[6] As pointed out
in Fuiig (2002: 10), the logic of politics within a
stylized notion of adversarial, top-down institutions is well documented by
both political scientists and sociologists. Scholars of collective action,
interest group politics (Olson 1965), and
social movements (McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly 2001; Piven
and Cloward 1977) have described how organized
interests compete for the power to create or dissolve binding laws or
administrative rules typically decided upon through bargaining, implemented by
agencies, and administered to stakeholders and the general public.
s Fraser (1992)
provides an especially useful critique of Habemias (1984).
Insightful works on deliberative democracy include Habemias (1998),
Cohen and Arato (1992) on civil
society, Cohen and Rogers (1995) on
secondary associations, and Bonliani and Rehg (1997), Benhabib
(1996), Elster (1998), and
Gutmann and Thompson (1996). Generally speaking, these works
are more attuned to developed world settings. Baiocchi (2001, 2003, 2005), Santos
(2005), Avritzer (2002), and
Heller and Isaac (2005) all provide excellent adaptations
of deliberative democratic theory to the developing world.
[9] 111 September 2006, the
Government of Indonesia announced that KDP would become a full nation-wide
program, covering essentially every village in Indonesia as a central component
of the government's development strategy (see Jakarta
Post 2006).
[10] For more details
see Guggenheim (2006), KDP National Secretariat (2003),
and Barron, Diprose, and Woolcock (2006).
[11] See Barron, Diprose, Madden, Smith, and Woolcock (2004)
for a more detailed description of the sampling methodology for
the overall study.
[12] Research teams made the
determination about high- and low-capacity districts through extensive
consultations with provincial government officials, international and local
NGOs, regional development experts, university faculty, and KDP staff. See
Barron, Diprose, Madden, Smith, and Woolcock (2004) for
further details.
[13] The propensity score is a statistical measure
designed to calculate the probability of a given household or village being
selected for inclusion in a program (for an introduction, see Baker 2000).
The score was estimated using the PODES (1996) dataset.
PODES, which stands for Pontesi Desa (Village Potential), is a key informant
survey administered every two years by BPS (Statistics Indonesia), which
contains information on each of some 60,000 villages in Indonesia. The actual
propensity score was derived using explanatory variables that could serve as
proxies for the economic level of the kecamatan. Among the PODES variables used
were population, access to urban facilities such as markets, hospitals, department
stores, health and education resources, main source of income, perception of
poverty level, etc. These are all "observable" factors, but to
control for "นทobservable" factors (e.g., motivation, cohesion,
leadership) we used the propensity score to select three statistically
comparable non-KDP ("control") villages in each kecamatan, and then
asked our field research team to identify which of these was, in their view,
the most appropriate match for the KDP ("treatment") village.
[14] This helped control for unobserved variables, which
propensity score matching techniques alone cannot.
[15] Although this case selection
strategy is made possible by the matches provided by matching the propensity
score, a more intuitive justification for this strategy is that it upholds the
implicit logic of the "possibility principle" of negative case
selection, outlined by Mahoney and Goertz (2004). That is,
our selection strategy generates "negative" cases or comparison cases
(e.g., cases of conflict from villages in which the KDP does not occur) in
which the outcomes of interest (e.g., transformative and partially
transformative power relations) are nevertheless possible.
[19] Discussion of
this case draws heavily on Diprose (2004) and is
adapted from Probo (2003), the original case study.
[20] We arrived at this qualitative
assessment through the dialogue between theory and evidence, which defines
comparative-historical analysis (see Mahoney and Rueschemeyer 2003).
[21] We are not surprised that exploitation was never
contested, since such a sweeping outcome is not likely to occur or be
observable during the relatively short time periods we capture in the cases.
[22] Explanatory variables at a
"secondary level" (here, spaces, incentives, resources) are causes of
the main outcome under investigation (here, transformation of power relations)
"but their effects cannot be understood independently of their
relationship with the causal factors at the basic level" (here,
mobilizational and deliberative contestation). (Goertz and Mahoney 2005:
498)
[23] KDP provides
ail anonymous complaints mechanism, whereby participants can report such circumventions
of program requirements. Although the housewives did not use it in this case,
many other groups did use it in our other cases. In some of these, anonymous
complaints led to the removal of FDs and FKs.
[24] Not
surprisingly, given its growing profile in the development community, KDP has
begun to generate a small (though not especially compelling) critical
literature; see, for example, Carroll (2006), whose
hardline critique otherwise seems to stand on arguments that KDP delivers
valued goods and services, has little corruption, and is popular. Li (2007)
leverages an interesting critique grounded in Foucauldian theory
of governmentality, which nevertheless draws on surprisingly little in the way
of actual data on KDP's
011- tlie-ground processes.
ไม่มีความคิดเห็น:
แสดงความคิดเห็น