Introduction Participation and Development -Beyond the Impasse?

Abstract

Development is in trouble. Successive waves of ideas, policies, programmes and financial transfers¹ over the past 50 years have yielded meagre results for many of the world’s most marginalised peoples. Much of Asia is said to have been hit by ‘crisis’, Latin America has experienced a ‘lost decade of development’, Russia and Eastern Europe are experiencing the ‘travails of transition’, while Africa has been completely ‘marginalised’ from the global development process (Payne, 2001). While living conditions, prospects and opportunities have improved for some people within these regions, many others have been cut off — economically, socially and politically. Many of these marginalised people, communities and groups are to be found in Africa, where poverty — in all its dimensions — continues to rise. Over 50 years on from the self-proclaimed ‘golden age of development’ (Singer, 1989; Kohler, 1995) some 300 million African people, almost half the continent’s population, survive on less than $1 a day (UNDP, 2006: 269). With the growing marginalisation and sense of powerlessness this engenders, global development thinking and practice has come to be characterised more by ‘impasse’ (Schuurman, 1993; Booth, 1994) than by sustainable achievement.