(4) Participation
“Every person and all peoples are entitled to participate in, contribute to and enjoy civil, economic, social and political development in which all human rights and fundamental freedoms can be fully realised.”
United Nations Declaration on the Right to Development, 1986, art 1
Seeing all people as rights-holders in itself means participation is not a choice, but mandatory. All individuals have a right to active, free and meaningful participation in all stages of the development process. This moves beyond the utilitarian notion of participation as essential for effective project outcomes. It also qualifies the scope of participation. Participation is not consultation: it must provide real opportunities to participate in and influence the agenda, process and implementation of development. Essentially it demands a “mutual decision making process, where different actors share power and set agendas jointly” (Veneklasen, Miller, Clark and Reilly, 2004).
Participation also invokes other obligations: to strengthen people‘s capacity to engage fully in the process and ensure an enabling environment to make it possible for people to develop and express their full potential. This refers to, for example, adequate access to information, adequate organisational capacities, supportive space and time to participate. Also, the HRBA prioritises participation for the most impoverished and excluded.
In the HRBA, the process of achieving goals is as important as the goals themselves. Thus supporting increased capacity for effective, free and meaningful participation becomes itself a key development goal. Participation is also critical as a means of ensuring accountability of duty-bearers.
For development work, participation requires more than participatory tools and methodologies, it demands that all development workers and participants expand the way we see the world and act within it in our daily life. It challenges decision-making structures and systems within development organisations.
From Principle to Practice
Using techniques that facilitate conversation, suspend judgment, and build trust amongst people can be quite powerful when dealing with a sensitive subject such as gender. Appreciative inquiry focuses on what has been working well. CARE Honduras applied this technique to shape the flow of an internal gender workshop based on “who we are” and “who we want to be”. “Conversation Cafes,” an adaptation of the native American tradition of the “talking stick”, was also introduced to promote conversation without interruption or judgment. Drama was used to introduce the topic of rights-based approaches, leading in to examples of “participation” and how to foster it internally and externally. While emphasising the “freedom to be heard,” participants told stories of successful relationships between men and women, creating a sense of connection and shared power between staff.
Principles into Practice: Learning from innovative rights-based programmes
CARE (2005)
In practice, we have seen the term participation, like empowerment, grossly misused and manipulated to give legitimacy to pre-determined agendas, while real power remains in the hands of outsiders. Decision-making power must be redistributed to local people for a true participatory agenda. We must also recognise however, the real difficulty in creating a process where communities do in fact communicate their identification of their needs and how they feel they can be met. The more typical practice is that they inform outsiders what they think they want to hear…
