Retheorizing Empowerment‐through‐Participation as a Performance in Space: Beyond Tyranny to Transformation

Abstract

to Transformation W hile participatory approaches emanate from a range of political per- spectives and traditions and are not inherently feminist, they can offer one means to a practical feminist politics.Participatory approaches aspire to reduce and circumvent the power relations normally involved in research and development and to take the notion of giving the marginalized a voice to new levels by facilitating their involvement in the design, implementation, and outcomes of programs.A substantial literature suggests that by redistributing power and establishing more reciprocal relationships between "insiders" and "outsiders," participatory approaches build ordinary people's capacity to analyze and transform their lives and thus provide one practical means to facilitate empowerment (see, e.g., Chambers 1994Chambers , 1997)).Amid the plethora of largely positive accounts, Participation: The New Tyranny?(Cooke and Kothari 2001b) stands out as a critical challenge to established interpretations.Contributors argue forcefully that the term participation is being mobilized to serve a wide variety of political agendas, many of which are not very radical; that participatory approaches can impose, not overcome, power relations when "delivered" as a technocratic cargo; that practitioners have erroneously imagined local communities as discrete and socially homogeneous; that "local knowledge" has been romanticized, intracommunity divisions underemphasized, and the positive contribution of external agents under-1 Michel Foucault's notion of the "polyvalence" ([1976] 1978, 101) of discourses can help explain the many manifestations of the concept of participation.Adapting a term that in chemistry expresses an element's ability to differentially combine with other elements, Foucault neatly describes how the same discourse can be deployed in ways that achieve quite different effects.