Samuel Hickey - Böcker

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-BC-ND 4.0 International License. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations.The puzzle of why some countries are wealthier and more developed than others continues to confound students and practitioners of development alike. Whereas earlier grand explanations focused on issues of 'geography' or 'institutions', the second decade of the 21st century finally saw 'politics' arrive centre-stage within international development. This catalyzed a search to answer the key question: under what conditions do governments become committed to and capable of delivering development? How can these processes be conceptualized and researched? And what (if anything) can be done to 'get the politics right' for development?Pathways to Development draws on a major comparative research effort to present new answers to the question of how politics shapes development. It develops and applies a 'power domains' framework across multiple countries in the global South to uncover the political drivers of development across a wide range of policy areas, including economic growth, gender equity, health, and education. Hickey and Sen find that a country's pathway to development is shaped less by institutional type than by the nature of the politics and power relations that underpinned these institutions and which shape how they actually function in practice within different policy domains. Comparative analysis reveals two alternative pathways to developmental outcomes, each of which is specific to particular configurations of power. The first involves a dominant ruling coalition with a strong developmental vision that faces an existential threat from social forces; the second involves competitive settlements within which the short-term vision of ruling elites and the politicization of the public bureaucracy are offset by the presence of strong and coherent coalitions within particular policy domains. Hickey and Sen use these insights to generate innovative, practical suggestions for policy actors seeking to promote inclusive development that are aligned to critical differences in political context.

Participation has established itself as a significant approach to project implementation, policy-making and governance in developing and developed countries alike. Recently, however, it has become fashionable to dismiss participation as more rhetoric than substance, and subject to manipulation by agencies and social change agents intent simply on pursuing their own agendas under cover of community consent. In this important new volume, development and other social policy scholars and practitioners seek to rebut this simplistic conclusion, while addressing the problems of power and politics which have beset some approaches to participation. They describe and analyse new experiments in participation from a wide diversity of social contexts that show how, far from being a redundant and depoliticizing concept, participation can -- given certain conditions -- be linked to genuinely transformative processes and outcomes for marginalized communities and people.This volume is the first comprehensive attempt to evaluate the state of participatory approaches in the aftermath of the 'Tyranny' critique. It captures the recent convergence between participatory development and participatory governance, and spans the range of institutional actors involved in these approaches - the state, civil society and donor agencies. It places participatory interventions in a political context, and links them directly to issues of popular agency. The volume embeds participation within contemporary advances in development theory and proposes theoretical and practical ways forward for relocating participation as a genuinely transformative approach.Scholars and practitioners alike, and from a diversity of disciplines and community and development agencies, are likely to find this volume a theoretically illuminating and practically useful source of ideas about how participation can achieve concrete liberatory outcomes.

Participation has established itself as a significant approach to project implementation, policy-making and governance in developing and developed countries alike. Recently, however, it has become fashionable to dismiss participation as more rhetoric than substance, and subject to manipulation by agencies and social change agents intent simply on pursuing their own agendas under cover of community consent. In this important new volume, development and other social policy scholars and practitioners seek to rebut this simplistic conclusion, while addressing the problems of power and politics which have beset some approaches to participation. They describe and analyse new experiments in participation from a wide diversity of social contexts that show how, far from being a redundant and depoliticizing concept, participation can -- given certain conditions -- be linked to genuinely transformative processes and outcomes for marginalized communities and people.This volume is the first comprehensive attempt to evaluate the state of participatory approaches in the aftermath of the 'Tyranny' critique. It captures the recent convergence between participatory development and participatory governance, and spans the range of institutional actors involved in these approaches - the state, civil society and donor agencies. It places participatory interventions in a political context, and links them directly to issues of popular agency. The volume embeds participation within contemporary advances in development theory and proposes theoretical and practical ways forward for relocating participation as a genuinely transformative approach.Scholars and practitioners alike, and from a diversity of disciplines and community and development agencies, are likely to find this volume a theoretically illuminating and practically useful source of ideas about how participation can achieve concrete liberatory outcomes.