NGO Second Exam Questions & Answers 2023/2024
Alternative approaches to development - ANSWER-Lewis and Kanji:
-NGOs played important roles within the construction of new "people-centered" or "alternative" development paradigms
-The key ideas of participation, empowerment and gender equality ...
NGO Second Exam Questions & Answers 2023/2024
Alternative approaches to development - ANSWER-Lewis and Kanji:
-NGOs played important roles within the construction of new "people-centered" or "alternative" development paradigms
-The key ideas of participation, empowerment and gender equality were at the heart of such approaches
-Background: After the Cold War, development theory largely faded from view
-The emergence of "alternative development" as we have seen, made set a claims about the approaches needed to address poverty and challenge the unequal relationships, structures and organizational cultures which have maintained it
-Such approaches were both a critique of mainstream, top-down, modernization-type approaches to promotion of capitalistic development, and a move away from the "radical pessimism" and revolutionary
rhetoric that followed dependency theory
-Yet, over time such ideas increasingly became absorbed into mainstream development institutions, with
variable results
-Central to this new idea was the concept of "participation": the need to build a central role in the decision-making processes for ordinary people, instead of their being "acted upon" by outsiders in the name of progress or development
-Participatory development emphasized the idea that people themselves are "experts" on their problems
and should be actively involved in working out strategies and solutions
-Key figure associated with this trend was UK academic and activist Robert Chambers-He believed NGOs became important sources of alternative development practices and were the "main innovators"
Participation - ANSWER--The concept of "participation" arose as part of a reaction against top-down, state-led projects that were common during the 1960s and 1970s
-There was growing frustration with government's inability to take responsibility for promoting social development---failure due in part to the creation of large bureaucracies, the selection by donors of wasteful projects and the opportunities offered by development aid for corruption
-A key set of ideas which informed this movement was US activist Arnstein's conceptualization of the "ladder of participation" which focused on who has power when decisions are being made behind the rhetoric of citizen involvement and consultation -The subsequent emergence of a bundle of tools and methodologies that became known as participatory
rural appraisal (PRA) challenged those working in development at this time---both in international agencies and in governmental organizations---to build new ways of working that were non-directive
-It aimed to challenge and "reverse" the conventional power relationships that tend to exist between professionals and clients, age and authority, and masculinity and femininity (sometimes known as "handing over the sick")
-It also sought to value local knowledge more highly
-Early definitions of participation, such as UNRISD research programme on popular participation in the late 1970s, contained more challenging "reversals" of power, which excluded groups increasing their control over resources and institutions
-However as the term "participation" became more widely accepted by development agencies, a certain fuzziness came to characterize its use, and the focus shifted to an array of participatory methods and tools, rather than ideas about transformative changes in power relationships
-Interest in participation has not only been important in the project setting,
Conceptual Framework for Thinking about "Participation" in a Systematic Way - ANSWER-First Form: Nominal---When government-formed groups are created; but their main purpose is merely tokenistic display
Second Form: Instrumental---Can be a way of providing labour under conditions of resource shortfall created by structural adjustment, which then counts as a cost to local people
Third Form: Representative---Where, for example, a certain group within the community gains some leverage within a programme or project by gaining access to the planning committee and is able to express its own interests
Fourth Form: Transformative---Where people find ways to make decisions and take action on their own terms
*Only this final form is truly "empowering" in a political sense*
-Different groups have different interests in participation, which is best understood as a "site of conflict," bringing both positive or negative outcomes for people living in poverty
Empowerment - ANSWER--Interest in empowerment reflected a shift from considering poverty simply as
"a lack" of material resources, towards a view of poverty as an outcome of unequal power relations
-Like participation, ideas about empowerment were brought into development from several different sources, such as Brazilian educator Paolo Freire's radical theory of "conscientization", and from areas of Western community organizing and social work theory
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