Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Participation has established itself as a significant approach to project implementation, policy-making and governance in developing and developed countries alike. Recently, however, it has become fashionable to dismiss participation as more rhetoric than substance, and subject to manipulation by agencies and social change agents intent simply on pursuing their own agendas under cover of community consent. In this important new volume, development and other social policy scholars and practitioners seek to rebut this simplistic conclusion, while addressing the problems of power and politics which have beset some approaches to participation. They describe and analyse new experiments in participation from a wide diversity of social contexts that show how, far from being a redundant and depoliticizing concept, participation can -- given certain conditions -- be linked to genuinely transformative processes and outcomes for marginalized communities and people.

This volume is the first comprehensive attempt to evaluate the state of participatory approaches in the aftermath of the 'Tyranny' critique. It captures the recent convergence between participatory development and participatory governance, and spans the range of institutional actors involved in these approaches - the state, civil society and donor agencies. It places participatory interventions in a political context, and links them directly to issues of popular agency. The volume embeds participation within contemporary advances in development theory and proposes theoretical and practical ways forward for relocating participation as a genuinely transformative approach.

Scholars and practitioners alike, and from a diversity of disciplines and community and development agencies, are likely to find this volume a theoretically illuminating and practically useful source of ideas about how participation can achieve concrete liberatory outcomes.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Part I From Tyranny to Transformation?
• Towards Participation as Transformation: Critical Themes and Challenges for a Post-Tyranny Agenda
• Towards Participatory Local Governance: Assessing the Transformative Possibilities
• Rules of Thumb for Participatory Change Agents
• Part II Rethinking Participation
• Relocating Participation within a Radical Politics of Development: Critical Modernism and Citizenship
• Spaces for Transformation? Reflections on Issues of Power and Difference in Participation in Development
• Towards a Repoliticisation of Participatory Development: Political Capabilities and Spaces of Empowerment
• Part III Participation as Popular Agency: Reconnecting with Underlying Processes of Development
• Participation, Resistance and Problems with the Local in Peru: Towards a Political Contract?
• The 'Transformative' Unfolding of 'Tyrannical' Participation: The Corvee Tradition and Local Politics in Western Nepal
• Morality, Citizenship and Participatory Development in an Indigenous Development Association: the case of GPSDO and the Sebat bet Gurage of Ethiopia
• Part IV Realising Transformative Participation: State and Civil Responses
• Relocating Participation within a Radical Politics of Development: Insights from Political Action and Practice
• 1 Securing Voice and Transforming Practice in Local Government: The Role of Federating in Grassroots Development
• Participatory Municipal Development Plans in Brazil: Divergent Partners Constructing Common Futures
• Confrontations with Power: Moving beyond the 'Tyranny of Safety' in Participation
• Failing Forward: Going beyond PRA and Imposed Forms of Participation
• Part V Donors and Participation: Caught between Tyranny and Transformation?
• Participation in Poverty Reduction Strategies: Democracy Strengthened or Democracy Undermined?
• Beyond the Technical Fix? Participation in Donor Approaches to Rights-based Development
• Part VI Broader Perspectives on From Tyranny and Transformation
• The Social Embeddedness of Agency and Decision-making
• Theorizing Participation and Institutional Change: Ethnography and Political Economy
• Part I From Tyranny to Transformation?
• Towards Participation as Transformation: Critical
• Themes and Challenges for a Post-Tyranny Agenda
• Towards Participatory Local Governance: Assessing the Transformative Possibilities
• Rules of Thumb for Participatory Change Agents
• Part II Rethinking Participation
• Relocating Participation within a Radical Politics of Development: Critical Modernism and Citizenship
• Spaces for Transformation? Reflections on Issues of Power and Difference in Participation in Development
• Towards a Repoliticisation of Participatory Development: Political Capabilities and Spaces of Empowerment
• Part III Participation as Popular Agency: Reconnecting with Underlying Processes of Development
• Participation, Resistance and Problems with the Local in Peru: Towards a Political Contract?
• The 'Transformative' Unfolding of 'Tyrannical' Participation: The Corvee Tradition and Local Politics in Western Nepal
• Morality, Citizenship and Participatory Development in an Indigenous Development Association: the case of GPSDO and the Sebat bet Gurage of Ethiopia
• Part IV Realising Transformative Participation: State and Civil Responses
• Relocating Participation within a Radical Politics of Development: Insights from Pol

Author notes provided by Syndetics

Samuel Hickey is a lecturer in Social Development at the Institute for Development Policy and Management, University of Manchester.

Giles Mohan is a lecturer in Development Studies in the Development Policy and Practice discipline of the Open University. He is the coauthor of Structural Adjustment: Theory, Practice and Impacts (2000) and of Power, Space and Development (2003).
Samuel Hickey is a lecturer in Social Development at the Institute for Development Policy and Management, University of Manchester.

Giles Mohan is a lecturer in Development Studies in the Development Policy and Practice discipline of the Open University. He is the coauthor of Structural Adjustment: Theory, Practice and Impacts (2000) and of Power, Space and Development (2003).