David Mosse

Authority, gender and knowledge: theoretical reflections on the practice of participatory rural appraisal

Participatory rural appraisal (PRA) methods are increasingly taken up by public sector organizations as well as NGOs among whom they have been pioneered. While PRA methods are successfully employed in a variety of project planning situations, and with increasing sophistication, in some contexts the practice of PRA faces constraints. This article examines the constraints as experienced in the early stages of one project, and suggests some more general issues to which these point. In particular, it is suggested that, as participatory exercises, PRAs involve ‘public’ social events which construct ‘local knowledge’ in ways that are strongly influenced by existing social relationships. It suggests that information for planning is shaped by relations of power and gender, and by the investigators themselves; and that certain kinds of knowledge are often excluded. Finally, the paper suggests that as a method for articulating existing local knowledge, PRA needs to be complemented by other methods of ‘participation’ which generate the changed awareness and new ways of knowing, which are necessary to locally-controlled innovation and change.

The Symbolic Making of a Common Property Resource: History, Ecology and Locality in a Tank‐irrigated Landscape in South India

Today there is a pervasive policy consensus in favour of ‘community management’ approaches to common property resources such as forests and water. This is endorsed and legitimized by theories of collective action which, this article argues, produce distinctively ahistorical and apolitical constructions of ‘locality’, and impose a narrow definition of resources and economic interest. Through an historical and ethnographic exploration of indigenous tank irrigation systems in Tamil Nadu, the article challenges the economic-institutional modelling of common property systems in terms of sets of rules and co-operative equilibrium outcomes internally sustained by a structure of incentives. The article argues for a more historically and politically grounded understanding of resources, rights and entitlements and, using Bourdieus notion of ‘symbolic capital’, argues for a reconception of common property which recognizes symbolic as well as material interests and resources. Tamil tank systems are viewed not only as sources of irrigation water, but as forming part of a village ‘public domain’ through which social relations are articulated, reproduced and challenged. But the symbolic ‘production of locality’ to which water systems contribute is also shaped by local ecology. The paper examines the historical and cultural production of two distinctive ‘cultural ecologies’. This serves to illustrate the fusion of ecology and social identity, place and person, in local conceptions, and to challenge a currently influential thesis on the ecological-economic determinants of collective action. In short, development discourse and local actors are seen to have very different methods and purposes in the ‘production of locality’. Finally, the article points to some practical implications of this for strategies of ‘local institutional development’ in irrigation.

A Relational Approach to Durable Poverty, Inequality and Power

Abstract The article argues for what can be called a ‘relational’ approach to poverty: one that first views persistent poverty as the consequence of historically developed economic and political relations, and second, that emphasises poverty and inequality as an effect of social categorisation and identity, drawing in particular on the experience of adivasis (‘tribals’) and dalits (‘untouchables’) subordinated in Indian society. The approach follows Charles Tillys Durable Inequality in combining Marxian ideas of exploitation and dispossession with Weberian notions of social closure. The article then draws on the work of Steven Lukes, Pierre Bourdieu and Arjun Appadurai to argue for the need to incorporate a multidimensional conception of power; including not only power as the direct assertion of will but also ‘agenda-setting power’ that sets the terms in which poverty becomes (or fails to become) politicised, and closely related to power as political representation. This sets the basis for discussion of the politics of poverty and exclusion.

Encountering Order and Disjuncture: Contemporary Anthropological Perspectives on the Organization of Development

ion separate from the social order it governs is shown historically to be grounded in particular interests and events, contingency, violence and exclusion. 4 Kothari (2005) found, when interviewing with former colonial administrators, a distain shown by this older generation of “development workers” to the growing professionalization of expertise among the world of NGOs, agencies and consultants of today.

Collective Action, Common Property, and Social Capital in South India: An Anthropological Commentary

This article uses detailed research on common property and collective action in an ancient south Indian water resource system to highlight the different objectives, modes of analysis, explanation, and generalization of economists and anthropologists. The article does not try to resolve these differences but goes on to use the south Indian case to show how a recent attempt to deploy “social capital” as a unified socioeconomic concept—one that attends both to anthropologists’ interest in social relationships and to economists’ concern to identify central trends and general patterns through regressions by isolating “the social” as a variable generating aggregable data—is highly problematic.

Colonial and contemporary ideologies of community management: the case of tank irrigation development in South India

This is an essay in the sociology of knowledge. It aims to demonstrate, firstly, how development institutions construct rural society in terms of organizational imperatives, and secondly, how these ‘constructions’ come to be underpinned by social theory. The focus is on irrigation in south India and colonial and contemporary state policy initiatives to promote local institutions for the community management of decentralized resource systems. The essay presents the social and historical origin of an important and powerful set of contemporary policy ideas. The significance of this lies in the continuing misperception of local institutions of resource management, and in particular the systematic isolation of resource management from its particular social and historical context.

Power and the Durability of Poverty: A Critical Exploration of the Links between Culture, Marginality and Chronic Poverty

Building on approaches that adopt what might be called a ‘relational’ approach to poverty, and using recurring case-studies from India, this paper examines poverty as an outcome of the historical and contemporary dynamics of capitalism – including processes of accumulation, dispossession, differentiation and exploitation; but equally, considers the social mechanisms, categories and identities which perpetuate inequality and facilitate relations of exploitation. The paper adopts an approach (drawing on Charles Tilly) that combines an examination of exploitation with Weberian ideas of social closure. In this way, the paper aims to show that ‘adverse incorporation’ and ‘social exclusion’ are not alternative or competing frameworks: the excluded are simultaneously dominated and excluded.A second aim is to integrate a multi-dimensional understanding of power – as domination, patronage, and political representation – into the analysis of poverty, drawing on the work of Steven Lukes, Pierre Bourdieu, and Arjun Appadurai; and a third aim is to see how incorporating power can help analyse different approaches to poverty reduction ranging from anti-poverty programmes and political decentralisation to mainstream party political processes.In developing the argument the paper focuses on the interlocking circumstances of chronically poor cultivators living in deforested uplands, indebted migrant casual labourers on the urban fringes, and the social identities of adivasis and dalits (‘tribals’ and ‘untouchables’) subordinated in Indian society. This both highlights particular spatial and social inequalities in India, and reflects on the cultural construction of power; its effects on material well-being and agency, and on the opportunities and constraints in struggles for political representation.

Epilogue: The Cultural Politics of Water – A Comparative Perspective

This special issue illustrates the broadening social science interest in water. In particular it shows the importance of regional research perspectives on the emerging ‘water crisis’, which is a complex set of resource use problems that cannot properly be addressed within the confines of economics, hydrology and engineering sciences. At the same time, the collection highlights the significance of the social study of water itself to Africanist scholarship. It demonstrates that water shares the complexity of land (from which it is rarely separable) as a medium of meaning and material relations, while adding movement and the dimension of time and process to the relationality that is inherent in space.1 In cases that deal with a variety of water-human-land relations, these articles take up the conceptual challenge that Joost Fontein poses in the introduction: ‘to use the study of water as a means of cutting a new path between the pitfalls of environmental determinism and then extremes of social constructivism

Knowledge as Relational: Reflections on Knowledge in International Development

In this debate article I want to raise some questions about how we think about knowledge in the encounters of international development, and the kinds of knowledge or knowledge practices of the different actors involved. Göran Hyden (this issue) has set out some broad changes in the understanding of what needs to known for development, and the demands of a contemporary shift away from donor-driven models of knowledge and accountability. This requires also that we re-think the function and purposes of knowledge in development. My principal point is that knowledge has to be understood as a relationship, rather than as simply instrumental, and that knowledge-relationships can be rather unpredictable in their effects. This has implications for how we understand development encounters, as well as the processes within agencies and institutions, and takes us beyond the earlier ‘principal-agent’ (Hyden, this issue) framings of development as ‘dominating knowledge’ (Hobart, 1993) or its interfaces as ‘battlefields of knowledge’ (Long and Long, 1992), as well as counterpart ideas of ‘local knowledge’ or participatory development alternatives. I take the special issue title – ‘knowing development/developing knowledge’ – as my guide for a discussion in 2 parts. I begin with ‘knowing development’, which raises questions about ‘development’ itself as a category. Here I want to use a project example to do 2 things. The first is to look at development conceived as problem-solving knowledge and problem-solving technology, that is as an intentional process. I will illustrate the continuing challenge of deriving relevant knowledge for local interventions, even amidst the profusion of methodologies, especially participatory ones that Robert Chambers (this issue) among others has promoted. Second, I will look at development encounters in terms of a set of knowledge effects that are not explicitly intended and are to do with changing social relationships. The distinction between development as a set of intentions and as social effects relates to one Cowen and Shenton (1996) draw between, on the one hand, development as imminent action, that is development as doing, human creativity and will, and on the other, development as immanent process, that is something that happens despite intention. In the second part of the article, I turn to the other title phrase ‘developing knowledge’. Here again I am interested in the nature of development policy knowledge; not

Rule and Representation: Transformations in the Governance of the Water Commons in British South India

IN HIS RULE OF EXPERTS: Egypt, Techno-politics, Modernity (2002), Timothy Mitchell offers fresh insight into the nature of colonial and postcolonial state power by clarifying the complex relationship between rule and representation. He demonstrates how policy universals, which appear as rational abstractions separate from the social order they govern (as the rule of law, private property, or the economy), can be shown to be historically grounded in particular interests and events, contingencies, violence, and exclusions. The apparent logic, universality, and coherence of these ideas, as well as the expertise and rational design that they call forth, are not inherent, but are produced through the messiness of contingent actions which succeed in concealing social practice by effecting the separation of ideas and their objects: a bifurcation of representation and reality that is characteristic of the modern world. Mitchell addresses a key dilemma in the study of colonialism: the dramatic social and environmental changes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries cannot be made sense of in terms of the rationalizing principles of colonial rule, yet imperial systems of knowledge have had a lasting impact on social and physical systems. Drawing on these ideas, this article will illustrate how colonial rule in India did not involve the assertion of the rule of law, administrative code, or science over kingship, community, or nature. The principles of property, revenue, or law did not constitute a preformed conceptual structure of rule imposed from the outside, but were worked out through compromise and contingent action in a variety of areas such as altered revenue demands, property disputes, engineered technology, and court decisions—not as the application of policy principle, but as selective, arbitrary, local actions and exceptions which wrought change not by their own logic, but through the rupture and contradiction that they effected in the existing social and political systems (Mitchell 2002, 77).