Empowerment, Deliberative Development, and Local-Level Politics in Indonesia: Participatory Projects as a Source of Countervailing Power

Abstract

The salience of the concept of "empowerment" has been deductively claimed more often than carefully defined or inductively assessed by development scholars and practitioners alike. We use evidence from a mixed methods examination of the Kecamatan (subdistrict) Development Project (KDP) in rural Indonesia, which we define here as development interventions that build marginalized groups' capacity to engage local-level governing elites using routines of deliberative contestation. "Deliberative contestation" refers to marginalized groups' practice of exercising associational autonomy in public forums using fairness-based arguments that challenge governing elites' monopoly over public resource allocation decisions. Deliberative development interventions such as KDP possess a comparative advantage in building the capacity to engage because they actively provide open decision-making spaces, resources for argumentation (such as facilitators), and incentives to participate. They also promote peaceful resolutions to the conflicts they inevitably spark. In the KDP conflicts we analyze, marginalized groups used deliberative contestation to moderately but consistently shift local-level power relations in contexts with both low and high preexisting capacities for managing St Comp Int Dev (2008) 43:151-180 were key members of the research team and played an integral role in developing the ideas explored here. Other field-level researchers provided ideas throughout the study. We are also indebted to Scott Guggenheim and Ruth Alsop for their active support and feedback, and to Dan Biller, Patrick Barron, and three anonymous referees for helpful comments. The views are those of the authors, and should not be attributed to the organizations with which they are affiliated.conflict. By contrast, marginalized groups in non-KDP development conflicts from comparable villages used "mobilizational contestation" to generate comparatively erratic shifts in power relations, shifts that depended greatly on the preexisting capacity for managing conflict.

Access to Justice and Legal Empowerment: A Review of World Bank Practice

“…62 The study generated over 70 'conflict pathways case studies' of conflicts that took place within KDP treatment villages and others that took place in similar villages without KDP treatment. 62 The study generated over 70 'conflict pathways case studies' of conflicts that took place within KDP treatment villages and others that took place in similar villages without KDP treatment.…”

Annex 3: Freedom of Information – Review of Impact and Effectiveness of Transparency and Accountability Initiatives

“…While some external observers contacted for this review lamented the fact that there were too few randomised evaluations in the area of T&A as compared to qualitative case studies, one advantage of the latter approach is that it tends to include much more contextual data, which facilitates more informed judgments about causal dynamics, other contributions to the same end, etc (Gibson and Woolcock 2008;Goetz and Jenkins 2001). On causality, we have found certain impact assessment approaches being used in a causal way -to actually promote greater T&A, not only assess the impact of TAIs.…”

Global Poverty and Inequality: A Brief Retrospective and Prospective Analysis

“…An example is the Kecamatan Development Project (KDP) in Indonesia (Guggenheim, 2006), a nationwide povertyreduction programme which also seeks to enhance the civic skills of participating villagers and in turn the responsiveness of local government. Built on social (in addition to economic) theory, KDP began as a study of village institutions in Indonesia and through the knowledge thereby gained, was able to design mechanisms for allocating development resources in ways that both re¯ected villagers' priorities and knowledge and provided channels for eectively mediating con¯icts ensuing from the project (Gibson and Woolcock, 2008). If`orthodoxy' had its way, such successes would immediately give rise, as they have, to calls to rapidly replicate KDP elsewhere, but it is the`spirit' of KDPÐits rich grounding in local knowledge discerned through extensive research conducted by Indonesians themselvesÐrather than the`letter' of KDPÐits formal structure and documentationÐthat should be the model for poverty reduction and`governance' projects elsewhere.…”