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 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.
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Notes
Such projects are part of a larger category of interventions known as Community Driven Development (CDD). According to the World Bank (2005), CDD goes beyond treating poor people and their organizations as targets of poverty reduction, instead regards them “…as assets and partners in the development process. CDD approaches give control of decisions and resources to community groups and local governments.”
This phase, discussed in more detail below, draws on and extends Appadurai’s (2004) concept of building a “capacity to aspire.”
See Rao (2008) for an interesting comparison of symbolic public goods and local level participatory institutions in Indonesia versus India.
According to his duality thesis, Roberto Unger suggests that some ways of defining and defending group interests are more “transformative and solidaristic,” while others are more “conservative and exclusive.” The latter “take the established institutional arrangements and the existing social and technical division of labor for granted” and lead each group “to identify its interests with the preservation of its niche, and to see the immediately contiguous groups in its social space as its greatest enemies.” The former “propose a way of realizing the interests and ideals through the step-by-step change of a set of arrangements,” which over time “revise the content as well as the context of recognized interests and professed ideals” (Unger 1998: 11).
As pointed out in Fung (2002: 10), the logic of politics within a stylized notion of adversarial, top–down institutions is well documented by both political scientists and sociologists. Scholars of collective action, interest group politics (Olson 1965), and social movements (McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly 2001; Piven and Cloward 1977) have described how organized interests compete for the power to create or dissolve binding laws or administrative rules typically decided upon through bargaining, implemented by agencies, and administered to stakeholders and the general public.
See Fraser (2003) for an overview of the debate on recognition and redistribution.
Fraser (1992) provides an especially useful critique of Habermas (1984). Insightful works on deliberative democracy include Habermas (1998), Cohen and Arato (1992) on civil society, Cohen and Rogers (1995) on secondary associations, and Bonham and Rehg (1997), Benhabib (1996), Elster (1998), and Gutmann and Thompson (1996). Generally speaking, these works are more attuned to developed world settings. Baiocchi (2001, 2003, 2005), Santos (2005), Avritzer (2002), and Heller and Isaac (2005) all provide excellent adaptations of deliberative democratic theory to the developing world.
In September 2006, the Government of Indonesia announced that KDP would become a full nation-wide program, covering essentially every village in Indonesia as a central component of the government’s development strategy (see Jakarta Post 2006).
See Barron, Diprose, Madden, Smith, and Woolcock (2004) for a more detailed description of the sampling methodology for the overall study.
Research teams made the determination about high- and low-capacity districts through extensive consultations with provincial government officials, international and local NGOs, regional development experts, university faculty, and KDP staff. See Barron, Diprose, Madden, Smith, and Woolcock (2004) for further details.
The propensity score is a statistical measure designed to calculate the probability of a given household or village being selected for inclusion in a program (for an introduction, see Baker 2000). The score was estimated using the PODES (1996) dataset. PODES, which stands for Pontesi Desa (Village Potential), is a key informant survey administered every two years by BPS (Statistics Indonesia), which contains information on each of some 60,000 villages in Indonesia. The actual propensity score was derived using explanatory variables that could serve as proxies for the economic level of the kecamatan. Among the PODES variables used were population, access to urban facilities such as markets, hospitals, department stores, health and education resources, main source of income, perception of poverty level, etc. These are all “observable” factors, but to control for “unobservable” factors (e.g., motivation, cohesion, leadership) we used the propensity score to select three statistically comparable non-KDP (“control”) villages in each kecamatan, and then asked our field research team to identify which of these was, in their view, the most appropriate match for the KDP (“treatment”) village.
This helped control for unobserved variables, which propensity score matching techniques alone cannot.
Although this case selection strategy is made possible by the matches provided by matching the propensity score, a more intuitive justification for this strategy is that it upholds the implicit logic of the “possibility principle” of negative case selection, outlined by Mahoney and Goertz (2004). That is, our selection strategy generates “negative” cases or comparison cases (e.g., cases of conflict from villages in which the KDP does not occur) in which the outcomes of interest (e.g., transformative and partially transformative power relations) are nevertheless possible.
This discussion is adapted from the original case study by Probo and Rasyid (2003).
This discussion is adapted from Anggraini (2003).
This discussion is adapted from the original case study, Ashari (2003).
Santri are typically Islam students, many of whom study in pondok pesantren, or Islamic boarding schools, under the guidance of kyai, or Islamic clerics. In this case, santri includes nonresident students and convocants, who attended and sometimes described themselves as having deep spiritual bonds to kyai.
We arrived at this qualitative assessment through the dialogue between theory and evidence, which defines comparative-historical analysis (see Mahoney and Rueschemeyer 2003).
We are not surprised that exploitation was never contested, since such a sweeping outcome is not likely to occur or be observable during the relatively short time periods we capture in the cases.
Explanatory variables at a “secondary level” (here, spaces, incentives, resources) are causes of the main outcome under investigation (here, transformation of power relations) “but their effects cannot be understood independently of their relationship with the causal factors at the basic level” (here, mobilizational and deliberative contestation). (Goertz and Mahoney 2005: 498)
KDP provides an anonymous complaints mechanism, whereby participants can report such circumventions of program requirements. Although the housewives did not use it in this case, many other groups did use it in our other cases. In some of these, anonymous complaints led to the removal of FDs and FKs.
Not surprisingly, given its growing profile in the development community, KDP has begun to generate a small (though not especially compelling) critical literature; see, for example, Carroll (2006), whose hard-line critique otherwise seems to stand on arguments that KDP delivers valued goods and services, has little corruption, and is popular. Li (2007) leverages an interesting critique grounded in Foucauldian theory of governmentality, which nevertheless draws on surprisingly little in the way of actual data on KDP’s on-the-ground processes.
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This article is part of a larger study on local-level conflict and participatory development projects in Indonesia. For generous financial assistance, we are grateful to DfID, AusAID, the Norwegian Trust Fund (Measuring Empowerment Study), the World Bank’s Conflict Prevention and Reconstruction Unit, and Development Economics Vice Presidency (Research Support Budget). Patrick Barron, Claire Smith, Rachael Diprose, and Adam Satu 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.
An erratum to this article can be found at http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s12116-008-9022-z
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Gibson, C., Woolcock, M. Empowerment, Deliberative Development, and Local-Level Politics in Indonesia: Participatory Projects as a Source of Countervailing Power. St Comp Int Dev 43, 151–180 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12116-008-9021-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12116-008-9021-0