Participate! A critical investigation into the relationship between participation and empowerment in design for development

  • ‘Participatory facilitators’ are often perceived as ‘outsiders’
  • “one may even argue that our efforts are unethical and indeed neocolonialist in nature.”
  • what is it to help, to assume they don’t have the capacity themselves
  • ‘Empowering to’ or ‘empowering through’ no real consistent meaning of empowerment
  • considered top-down and bottom-up approaches rather than aimless loose bottom-up as default
  • what are we changing and why, what dynamic are we introducing to an existing community
  • need more initial contextual research
  • ‘symbolic violence’
  • lost in translation

  • “designers can benefit from a reality-check on our assumption that participatory methods and empowerment go hand in hand” ⤴️

  • “the effects of words on policy and research m” ⤴️

  • “knowing when and where participatory methods are appropriate and beneficial, to better understand the limitations of their methods and hopefully how they can be adjusted for the intended purpose of long term sustainable development for the communities involved.” ⤴️

  • “this article discusses participatory design literature and projects in light of the critical discourse taking place in development theory.” ⤴️

  • “purpose to improve the quality of design for development projects as well as design for marginalized and vulnerable groups.” ⤴️

  • “Participatory methods are regarded as empowering and ethically defensible” ⤴️

  • “Participatory methods are seen as appropriate and efficient ways to identify people’s desires as a basis for development and innovation, as well as an ethically appropriate research tool” ⤴️

  • “question if the link between participatory methods and empowerment are as obvious as they seem in theory; a theory developed from a ‘western’ perspective.” ⤴️

  • “designers strategies need to become more transparent and consistent on this area” ⤴️

  • “review elements of criticism against participatory methods” ⤴️

  • “Participatory Rural Assessment (PRA) originating from the critical pedagogy of Paolo Freire [1]and further advocated by Robert Chambers [2, 3], will represent the participatory method known to development practitioners.” ⤴️

  • “the importance of semantic coherence” ⤴️

  • “I realize I cannot achieve the ‘idea flow’ that I had been used to from the sessions in Delft; or even conduct anything close to a brainstorm the way I want.” ⤴️

  • “The participants keep referring to me as “the design expert from Norway”, looking at me for approval for their answers.” ⤴️

  • “the possibility of a question having several answers is an opinion I do not share with the participants” ⤴️

  • “I even start questioning if we have the same view on the benefits of participation.” ⤴️

  • “trying to implement a different world order of bottom-up, empowering approaches into the existing international development strategies.” ⤴️

  • “I would argue for the continuation of applying such methods but keeping an ear open to criticism and adapt our methods concurringly.” ⤴️

  • ”. ‘Quick and dirty’ participatory tools produce fast data and visual representation with few financial means, something that is often a necessity for designers who are expected to focus a large part of their energy on innovative product solutions.” ⤴️

  • “Participatory Rapid Assessment (PRA) techniques advocated by Robert Chambers are used by development practitioners internationally[3], and recommend the following principles for PRA facilitators: “the reversal of learning”, “learning rapidly and progressively”, “offsetting biases”, “optimizing tradeoffs”, “triangulation”, “seeking diversity”, “they do it”, “self-critical awareness”, “personal responsibility” and “sharing”.” ⤴️

  • “the benefits of being able to use tools that enhance oral communication, such as pictures, symbols and physical objects.” ⤴️

  • “participatory methods can be traced back to old English colonial rule; developed for the purpose of decentralized governance[10] A” ⤴️

  • “participatory methods can be used in a manipulative way by large international development actors to decrease local resistance to foreign interventions.” ⤴️

  • “critically review to which extent our participatory development activities actually fulfill the promised objectives;” ⤴️

  • “generally failed because they have tended to ignore questions about inclusiveness, the role of change agents and the personal behavior of elites” ⤴️

  • “ignore, questions of legitimacy, justice and power in pursuit of consensus”” ⤴️

  • “Lack of sufficient understanding power-relations in a context;” ⤴️

  • “the facilitator being an outsider that interferes with motivation and social power structures a” ⤴️

  • “decisions and motivations shift within groups and corrupt the individuals viewpoint.” ⤴️

  • “the language used by participatory development authors reflects certain power relations and inherited world-views.” ⤴️

  • “poverty and inequality are in themselves obstacles to realizing any of the potential offered by participatory development[” ⤴️

  • “words that once spoke of politics and power have come to be reconfigured in the service of today’s onesize-fits-all development recipes, spun into an apoliticised form that everyone can agree with. A” ⤴️

  • “Participatory orthodoxy’ is strongly neocolonialist by nature,” ⤴️

  • “‘community’, ‘village’, ‘local people’ are all words derived from colonial anthropology a” ⤴️

  • “language that splits in two: the disempowered (them) from the empowered (us), the western versus the developing world,” ⤴️

  • “Bourdieu’s warning that research can inflict ‘symbolic violence’ through the misunderstanding and misrepresentation of the participants[” ⤴️

  • “how valid are our results when facilitating multi- ethnic groups in foreign languages in an cultural context far from ours?” ⤴️

  • “an increasing tendency to apply PRA in research and relief operations including disaster victims and displaced persons, contexts where the meaning of ‘identity’ and social power relations is extremely complex [” ⤴️

  • “skepticism of the validity of insights and degree of misunderstandings possible from such processes” ⤴️

  • “the process of participation is not universal”” ⤴️

  • “the problem of assuming that anyone can map people’s needs in such a quick and routine-like way: “Does the routinisation of PRA[..] contradict or divert the original aim of giving more voice and control to the rural poor? Have PRA/RRA enthusiasts forgotten that social scientists long ago regularly used such projective devices as mental mapping and informant-based social ranking?” ⤴️

  • “forcing social scientists to work like economists and accountants is part of the problem, not part of the solution!”” ⤴️

  • “workshops are often conducted with time limits of a week or two, from which ideas are drawn for concept development. Is this sufficient when aiming for long-term sustainability and context dependent objectives s” ⤴️

  • ”. She presented herself as a researcher. The first time the focus group showed her their houses, they tried to show her the best houses” ⤴️

  • “the rumor when she arrived had it that she was a rich American investor looking for property. The second time, they had found out that she was from Norway, possibly with development money in her pocket.” ⤴️

  • “‘Participatory facilitators’ are often perceived as ‘outsiders’ just like this surveyor, and are perceived as someone who can use their position and authority to override existing decision- making processes within the community [” ⤴️

  • “the groups constructed will have different motivations for joining, different expectations and different cultural context for understanding participation.” ⤴️

  • “Researchers have often found it useful to distinguish between different types of empowerment. Zimmermann [25] for example describes psychological empowerment as a potential within the individual, while Ife[26] focuses also on top-down conditions for empowerment” ⤴️

  • “the relevance of looking at interaction between the individual and the community, which from a foucauldian perspective can be seen as more relevant, since power “exists only as exercised by some on others, only when it is put into action” [” ⤴️

  • “how the individual empowerment can increase decision power” ⤴️

  • “one may even argue that our efforts are unethical and indeed neocolonialist in nature.” ⤴️

  • what don’t they have access to already? why is it they’d need facilitation?

  • “‘Empowering to’ or ‘empowering through’ How is the word actually used in a specific context? T” ⤴️

  • “claims that empowerment is qualitative and hard to measure, while later on uses a definition that describes a quantitative result of an empowerment process.” ⤴️

  • “the over excessive use of words such as ‘empowerment’ and ‘participatory development’ results in an uncritical use of the terms and uncritical relationship to their meaning.” ⤴️

  • “the women expressed to her the dissatisfaction of not getting to go to the factory anymore. At the factory they had met with other women, learned about what was happening in the community. Now that the machine had been redesigned, they stayed at home while working,” ⤴️

  • “designers should spend time with users in the users’ own environments rather than focus on tests in laboratories, and (3) that decisions should be made democratically with the participants rather by the designers alone[” ⤴️

  • “children can be empowered by gaining confidence through experiencing that adult designers are interested in knowing their opinions and being able to express thoughts and ideas.” ⤴️

  • “Is this case study illustrating the effect of participatory design methods on psychological empowerment? Or is it a result of a longer term presence and inter-personal relationship between the researcher and the informant, known from ethnographic and anthropological research?” ⤴️

  • “Real empowerment means that we increase someone’s power, which depends on both top-down and bottom-up approaches[26] to change while design for capabilities is focused on the individual and perhaps already assuming that the individual has the opportunity to do what they are capable of.” ⤴️

  • “more inclusion either of multi-disciplinary teams or longer, more personally committed, needs assessments.” ⤴️

  • ““most development projects fail to show any effect on empowerment. While sensitivity to diversity and inequalities is implied in politics and theories of participatory development, in practice no fundamental changes in the economic, social and political structures that govern disadvantaged people’s lives are effected[8]” and there should be a system in place for monitoring the effects of such toolboxes on a larger scale.” ⤴️

  • “the trap of using so-called ‘chains of equivalence’[32]; a habit of linking certain words together to give a certain meaning without furthering questioning their relationship.” ⤴️

  • ““The fine-sounding words that are used in development policies do more than provide a sense of direction: they lend the legitimacy that development actors need to justify their interventions[” ⤴️

  • “‘participation’ has historically been used both to enable ordinary people to gain political agency and as a means of maintaining relations of rule, for neutralizing political opposition” ⤴️

  • “it is therefore important to pick a definition that includes an understanding that bottom-up and top-down changes are relevant for our design projects.” ⤴️

  • “be more precise about the benefits and limitations of our tools” ⤴️

  • “reflect more extensively upon whether the current participatory design tools are sufficient to understand and achieve empowerment in design for development and marginalized groups” ⤴️

  • “Work towards a research based understanding of how our design projects shall contribute to empowerment based on the understanding that empowerment requires transformation.” ⤴️

  • “Ethnographic interviews or other inter- disciplinary approaches may be more suitable to “understand the complex behavior of members of society without imposing any a priori categorization that may limit the field of inquiry.”(Fontana and Frey 2005)” ⤴️

  • “Stronger focus on the background research and creating sustainable local partnerships” ⤴️

  • “Defining what type of empowerment is referred to and when and how it shall be measured and when (qualitative or quantitative)” ⤴️

  • “transparent monitoring and evaluation systems f” ⤴️