Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Critical Studies of Participation
This highlights the crucial need to move beyond evaluation to undertake critical
studies of the construction, performance, and discourse of participation. Whereas
preceding streams often seek to promote and mainstream 'marginal' participatory
practice, this third stream of research foregrounds the existence of participation 'as
a legitimate object of study
in itself
' (Irwin, 2006, p. 310, original emphasis)
through paying close attention to the processes and consequences of its construction
and developing 'a more sophisticated and genuinely refl exive understanding of
power' (Cooke and Kothari, 2001, pp. 14-15). Critical studies emerging at the
interface between geography, STS and development studies are beginning to ask:
how are participatory processes constructed and framed? How do various represen-
tations, boundaries, and inclusions/exclusions get made through the performance
of (analytic-)deliberative practices? What about the manifestations and dynamics
of internal/external power in participation? To what extent does participation
express symmetry with respect to cultural and instrumental rationalities? Does
participation make institutions more responsive, refl exive and responsible in the face
of wider environmental concerns? Or does it represent a new form of technocracy
that insulates neoliberal agendas and science-led progress from public challenge and
dissent?
Such questions are being addressed in a variety of ways, ranging from situated
ethnographies of 'participation in action' through to analyses of what happens
beyond the formal 'invited' time-spaces of participation. An immediate, but often
neglected, mode of inquiry is critical self-refl exivity. This has been demonstrated by
Davies (2006b) in a highly refl ective account of a DM experiment on medical bio-
technology. She considers how framings of the process were partial and subject to
'overfl ows', how (multi-criteria) calculations kept framings and uncertainties open
just as much as deliberation, and how such openness, while potentially more
accountable, does not offer unequivocal justifi cations for policy decisions. In a
similarly detailed account Elwood (2006) charts how participation and representa-
tion were negotiated through everyday knowledge practices in a PPGIS project with
two Chicago community organizations, while Ferreyra (2006) has adopted a bio-
graphical approach to critically refl ect on her experiences of participatory action
research with a watershed partnership in Ontario, Canada.
Beyond self-refl ection an increasing number of situated in-depth studies are begin-
ning to expose critical issues of representation and power within and beyond formal
spaces of participation. In a multi-sited ethnography of participatory monitoring in
UK biodiversity action planning, Ellis and Waterton (2005) explore how the exclu-
sion/inclusion of humans and non-humans was performed. They highlight how
'human investment as well as the signifi cance of organisms in place may be made
invisible' (p. 689) when recorded as a data point able to travel to distant centres of
power for processing and decision-making. Hinchliffe's (2001) situated study of
decision-making over BSE in Britain has also shown how the exclusion of indeter-
minacies, antagonisms and socio-natural diversity central to the crisis was per-
formed through deliberative practices just as much as through scientifi c ones. There
will also be self-exclusions linked to the willingness of individuals to participate,
but, as Cleaver's (2001) work on water resource usage in Africa argues, rather than
being an irresponsible act this is intimately tied up with one's own sense of identity
and agency. Further exclusions can occur within the process, for example where
