http://www.themercury.co.za/index.php?fArticleId=4462144
Testimony to the power of ordinary people
June 19, 2008 Edition 1
Imraan Buccus
These days even a possible American president, Barack Obama, is talking about bottom-up development.
Indeed his campaign for the democratic nomination often eschewed corporate support in favour of a grass-roots-up campaign. The fact that he was able to win the Democratic nomination on the back of the work of ordinary people in community organisations is testament to the power of ordinary people.
It was ordinary people who built the mass struggles against apartheid in the 1980s, but as this column has often observed before, from housing to access to water to xenophobia, one can easily trace many of our problems in post-apartheid South Africa to a lack of commitment to meaningful, participatory bottom- up development.
In South Africa ordinary people have been protesting against top-down development with even more vigour. But elites have often struggled to grasp this and have tended to label much of this anger at the exclusion of ordinary people as “service delivery” protests.
But the demand of ordinary South Africans for a bottom-up and democratic approach to development has a wider international resonance.
Increasingly even development experts are taking a critical look at top-down approaches and proposing more democratic models.
Innovations in this regard in places such as Bolivia, Porto Allegre in Brazil, Kerala in India and Naga City in the Philippines are often cited as evidence for the effectiveness of bottom-up models of social planning.
Questioned
So, in some ways there seems to be an international recognition for the need for bottom-up development.
Increasingly technocratic, top-down development is being questioned and interrogated more critically and the flaws of such a developmental approach are fast being exposed.
Kerala was recently known to have had extreme poverty, malnutrition and high infant mortality rates.
Later, when the state embarked on a model that was participatory and bottom-up, Kerala made mind-boggling progress. Today Kerala has social development indicators that are comparable to Western Europe and North America.
So, as I sit here at the Civicus World Assembly in Glasgow, Scotland – where an entire segment of the conference has been dedicated to “participatory governance” one begins to think that there just may be hope for a solid contestation of a technocratic top- down approach to dealing with peoples’ development.
At this global conference convened by the Civicus Participatory Governance Programme we prepare to listen and engage on a range of encouraging and fascinating models from India, Bangladesh, Brazil, Phillipines, Mexico and indeed we have a South African story to tell. In South Africa we have all of the legislative and constitutive provisions in place, yet we are not as yet seeing truly bottom-up development. In principle we are world leaders, in practice we are way behind many countries.
It is a sad fact that in our country, despite all the good laws, opportunities are very seldom created for affected groups to obtain information on a proposed policy process, reflect on proposals and options, articulate preferred options and mandate representatives to speak on their behalf, with measures created for accountability and feedback.
It is an equally sad fact that very often poor people’s movements have faced considerable repression when trying to access information and processes that are theirs by right in terms of law and policy.
It is critical to assess who participates in the decision-making arena, and whose voice is heard. In the South African context, the relative inaccessibility of information on government decision-making and the resources and abilities required to engage in participatory processes results in the domination of such spaces by the elite and those with access to resources, such as NGOs, business and other similar interest groups.
Stand in
A particular problem has been that NGOs tend to stand in for poor communities. Poor people’s organisation have often rejected this. This has caused all kinds of consternation among those who believe that there are three sectors in society – government, business and civil society – and that participation simply means that all three sectors must be included.
But this model is deeply flawed. At times they have very different modes of working, interests and constituencies.
But while most states expect participation on their own terms, poor people’s movements tend to be ignored and have come to be seen as social “pariahs” because they have opted to use the murky space of popular protest – often hugely confrontational. Yet this is where genuine grassroots democracy is forged.
Today, the strong belief in social justice that has advanced organisations of the poor is much cloudier.
And indeed South Africa has a great deal to learn from examples around the world – where grass-roots movements have been effectively involved at the local level – like the successes in involving street hawkers in Ghana, farm workers in India and a range of fascinating examples from Latin America.
Despite the negativities that sometimes come with international gatherings like this one, somehow it also fills one with hope – chances are the poor may just have a future after all.