Popular participation in development : the prospects, problems and educational possibilities for enhancing participation in rural co-operatives and community development in the Yei district of southern Sudan, 1972-1983

This study illuminates and contrasts co-operative and CD policies and experieeces with regard to participatory and educational criteria; these are crystallized in an analysis of theoretical models of both fields. The methodology is based on phenomenological assumptions. Twenty one case studies are subjected to a cross-case analysis undertaken to achieve the study's objectives. The data from which the cases are derived were gathered through direct observation of phenomena, interviewing of key informants, a survey of a sample of co-operators and documentary search. A total of 463 subjects was interviewed. The technique of cognitive mapping was an aid in the content analysis of the qualitative data, which, in combination with a quantitative analysis of the survey data, facilitated the construction of the case studies. These case studies were then utilized in a cross-case analysis undertaken in the light of an examination of various relevant macro-factors affecting socio-economic and political development in Southern Sudan. At the micro-level, decision making in co-operatives and CD is found to have been dominated by local leaders. These were not necessarily elected or subjected to any systematic local popular control. There was evidently insufficient understanding and appreciation of the need to ensure popular participation in decision making. The irregularity and scarcity of meetings, the inappropriateness of organizing techniques for eliciting participation in meeting, the deficiency of the data basis for decision making, the virtual absence of appropriate education to enhance participatory competences and processes, and the superficiality of the analyses seeming to have underpinned some decisions support this conclusion, and throw doubt on the quality of most of the decision making processes illuminated. Co-operative programmes were mainly implemented by management committees, the ordinary co-operators largely participating indirectly. But in CD, direct popular participation was vigorously pursued and largely achieved through persuasion, cajoling, coercion; and some degree of harmonization of self-help activities with the flow of occupational activities, accepted gender roles and the traditional modes of organizing collective work. At this stage, the impediments to participation appear to have included; the ineffectiveness of local leaders as organizers and financial managers, deficiency of practical production skills, the fragmentation of the development activities undertaken by `communities' exhibiting internal cleavages and conflicts of interests, low levels of material and financial resources, and the absence of appropriate educational elements to counteract some of these obstacles. No systematic participatory evaluation was found to have taken place in any of the experiences studied. It is argued that the impediments to participation at the grassroots, and the identified incongruencies between purported participatory policies and corresponding planning and implementation approaches at the macro-level are linked with what appears as authoritarianism inherent in unexamined structures and top-down planning processes dominated by elites. Many of the obstacles reflect the unfair distribution of politico-economic and cultural power by which the distribution of resources and regulative institutions is determined. (D80795)