[Anthropgrad] Seminar on: Participation and Participatory Development

[Patrick Kilby]

Anthropology Seminar Series,  

  

 Milgate Room, AD Hope Building Monday, 15 December 2008, 3pm

 

'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
practices 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.

==================================================================