Abstract
This chapter disentangles conceptualisations of the civil society - frequently denoted “community” in the field. It demonstrates how competing conceptualisations of civil society made participation challenging for municipal administrators. It further shows how bureaucracies dealt with the uncertainties and complexities associated with participation by creating a subset of the civil society (representatives) and ensuring that the right people formed part of this subset.
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Notes
- 1.
In this thesis, the MDFs are understood as the partial organization of civil society, with the term civil society referring to organised and non-organised non-state and non-market actors in a country (see Chapter 1) (see also Cornwall et al., 2011: 9; Eberlei, 2014: 6). In the field of development interventions, and thus also in this case study, actors often speak of “community” rather than “citizens” or “civil society”. “Community” is in this thesis interpreted as referring to the citizens of a specific locality, namely the urban centres where TSUPU’s and USMID’s development interventions were implemented. The terms “civil society”, “community” and “citizens” are used interchangeably throughout this chapter.
- 2.
The logframe is a common project management element in the planning and formulation of development interventions. It specifies the project logic, linking means and ends through a logical chain. The logframe is usually presented as a matrix of rows and columns specifying, for example, project goals, outputs, activities and inputs in the rows and indicators of achievement, means of verification and assumptions in the columns. Project goals are often connected to national and/or international development objectives.
- 3.
Of course, municipal administrators also speak about who belongs to the community. Predominantly, they speak about stakeholder groups, which is donor jargon and shows the dominance of donor concepts even in the language of municipal bureaucrats.
- 4.
Depicting citizens as not “enlightened” is reminiscent of early colonial conceptualisations of non-European peoples as cannibals, uncivilised, unreasonable, akin in their behaviour to wild animals (see Hall, 1994) and thus represents a striking use of colonialist terminology by this municipal bureaucrat.
- 5.
Right and wrong are not clear-cut containers into which citizens can be sorted. There are inconsistencies and contradictions in the ways municipal administrators conceptualise communities.
- 6.
As mentioned in Section 4.2.1 (Understanding Participation as a Tool for Monitoring), USMID’s programme document abbreviates the forums as “MF” instead of “MDF”.
- 7.
The classifications ‘cultural groups’ or ‘cultural institutions’ refer to the different kingdoms, chiefdoms and ethnic groups that make up the Ugandan territory and which continue to play an important role in shaping the identity and values of Ugandan citizens.
- 8.
[Municipality] is used where the interviewee named a specific municipality that should remain anonymous but was not amongst the three municipalities where field research was carried out, wherefore no pseudonym was established.
- 9.
In this quote, the town clerk of B-Ville spoke about the MDF in A-Town, where she had previously held the position of town clerk. Throughout the interview, she spoke of her experiences in both municipalities.
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Schindler, E.M. (2021). Organising Civil Society by Building Membership. In: Structuring People. Sozialwissenschaftliche Zugänge zu Afrika. Springer VS, Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-35903-4_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-35903-4_5
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