[TLDR (too long didn’t read): This Reader is about the idea of participation being used manipulatively and how this affects human rights. For a quick overview, just read the bolded text].
-When is participation an instrument for manipulation? (Raff Carmen)
1. The world, and society, can indeed be shaped by us. But it is not on our own that we will change anything. The elites, who themselves display the best class solidarity ever, will do anything to ensure that those at the bottom never learn to work together. (Yuval Noah Harari) They have learned to use hypocrisy and keep improving the quality of it. If everything fails, just shoving issues under the carpet is a good tactic for hypocrisy. (Robert Chambers)
2. We have to stop using the UN term ‘shrinking space’ for public interest civil society and instead use the politically more correct notion: we face ‘a limitation of our right to participation’. In fact, we do have the right to participate in governance and this right is being breached. (Ana Maria Suarez-Franco)
3. In this context, the promotion of participatory governance is not about just politely knocking at open doors, but rather about getting the conversation to where it hurts. Yes, we need public interest civil society in governance –at least if you want to get where it hurts. And, to make a difference, we do need to get where it hurts… (G2H2)
4. One thing is all too often forgotten in this: Those who want success, those who want to achieve something, must organize themselves, must create/have structures, must have able spokepersons.* Taking to the streets by the thousands is important, it politicizes, it imprints the memory of protesters. But let us acknowledge that achieving something politically significant is more difficult. The lessons to be learned here can best be found with the trade unions that started organizing themselves over a hundred years ago, locally, nationally, globally. Not always with equal success, but to this day, they remain the only credible organizations that can negotiate, that can enforce something, that can bring about true counter-power. (Francine Mestrum)
*: Individual compassion is a great deal less powerful than organized solidarity. (Tikkun) So, truly ambitious change ‘takes a village’.
5. Action for change can only come from awareness. Therefore, all monitoring and evaluation achievements, must be especially judged with regards to the degree of participation being achieved (i.e., representation with a binding character) and with regard to equality and human rights (HR) considerations of the benefits accrued –or not. The central idea, then, is to secure concrete short- and long-term results for claim holders with an initial emphasis on achieving their fastest possible self-awareness so as to quickly engage them in short-term actions for initial impact.
6. Claim holders’ empowerment has nothing to do with a give-and-take endeavor (e.g., struggling for yet a greater fraction for HR funding from a certain budget); it is much more; it relates to creating and exerting a lasting counter-power. It entails an understanding that one has got power and that, the broader the base of one’s exercising this power, the more sustainable the outcome will be. It is actions carried out with commitment and confidence that ultimately reflect empowerment. (Saroj Dhital)
7. So, build up claim holders’ power through: them becoming informed; them sizing the challenges ahead; basing their work on the values of an alternative society (often called value-based strategic planning) and acknowledging their shortcomings so they can arrive at a unified strategic HR-based plan –remembering that planning is essentially a political process; it demands taking sides based on definitive value-based positions.
It is the aggrieved claim holders, suffering violations of their human rights, that are to lead in deciding priority actions
8. In this context, we must call on claim holders (in our case preferably the most marginalized) to organize, mobilize and demand needed changes. Nothing is going to come from ‘government or the state should’. World Bank Reports are full of such calls(!), and look where that has taken us. Assessing claim holders’ capacity to demand is thus part of the broader challenge of rectifying their chronic neglect. In short, any call must be coupled with human rights learning so as to help/contribute to empower claim holders to themselves demand those needed changes. Otherwise, the call will become yet another aspirational letter to Santa Claus.
9. The core issue here is a push and pull question. Only actively ‘pulling’ by claim holders will move the HR cause ahead. UN and other international agencies can do little by ‘pushing’ Member States to commit. History is clear about this.
10. Bottom line, HR are constrained by the competence and determination of claim-holders to impose their justified demands upon duty bearers. What is needed is bottom-up planning, implementation and accountability with claim holders’ inputs!
Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City
Your comments are welcome at schuftan@gmail.com
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