5 - Participation

Summary

Introduction

Thinking about working with participants usually includes working with community activists or residents, volunteers or people with whom you have an empowerment agenda, as well as people in organisations who wish to engage with these participants. An empowered person is one who can take initiative, exert leadership, display confidence, solve new problems, mobilise resources and undertake new action (Saxena, 2011). In this chapter we focus on the empowerment agenda; we look at working with community activists and volunteers in the chapter on community engagement (Chapter 7).

Power and empowerment

Empowerment practice enables people to gain influence and control over their lives, particularly with social institutions. When thinking about participation it is crucial to think about empowerment, and hence power (see Chapter 2), including how and where it impacts on people and how it impacts on some people more than others. Empowerment may be thought of as a product of participation in decision making (see Chapter 17)

Popular participation as an idea entered into our community understandings in the 1960s and 1970s, linked to many different ideologies (Stiefel and Wolfe, 2011), but was often about democracy, critical reflection and problem solving. It has changed over time to become linked to means of overcoming the limitations of governmental arrangements to meet changing needs; it is supposed to allow governments and their structures to act in a more flexible and local way. Empowerment participation usually implies action from the grassroots but, in our experience, participation is increasingly a ‘top down’ approach, which seeks to embed people in existing systems rather than thinking of changing systems to meet people's ability to participate readily.

Power may be understood as something that circulates, rather than as something some people have and others do not. So, a Foucauldian (1976) understanding is that there is a power dynamic in every human transaction. Empowering people to take part in systems is, in a Foucauldian sense, a form of manipulation of them for a purpose. It is crucial in thinking about empowerment to think about empowerment for what purpose and for whose purpose (Cooke and Kothari, 2004).