[Anthropgrad] Pre-Field Seminar by Faisal Shah on MONDAY, 15 Dec 08

[Sin Wen Lau]

Anthropology Friday Seminar Series, Semester 2, 2008
Milgate Room, AD Hope Building
Monday, 15 December 2008, 3pm

Please note change in date. Faisal will be presenting his pre-field 
paper on MONDAY, 15th Dec 08, instead.

'Participation and Participatory Development: The case of Rural Support 
Programmes of Pakistan'
Pre-Field Seminar by Faisal Shah, Ph.D. Candidate in Development 
Studies, Department of Archaeology & Anthropology

Participatory development has been in vogue in the development sector 
since the WW-II. Taken up by NGOs in the beginning, large development 
players like the World Bank and various UN agencies have become 
proponents of participatory practices in the development projects since 
the 1990s, on grounds like sustainability, efficiency and equity. This 
approach has however not escaped some critique from among the 
practitioners, who term it as the new orthodoxy, a bunch of routinized 
practises and as a failure to address issues of power and resource 
distribution. The most visible development actor in Pakistan following 
this approach, has undoubtedly been the Rural Support Programmes. With 
the humble beginning of Aga Khan Rural support programme (AKRSP) in the 
early 1980s, such programmes have successfully been replicated in the 
rest of the country and even the region that includes South as well as 
Central Asia. In Pakistan, they work with around 122,000 self help 
groups, called Community Organizations, with a membership of around 2 
million people and covering a population of roughly 12 million 
Pakistanis. This research will attempt to seek answers to questions like 
the long term sustainability of such models of development within the 
Pakistani context, how these programmes relate to state and society and 
where does the future lie for such attempts, in the presence of local 
governments and representative democracy.
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Lau Sin Wen
Department of Anthropology
Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies
The Australian National University
Canberra ACT0200
Australia

Telephone : +61-2-6125-3271
Fax	 : +61-2-6125-4896
Email	 : sinwen.lau at anu.edu.au
Website	 : http://rspas.anu.edu.au/anthropology
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