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Keeping it Vague : Discourses and practices of participation in Rural Mozambique
Get PDFSince the 1980s, considerable changes have taken place in thinking about development interventions. Many donors, host governments and development organisations embraced the concepts and the related methods of participatory approaches. In an attempt to move away from an era of more directive and top-down interventions, the project proposals in the 1990s were dominated by concepts such as participation, decentralisation, Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA), empowerment, community-based development. In other words, the language of policy makers and practitioners in the field of development changed considerably. More significantly, the discourse of development changed. The discourse concept emphasises that language is not neutral. Discourse determines what can be said and written in a certain social group in a particular epoch. Discourse is not static; it changes as a result of its constant interplay with everyday practices and in social interaction. Framing is another important concept in this study. Framing refers to the process of filtering and selection of elements in the discourse that leads to new text and talk, new meanings and/or new social practices. In chapter two, a summary is given of ideas and thoughts of some important authors who have been influential in setting participatory approaches on the development agenda. The popularity of participatory approaches during the 1990s did, however, generate criticism. Chapter three gives an overview of contemporary critical thoughts on these approaches. The advocates themselves, such as Robert Chambers, expressed concern over 'bad practices', which he regarded as a consequence of rapid up-scaling, insufficient training and 'use of the label without the substance'. In other words, the argument was that the ideas were good but that these ideas were not properly implemented in practice. More fundamental criticism was voiced by authors such as Mosse,Leeuwis, Cooke andKothari. They pointed out the inherent contradictions and philosophical shortcomings of participatory approaches. The definitions of participation and empowerment are often vague, and the language used around these concepts tends to have a 'positive' connotation. This makes is easy to use these concepts in a rhetorical and populist way. In the discourse around participatory approaches, very little attention is paid to political dimensions of development interventions and existing social organisation. This study buildsfurtheron these critical reflections with the help of the concepts discourse and framing that are elaborated in chapter four. The objective of the study is to describe and compare the discourses and everyday practices of five development projects in rural Mozambique. In doing this, the study hopes to contribute to the understanding of everyday dynamics of participatory development interventions. The following research questions were formulated at the end of chapter four; 1)Whatwas the project context like? 2) What were the project discourses around the concepts participation and empowerment? 3) What were the everyday project practices? 4) How did PRA project practices compare with principles of 'good' PRA practices? 5) How did project discourses compare with project practices? 6) How can gaps between discourses and practices be explained? Two major case studies and three minor ones were selected. The approach of the study is explained in chapter five. The methodology consisted mainly of participant observation and interviews. The involvement of the researcher in these projects either as an advisor, trainer or evaluator gave a good opportunity to have access to observations from within the project. For the two major cases, the researcher also had the opportunity to do research as an outsider, acting independently of any project involvement.Chapter six provides important contextual information by describing the recent history ofMozambique. It specifically explores the events and facts that are important for the understanding of rural development inMozambiquein the 1990s.The empirical chapters, chapters seven through nine, have the following structure: first the project context is described, then the project discourses, and finally some critical incidents and observations, thus answering the first three research questions. The other three research questions are dealt with in the concluding chapters ten and eleven.The first major case study deals with various interventions in the most southern district of Mozambique, Matutuíne, inMaputoprovince. The aim of this project was to involve local people in the management of natural resources. The main focus was an initiative by the Swiss NGO Helvetas. The project was geared towards empowering the inhabitants of the district to confront commercial investors with interests in the area. In chapter seven, some of their activities—such as a Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA), community land delimitation and seminars—are described. This chapter also reflects on the relations of the project with various other actors in the district.The other major case study is a project that promoted decentralised district planning in 14 districts ofNampulaProvincein the North of Mozambique. This project was a joint initiative of two UN organizations (UNDP and UNCDF), the Government of theNetherlandsand the Mozambican Ministry of Planning and Finance. District administration was encouraged to write district plans. PRAs, the establishment of District Consultative Councils (DCCs) and Local Development Committees (LDCs) were the vehicles implemented to involve rural people in the development planning of the district. This project is described in chapter eight.The three minor case studies, all based on projects run by NGOs, are presented in chapter nine. The first minor case was an initiative in the area of land rights and took place in Nicoadala district inZambeziaprovince. The project attempted to delimit land for communities, a possibility provided for through the land law of 1997. The second minor case took place in Machaze district inManicaprovince and is similar to the project in Nampula since its aim was decentralised district planning. The difference is that this project in Machaze placed more emphasis on the local level and started with the establishment of a Local Development Committee and a series of PRAs. The third minor case is about a PRA that was planned by an NGO to take place inMorrumbaladistrict,Zambeziaprovince, but in fact never took place. All projects made use of PRA. In chapter ten, I first take a closer look at how PRAs were perceived and how the PRAs were conducted by project staff. I compare this with the supposed principles of 'good' PRA practice. Project staff largely regarded PRA as a tool for data collection or as a way to obtain a ranking of a wish-list or other information. The way in which data were collected and the way in which problems were analysed revealed a rather extractive and uncritical way of working. The level of probing and triangulation was minimal. There was little space for sharing, joint analysis or critique. The role of PRA in the intervention or in the envisaged development process was seldom made explicit in project documents. Chapter ten continues to synthesize three gaps between project discourses and project practices. Firstly, project discourses tend to picture the intervention as rather a-political and its methods as neutral, while in practice many different interests and several conflicts surfaced as a result of the intervention. It became apparent how different power-holders try to either control or even block the interventions. In turn, project staff do all they can to appease all actors and keep their project running.Secondly, all projects have empowerment as an objective. It is however apparent that, in the project discourses, this concept is not further elaborated and it is not clear who should be empowered in relation to whom, or how this could be achieved. Since the PRAs were rather extractive and uncritical, and as the interests of project staff differed often from the empowerment of local people, these exercises offered little scope for local learning or mobilisation. Projects tended to create new institutions rather than trying to change existing local institutions. Little or no attention was paid to intra-community inequalities and, as time went by, projects tended to water down their empowerment objectives.The third gap that was identified is that whereas, according to the discourse of participatory development, processes should be bottom-up and local, observations showed that most interventions were largely imposed by donors and development agencies and their staff. The philosophies of the project rationale and approach are rather foreign. The influence of expatriates on project formulation and implementation was obvious. Moreover, agenda setting of everyday activities or determining the next step during a PRA was in the hands of project staff, with local people having virtually no say in the matter. New organisations such as Local Development Committees and District Development Councils were equally largely imposed by project staff and their durability is therefore questioned.In chapter eleven an attempt is made to explain these gaps. The concepts of discourse and framing were very useful for doing so. We can talk of a discourse of participatory development; a dominant system of representation that governed the way policy makers and practitioners talked and wrote about development during the 1990s. This discourse was shared in trans-national discourse coalitions and often had rather optimist and positive connotations. When it came to putting this discourse into practice, formulating the project document, andoperationalisingthis document in activities in the field, the discourse had to be actively framed or translated. The various actors do this in several ways so as to fit the discourse into their wants and needs. One and the same actor can also frame the discourse in different ways, depending on the audience and context. Project discourses were characterised by vagueness, thus allowing the many different actors to select only that which they regarded as being useful.Several contextual factors may contribute towards explaining the gaps between discourses and practices. The following are distinguished; the brutal history of colonial and post-colonial top-down interventions in rural Mozambique, the consequent distrust towards outsiders, the lack of training and experience of project staff, party-political tensions, expectations of local people, and a lack of commitment towards the empowerment of local people on the part of project staff and local power-holders.In addition, discourses of participatory development exhibit a number of conceptual and philosophical shortcomings that also contribute to the divide between formal discourses and everyday project practices. The most important (and most known) criticism is that participatory approaches are quite naïve since they often ignore power relations. It generally assumes that people are willing and able to collaborate, and are able to overcome conflict via mutual learning. Furthermore, the fact that certain concepts are not further specified, being kept vague, makes the approach difficult to criticise.In the last section I turn my attention specifically to project managers who have to deal in everyday practice with: 1) the inherent contradictions of the approach, 2) framing the laudable but naïve ideas into activities and 3) the different actors with their various interests. Good project managers inMozambiquehave to be highly politically sensitive and strategic. They often have to adopt a strategy what I have called 'juggle and muddle'. Keeping the discourse vague is not only an observation of this study; at particular moments it can also be a recommendable strategy in running a project effectively
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Dialoog stad en platteland : ervaringen van het project ruraal debat van Overlegorgaan Duinboeren
No full textVariations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist
No full textWe have done our best to complete the author checklist relating to the use of animals in the hut study. Note that the objective for the hut study was to evaluate the IRS treatment applications for residual efficacy against Anopheles mosquitoes, including the local An. coluzzii mosquito population. Cows were only used to attract mosquitoes into the huts and no tests were carried out directly on the cows. The author checklist is intended for use with studies where experiments are carried out on animals, which is why we have had such difficulty in completing this for the hut study, as many of the questions do not relate to how the cows were used
Author-wise bibliometric analysis based on entropy.
No full textAuthor-wise bibliometric analysis based on entropy.</p
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