Sarah C. White

Depoliticising development: the uses and abuses of participation

Participation must be seen as political. There are always tensions underlying issues such as who is involved, how, and on whose terms. While participation has the potential to challenge patterns of dominance, it may also be the means through which existing power relations are entrenched and reproduced. The arenas in which people perceive their interests and judge whether they can express them are not neutral. Participation may take place for a whole range of unfree reasons. It is important to see participation as a dynamic process, and to understand that its own form and function can become a focus for struggle.

NGOs, Civil Society, and the State in Bangladesh: The Politics of Representing the Poor

The established rhetoric of opposition between state and NGOs as development agents has shifted to one of complementarity and common interest. Along with this, the ‘comparative advantage’ claimed for NGOs has expanded from economic and welfare benefits to encompass also the political goods of civil society and popular participation. This paper reviews these developments in the context of Bangladesh. It argues that they need to be assessed critically in ways which are both theoretically informed and locally contextualized. While recognizing that there are, indeed, areas of common experience and interest between the state and NGOs in Bangladesh, it questions whether these necessarily coincide with the interests of those they all invoke: the poor.

Analysing wellbeing: a framework for development practice

This article presents a framework for analysing wellbeing in development practice, drawing on the work of the Wellbeing in Developing Countries Research Group (WeD). Wellbeing is viewed as a social process with material, relational, and subjective dimensions. Wellbeing may be assessed at individual and collective levels, but at base is something that happens in relationship – between individual and collective; between local and global; between people and state. The article considers potential hazards in taking wellbeing as focus, and concludes by considering what real difference such a focus could make.

Participatory Approaches and the Measurement of Human Well-being

‘We are all democrats now,’ wrote John Dunn ironically in his 1979 review of Western Political Theory (Dunn 1979). Twenty-five years on, the democratic ethic of people centred governance has acquired the status of a sacred totem that commands obeisance far beyond the arena of formal politics. Rites and symbolic acts of participation have accordingly been ‘mainstreamed’ across a remarkable range of institutions, from neighbourhood school boards to multilateral agencies. Though very different in their form and practice, the promise is similar. Incorporating participation will mean that processes of policy making, administration and research become more inclusive, more responsive, more equitable, and so represent more fully the interests of ‘the people’ they claim to serve.

The ‘gender lens’: a racial blinder?

While gender is highly visible in development theory and practice, race is rarely mentioned. This paper asks why this is, and how far Gender and Development (GAD) itself is implicated in the lack of recognition of race. The paper begins by acknowledging the complexity of the question: that race, gender and development are all contested terms and represent continuing sites of struggle. It then explores various aspects of ‘race in GAD’. These include: the charge of cultural imperialism; the false simplicity in the labelling of ‘women’, which masks the very different terms on which ‘third’and ‘first’world women were ‘brought into’development; and the failure of core GAD frameworks to recognize black feminist thought, so critically limiting their analytical power. The paper then goes on to discuss the racial marking of expertise in development and the ambivalent ways in which value is assigned through this. The paper concludes by reflecting on the interplay of identities in development planning and what this reveals of the implication of development more broadly in the construction of social difference.

Religion, Politics and the Everyday Moral Order in Bangladesh

Abstract Commentaries on contemporary Bangladesh give increasing attention to the role of religion, particularly its more “fundamentalist” forms, in public politics. Here we offer an alternative analysis that explores the significance of religion in peoples everyday lives, concentrating on its articulation in community politics. We draw on an important local distinction between dharma understood as a moral foundation for life and dharma understood more narrowly as “religion.” Our empirical analysis suggests that it is the former sense of dharma which has greater relevance for the moral order of the community, and is used to evaluate and structure its social and political institutions, including those identified as “religious.” This perspective furnishes fresh insights into the dynamic relationship between religion, politics and social change in modern Bangladesh.

Beyond the Paradox: Religion, Family and Modernity in Contemporary Bangladesh

This paper reflects on the apparent ‘paradox’ of a contemporary Bangladesh that appears both ‘more modern’ and ‘more Islamic’, focusing on changes in the family (and the gender and generational orders that it embodies) as a central locus of anxiety and contestation. The paper begins with theory, how the paradox is framed by classical social science expectations of religious decline and how this has been contested by contemporary writers who describe specifically modern forms of piety. It then turns to Bangladesh, where highly publicized symbolic oppositions between ‘religion’ and ‘development’ contrast sharply with people’s pragmatic accommodation of development goods in everyday life. Analysis of religious references in interview data reveal the co-existence of very different understandings: a more traditional view of religion as embedded in the moral order; and a more modern deliberate cultivation of a religious life. They also reveal how many of the uses which people make of religion are not specifically religious: to conjure a moral universe, to mark what is important to them, to say things about themselves. The fi nal section returns to theory, reflecting on how this is informed by the findings from Bangladesh, and suggesting that the importance of the private and personal as a site for governance offers a further dimension of why the supposed ‘paradox’ of a religious modernity may not be so paradoxical after all.

The Ethical Imperative of Qualitative Methods: Developing Measures of Subjective Dimensions of Well-Being in Zambia and India

Well-being advocates state that it provides a more holistic, humanistic focus for public policy. Paradoxically, however, well-being debates tend to be dominated by highly quantitative, de-contextualised statistical methods accessible to only a minority of technical experts. This paper argues the need to reverse this trend. Drawing on original primary mixed method research in Zambia and India it shows the critical contribution of qualitative methods to the development of a quantitative model of subjective perspectives on well-being. Such contributions have a political, ethical and practical urgency if subjective measures of well-being are to be used in policy.

Relational Wellbeing: Re-centring the Politics of Happiness, Policy and the Self

The ubiquity of references to happiness and wellbeing indicates widespread anxiety that all may not be well, reflecting the erosion of the social in late capitalist modernity. The paper finds that, rather than helping to solve this problem, individualist formulations of wellbeing in policy mimic or deepen the underlying pathology. Drawing on empirical research in Zambia and India, it advocates an alternative approach, relational wellbeing, which is grounded in a relational ontology that can challenge dominant ideologies of the self, places central the generative quality of relationality which is critical to societal change and engenders a socially inclusive political vision.

Introduction. The many faces of wellbeing

In her novel Regeneration (1998), Pat Barker presents the following reflection of the neurologist and anthropologist W. H. R. Rivers (1864–1922) on his fieldwork in the Solomon Islands: I thought I’d go through my usual routine, so I started asking questions. The first question was, what would you do with it if you earned or found a guinea? Would you share it, and if so who would you share it with? It gets their attention… and you can uncover all kinds of things about kinship structure and economic arrangements, and so on. Anyway, at the end of this… they decided they’d turn the tables on me, and ask me the same questions. Starting with: What would I do with a guinea? Who would I share it with? I explained I was unmarried and that I wouldn’t necessarily feel obliged to share it with anybody. They were incredulous. How could anybody live like that? And so it went on, question after question.…They were rolling round the deck by the time I’d finished. And suddenly I realized that anything I told them would have got the same response… it would all have been too bizarre. And I suddenly saw that their reactions to my society were neither more nor less valid than mine to theirs. And do you know that was a moment of the most amazing freedom. I lay back and I closed my eyes and I felt as if a ton weight had been lifted.… It was the Great White God de-throned, I suppose. Because we did, we quite unselfconsciously assumed we were the measure of all things. That was how we approached them. And suddenly I saw not only that we weren’t the measure of all things, but that there was no measure. (Barker 1998: 212, excerpted)