Something strange happened in development policy during the 1990s
participation, local communities, and empowering ordinary people
Something strange happened in development policy during the 1990s.
The World Bank and radical anti-capitalist activists started saying the same things.
Both talked about participation. Both celebrated local communities. Both wanted to empower ordinary people and bypass inefficient states. Both looked to civil society as the answer.
This wasn’t supposed to happen. These are ideological enemies. The World Bank represents global capital, structural adjustment, market liberalization. Radical movements represent resistance to all of that. And yet, as Giles Mohan and Kristian Stokke observed in their analysis of this period, both camps had arrived at remarkably similar conclusions about where development should happen and who should lead it.
The local became sacred ground.
This convergence wasn’t accidental. It emerged from two very different crises of faith. Neoliberals had spent the 1980s dismantling the developmental state, only to realize that markets alone weren’t delivering growth or reducing poverty. They needed something else, some institutional glue to make their reforms stick. Meanwhile, the left was reeling from the collapse of actually existing socialism and the failures of state-led development in the Third World. Class politics seemed exhausted. Grand narratives had lost their credibility.
Both sides retreated to the local. Both found what they were looking for.
But here’s the problem Mohan and Stokke identified, and it’s one that remains relevant today. This shared enthusiasm for local participation papers over fundamental disagreements about what participation is for, who benefits from it, and what it can actually accomplish. Worse, it creates blind spots that neither side acknowledges.
The local isn’t what either camp thinks it is.
Consider decentralization, the first of four arenas Mohan and Stokke examined. When the World Bank talks about decentralization, it means something very specific. Drawing on rational choice theory, Bank economists frame decentralization as a way to make service delivery more efficient. The local becomes a functional economic space. Citizens become consumers. Participation means market transactions. As David Slater noted in his analysis of the concept, decentralization can be articulated into either a monetarist discourse or a discourse of collective empowerment and democracy. The word itself carries enough ambiguity that both meanings can coexist without ever confronting each other.
The Bank’s own policies through the 1980s and 1990s made this explicit. Competitive markets were said to permit flexibility and responsiveness while economizing on scarce administrative resources. Decentralization should be seen as part of a broader market-surrogate strategy. The political dimensions were stripped away, leaving only technical questions of efficiency.
This is not what grassroots activists mean when they talk about local empowerment. But they ended up supporting many of the same policy prescriptions.
Participatory Rural Appraisal offers an even more telling example. Robert Chambers championed PRA as a paradigm shift in development practice, a reversal of the top-down expertise that had characterized earlier interventions. Instead of outside experts imposing their knowledge on passive recipients, local people would generate their own understanding of their situations. Mapping exercises, community discussions, visual tools that didn’t privilege literacy. The methodology spread rapidly through development organizations.
The appeal is obvious. Who could argue against listening to local people? Who could defend the arrogance of experts who parachute in with predetermined solutions?
But Mohan and Stokke identified something troubling beneath the populist surface. PRA tends to treat communities as harmonious and homogeneous. It promotes a consensual view that conceals powerful interests at the intra-community level. When Nelson and Wright examined how the concept of community actually functions in development practice, they found it was more often used by outside organizations than by people themselves, carrying connotations of consensus and needs determined within parameters set by outsiders.
The danger, from a policy standpoint, is that actions based on consensus may actually empower the vested interests who manipulated the research in the first place. Pottier and Orone documented cases where local chiefs deliberately excluded the very poor from participatory exercises. Richards found that decisions made through these processes generally favor village elites.
This is not a marginal problem. It’s built into the methodology’s assumptions.
Chambers himself acknowledged that underdevelopment has many levels of causality, but he chose to focus on what he called the primacy of the personal. We are much of the problem, he wrote, meaning outside experts and their attitudes. By revealing our self-conscious appreciation of this paradox, we place ourselves back at the center of the development process.
Mohan and Stokke pushed back hard on this framing. Development is not just about attitudes but about materialities that such a discourse may do little to address. The invocation of a benign virus spreading through organizations is too voluntaristic. Strategies for affecting wider structures are rarely put forward.
There’s a deeper epistemological issue here. By valorizing local knowledge and being self-critical of Western colonizing knowledge, practitioners end up behaving as if they have nothing to offer. The populist line treats all knowledge from the West as tainted, which prevents genuine dialogue and learning. Local and non-local become discrete entities, entirely separable from each other in space.
But they’re not. They never were.
Social capital theory makes this problem even more acute. Robert Putnam’s work on Italy and America had enormous influence on development thinking in the 1990s. The concept promised to explain why some places succeed while others fail, even when they face similar macro-policy environments. Social capital refers to features of social organization such as networks, norms, and trust that facilitate coordination and cooperation for mutual benefit.
The appeal to development institutions is clear. Social capital is essentially the sociocultural glue that binds communities together and ensures both political and economic progress. The language is non-threatening, full of trust and reciprocity and associations. Conflict-oriented notions of power, class, gender, and ethnicity are relatively unheard within this discourse. Everyone can communicate.
This is precisely why Ben Fine argued that social capital allowed the World Bank to broaden its agenda while retaining continuity with most of its practices and prejudices, including benign neglect of macro-relations of power and preference for favored NGOs and grassroots movements.
Putnam’s framework has a fundamental flaw. It treats culture as internally determined, locked into path dependency where initial stocks of social capital create self-reinforcing cycles of prosperity or failure. Successful regions are those that have possessed high stocks of social capital for a long time. The historical roots of the civic community are astonishingly deep.
Sidney Tarrow revisited Italian political history and found something quite different. The South of the country was held in a semi-colonial relation to the North, with economic development and associational life consciously suppressed. Contemporary weaknesses weren’t connected to initial endowments at all. They were connected to ongoing political relationships.
James Putzel added another inconvenient observation. In areas Putnam identified as having high social capital, communist trade unions were heavily involved in promoting political activism and civic life. Putnam omitted them entirely from his analysis. One can only assume he did so because these were not legitimate forms of social capital, preferring instead the more benign activities like sports leagues and choir groups.
The state disappears from this picture. So does capitalism. What remains is a culturally internalist explanation that locates the problem of underdevelopment within the victims themselves, much like modernization theory did decades earlier.
Jonathan Fox developed a more sophisticated account of how civil society actually thickens. He examined the uneven emergence of social capital under authoritarian regimes and found it resulted from the interplay of the state’s willingness and capacity to encourage or dismantle social capital, the contextual strategies of local political actors, and the effect of other organizations in enabling or disabling collective action. Patrick Heller’s work on Kerala demonstrated close links between social capital formation and the democratic state. High levels of social development and redistributive reforms were products of mutually reinforcing relations between state institutions and organized labor movements.
None of this fits the World Bank’s preferred narrative. But the Bank continued promoting Social Funds across Africa and Latin America, channeling resources through NGOs while treating social capital as a local endowment that needed building.
The fourth arena Mohan and Stokke examined was social movements and radical democracy. Here the localism comes from a different direction entirely.
Post-Marxism emerged in the 1980s as a response to what critics saw as class reductionism and economic determinism in traditional left politics. Laclau and Mouffe argued that society couldn’t be explained through a static relationship to the means of production. Identities were fluid. Political consciousness could form around multiple axes of difference, not just class. New social movements became the focus of serious analytical engagement with political agency.
In the Third World context, these movements became increasingly visible during economic crises and governance failures. Formal political institutions seemed indivisible from market needs. New movements emerged that were local, pluralistic, and sometimes linked horizontally across issues. Cultural considerations were not subordinated to economic motives.
Arturo Escobar elaborated this emphasis on culture. The development discourse, he argued, functioned as a central operator of the politics of representation and identity across the Global South. It suppressed local cultures, women, identities, and histories. Grassroots movements represented acts of cultural resistance, local knowledge against expert systems, popular power against institutional domination.
This is where things get complicated.
Mohan and Stokke noted that the literature on social movements shares the same tendencies toward essentializing the local that appear in neoliberal approaches. Civil society is conceptualized as a relatively autonomous site of resistance and empowerment. Broader material and political processes are analytically marginalized.
But consumption-based identity politics is more visible in wealthy countries. In the Third World, livelihood struggles still dominate. To characterize Global South countries as post-industrial and postmodern is to misinterpret their histories of imperialism and underdevelopment entirely.
Frans Schuurman observed that many social movements aren’t anti-development or post-development at all. They’re products of an aborted modernity project, people seeking the benefits they were promised but denied.
The relationship between social movements and the state is also far more complex than the autonomy thesis suggests. While Laclau and Mouffe don’t deny the state’s existence, they de-privilege it as a site of political struggle. This leads to downplaying state power at precisely the moment when states have become less accountable.
Judith Hellman examined the actual outcomes of political participation for social movements and found multiple possibilities. States can fulfill movement demands. They can incorporate movements into populist followings. They can absorb isolated movements into broader party-led coalitions. The notion that movements are and must remain autonomous ignores this messy reality.
Ellen Meiksins Wood offered perhaps the sharpest critique. Civil society emerged alongside capitalism and the modern state, intimately tied to private property rights. Under capitalist modernity, the market became incorporated into an arena outside the state. Political functions formerly carried out by states were performed within civil society, centered on the commodification of social life including labor.
The non-state arena may be a space of political freedom, Wood argued, but not of economic freedom. The market isn’t simply a sphere of opportunity and choice. It’s a compulsion, a necessity, a social discipline.
This has implications for identity politics. While class may not be the only political referent, it cannot be equated with all other identities. Class is irreducibly linked to capitalist exploitation. Sexual orientation, for example, is not inherently exploitative and could exist in any political-economic system. The plurality of identities and the non-fixity of social relations mean that celebrating difference could potentially endorse exploitative social relations.
In what sense, Meiksins Wood asked, could it be democratic to celebrate class difference?
The question of scale runs through all of this. Local resistance by itself cannot challenge global and national forces. The Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People mounted a sustained campaign against the Nigerian government and Shell during the 1990s, combining environmental concerns with ethnic and political recognition demands. They achieved significant international attention and support. Then the government imprisoned and executed their leaders. The opposition waned.
What this shows is that emphasis on the local alone leaves groups exposed to defeat or destruction by not building sufficient social alliances. Resistance must be localized, regionalized, and globalized at the same time, as Chin and Mittelman argued. The linkages between scale and politics have become more complex and more crucial in an era of globalization.
The Zapatistas spread their message via the internet, picked up by activists and academics worldwide as a postmodern social movement. Subcomandante Marcos articulated a vision of global civil society, claiming to be gay in San Francisco, Black in South Africa, Asian in Europe, a Jew in Germany, a feminist in a political party, every untolerated and oppressed minority beginning to speak.
This suggests political spaces beyond the nation-state system. Global civil society recognizes states but is not state-centric. It works underneath and beyond states, just as economic globalization works outside and across them.
But if transformations of the global political economy are to happen, concerted efforts must be made to reshape global governance. Reform must move from the local upward and from the global downward, with each level playing a contributing part. The shape and substance of such reforms remain unknown.
What can we take from this analysis more than two decades later?
The consensus around local participation that Mohan and Stokke identified hasn’t dissolved. If anything, it has intensified. Community-based approaches dominate development practice. Social enterprise and impact investing channel resources through civil society organizations. Participatory methods have become institutionalized across major agencies.
The dangers they identified haven’t gone away either.
Local communities are still romanticized as spaces of solidarity and authentic knowledge, even as internal inequalities structure who speaks and who is heard. The state remains undertheorized, treated either as an obstacle to be bypassed or a monolithic other to resist. Transnational economic forces operate largely outside the frame. And both neoliberals and radicals continue talking past each other while using the same vocabulary.
What would it mean to take the politics of the local seriously?
It would mean examining how the local is produced and represented by hegemonic interests. It would mean asking who benefits when participation is defined in particular ways. It would mean refusing the binary between state and civil society, recognizing instead the multiplicity of links between actors in both spheres with varying degrees of autonomy and capacity. It would mean understanding places not as discrete communities but as constituted by economic, social, cultural, and political relations that extend far beyond any given locality.
A global sense of place, as Doreen Massey called it.
This doesn’t mean abandoning local engagement. It means being honest about what local engagement can and cannot accomplish on its own. It means building alliances across scales rather than retreating into enclaves that provide shelter from the storm. It means recognizing that the local is always already shaped by forces operating at other levels, and that meaningful change requires intervention at multiple points simultaneously.
The strange convergence between the World Bank and radical activists wasn’t a sign that both had discovered the same truth. It was a sign that both were avoiding the same difficult questions.
Those questions remain unanswered.
Sources
Mohan, Giles and Kristian Stokke. “Participatory Development and Empowerment: The Dangers of Localism.” Third World Quarterly, Vol. 21, No. 2 (April 2000), pp. 247-268.
Chambers, Robert. “The Origins and Practice of Participatory Rural Appraisal.” World Development, 22(7), 1994.
Escobar, Arturo. Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World. Princeton University Press, 1995.
Fine, Ben. “The Developmental State is Dead—Long Live Social Capital?” Development and Change, 30, 1999.
Fox, Jonathan. “How Does Civil Society Thicken? The Political Construction of Social Capital in Rural Mexico.” In Peter Evans (ed.), State-Society Synergy: Government and Social Capital in Development. University of California, 1997.
Laclau, Ernesto and Chantal Mouffe. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. Verso, 1985.
Massey, Doreen. Space, Place and Gender. Polity Press, 1994.
Meiksins Wood, Ellen. Democracy Against Capitalism: Renewing Historical Materialism. Cambridge University Press, 1995.
Putnam, Robert. “The Prosperous Community: Social Capital and Public Life.” The American Prospect, 13, 1993.
Slater, David. “Territorial Power and the Peripheral State: The Issue of Decentralization.” Development and Change, 20, 1989.
Tarrow, Sidney. “Making Social Science Work Across Space and Time: A Critical Reflection on Robert Putnam’s ‘Making Democracy Work.’” American Political Science Review, 90(2), 1996.