Exploring social mobilisation and participation and the potential for social change in contexts of tradition-bound social exclusion

Abstract

Empowerment of the disadvantaged and the marginalised in a society is one of the inherent commitments of meaningful social mobilisation, both in theory and practice. One of the core aspects of social mobilisation is to engage with relations of power and reorganise them in favour of the disadvantaged. For a marginalised group in a community, this requires the capacity to define their goals and the environment or the freedom (to act) to achieve those goals – an aspect referred to in development literature as collective agency. Collective agency transforms into collective action when the interests of several social actors converge and lead to voluntary engagement to achieve a common cause. Community organisations, established through a process of social mobilisation, are increasingly viewed as a mechanism in community development to create collective agency, spur collective action and empower lower-status groups or the disadvantaged.However, some empirical studies conducted to scrutinise the potential of social mobilisation and community development programs have pointed to the risk of strengthening the traditional unequal relations of power instead of challenging them. They have also noted the potential for elite-capture of the spaces created through social mobilisation processes. In these respects, a gap between theory and practice was identified, namely, that the perceptions, viewpoints and experiences of the disadvantaged and the most marginalised at the grassroot level who are directly or indirectly affected by social mobilisation and community development programs are generally underexplored. Moreover, it was also realised that the success of social mobilisation programs is generally measured in terms of input versus output analysis rather than exploring their transformative potential and their impact on the overall power configuration in a social structure. The current research goes some way towards addressing this gap by exploring the relationship between social mobilisation, participation and social change and the processes involved in these strategies in the context of elite-based, tradition-bound and exclusionary decision-making and governance arrangements. \xa0The research employed a qualitative case study method and involved document analysis, observation and interviews as instruments to explore and analyse people’s perceptions and experiences in relation to the empowerment potential of a ‘three-tier social mobilisation strategy’[1] spearheaded by the Rural Support Programmes Network (RSPN)[2] in Chitral, a North-western rural district in the province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP), Pakistan. The study specifically focused upon whether and how RSPN’s social mobilisation strategy has contributed to re-shaping traditional patterns of elite-based decision-making into more inclusive, participatory and democratic processes for social change.The study findings show that the community spaces created by RSPN do not truly represent the disadvantaged and the marginalised community. Instead, they have emerged as elite-captured formal entities. These organisations are used by their leaders (members of elite groups) for social exclusion of the disadvantaged and as means to conceal persistent power inequalities and to influence broader governance structures to meet their vested interests. Therefore, the empowerment potential of the socio-economic resources invested in or through these spaces was found to be limited.The study findings reveal that certain aspects embedded in the three-tier social mobilisation strategy, such as elite-based recruitment of community activists, project-bounded social activism and savings-focused community participation, allow members of elite groups to re-institutionalise their power. This, in turn, enables elites to capture new institutional spaces created by RSPN. The study found that outright capture of newly created community spaces by elites, the concentration of development funds in these organisations together with the ‘civic habitus’ shaped as a result of the people’s lived experiences of oppression, marginalisation and social exclusion, lead them to comply with the regime of power strategically – a phenomenon referred to as ‘strategic compliance’ in this study. The study findings further show that these conditions encourage the elites to extend their power both within the three-tiered organisational structures (provided by RSPN) and beyond, into external spaces such as local and District Council offices and even into provincial and federal parliaments.Overall, I conclude that intermittent, resource-focused mobilisation, bounded by project targets framed around limited tangible outcomes as goals of community development, is not only open to elite-capture but may provide institutional frameworks (organisational structures and processes) favourable to elites, further amplifying social exclusion of the less-powerful, as well as reproducing traditional relations of power and, ultimately, hindering future prospects for social change.[1] The term refers specifically to the RSPN strategy and any subsequent use of the term in the text will be in that context.[2] RSPN (http://www.rspn.org/) is a development network of ten member Rural Support Programmes (RSPs), operating independently, espousing a common approach to development centred upon social mobilisation. Throughout the thesis I distinguish between RSPN (the organisational network) and individual or multiple RSPs, as appropriate. \u200b\u200b\u200b\u200b\u200b\u200b\u200b