No other volume has brought together examples from such a broad Southern spectrum and covering such a diversity of actors: rural and urban dwellers, transnational activists, religious groups, politicians and social leaders. The cases illuminate the crucial contribution that citizen mobilization makes to democratization and the building of state institutions, and reflect the uneasy relationship between citizens and the institutions that are designed to foster their political participation.
No other volume has brought together examples from such a broad Southern spectrum and covering such a diversity of actors: rural and urban dwellers, transnational activists, religious groups, politicians and social leaders. The cases illuminate the crucial contribution that citizen mobilization makes to democratization and the building of state institutions, and reflect the uneasy relationship between citizens and the institutions that are designed to foster their political participation.
Mobilizing for Democracy: Citizen Action and the Politics of Public Participation
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Overview
No other volume has brought together examples from such a broad Southern spectrum and covering such a diversity of actors: rural and urban dwellers, transnational activists, religious groups, politicians and social leaders. The cases illuminate the crucial contribution that citizen mobilization makes to democratization and the building of state institutions, and reflect the uneasy relationship between citizens and the institutions that are designed to foster their political participation.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781848139152 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Bloomsbury Publishing |
| Publication date: | 04/04/2013 |
| Series: | Claiming Citizenship |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 304 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Bettina von Lieres is a Senior Lecturer in the Political Studies Department at the University of the Western Cape in Cape Town, South Africa, and also teaches at the University of Toronto. A South African political scientist, she has written widely on issues of democracy, citizenship and marginalisation. She serves as co-convenor of the Deepening Democracy subgroup of the Development Research Centre on Citizenship, Participation and Accountability.
Naila Kabeer is professorial fellow at IDS and a member of the Poverty and Social Policy Team. Her research interests include gender, population and poverty issues. Her recent books include The Power to Choose: Bangladeshi women and labour market decisions in London and Dhaka and Gender Mainstreaming in Poverty Eradication and the Millennium Development Goals
Read an Excerpt
Mobilizing for Democracy
Citizen Action and the Politics of Public Participation
By Vera Schattan P. Coelho, Bettina von Lieres
Zed Books Ltd
Copyright © 2010 Vera Schattan P. Coelho and Bettina von LieresAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84813-446-1
CHAPTER 1
Mobilizing for democracy: citizen engagement and the politics of public participation
VERA SCHATTAN P. COELHO AND BETTINA VON LIERES
Introduction
What are the conditions under which citizen mobilization strengthens democratic institutions and cultures? In exploring that question, this book introduces eleven original empirical case studies of how different forms of citizen mobilization have generated democratic outcomes in seven countries of the global South. It highlights the limitations of one-size-fits-all approaches to addressing the challenges of building democracy, and it demonstrates how the prospects for achieving democratic outcomes depend on a combination of forms of mobilization and distinctive political and institutional contexts.
Drawing on the case studies, the book's focus is on what we call 'mediated citizen mobilization', in which marginalized citizens rely on mediators or interlocutors either to trigger or to shape their strategies. The case studies examine three forms of mediated citizen mobilization: associations, social movements and citizen involvement in formal governance mechanisms.
The case studies provide examples of citizen mobilization that has had democratic outcomes in political contexts that vary significantly in terms of constitutional and legal frameworks, state capacities and histories of citizen mobilization. Each of these contextual factors leaves distinctive traces of how citizens and their organizations mobilize for democracy, and also shapes the choice of forms of mobilization. Sometimes, in fragile states or emerging democracies, the most important outcomes of engagement are the construction of democratic citizenship, the capacity to press for rights, and the deepening and expansion of the practices of democratic participation. Where there is a longer history of citizen mobilization, there is a better chance of larger-scale gains – such as the crafting of new agendas for citizen participation or sustained access to economic resources, rights and accountable institutions.
In focusing on the importance of the forms of citizen mobilization and the political context, this book contributes to the debate on democracy building. While international studies devote increasing attention to citizen mobilization and its potential contribution to deepening democracy (Gaventa and McGee, 2010; Bjorkman and Svensson, 2009; Hossain, 2009), there is still little echo of this debate in the mainstream political and developmental approaches to democracy.
Carothers (2009) defines the political approach to democracy building as centring almost exclusively on building and strengthening representative institutions, such as competitive elections, an independent judiciary and a strong legislature (following Dahl, 1971; Manin, 1997; Przeworski, 1999). By contrast, the developmental approach involves 'a broader notion of democracy, one that encompasses concerns about equality and justice, and the concept of democratization as a slow, iterative process of change involving an inter-related set of political and socio-economic developments' (Carothers, 2009: 5; also Gerrits, 2007; Youngs, 2008).
This book complements these approaches by arguing, through empirical research, that democracy is not built by political institutions or developmental interventions alone. Taking a broader societal view, the chapters explore the conditions under which citizen mobilization has successfully contributed to the articulation of citizens' concerns, the promotion of democratic change, and the pressuring of states to act more accountably and democratically.
We begin this introductory chapter with reference to studies that discuss the challenges of deepening democracy through citizen mobilization. These include the complexities of political representation, the competing claims of political legitimacy and the trade-offs between long-term and one-off democratic gains.
In addition to these problems, we point to the lack of comparative research into how citizen mobilization plays out in different political contexts, and we describe the framework within which we have compared citizen mobilization across contexts.
The next section presents a review of the case studies, organized around the three different forms of mobilization under consideration. We conclude by calling attention to the importance of citizen mobilization for the project of deepening democracy.
Deepening democracy through citizen mobilization
This book engages with the 'deepening democracy' approach in current debates on democracy – a strand that, put simply, focuses on the 'contemporary project of developing and sustaining more substantive and empowered citizen participation in the political process than what is normally found in liberal representative democracy alone' (Gaventa, 2006b: 7; see also Fung and Wright, 2003; Dryzek, 2000).
Scholars and activists who take this approach argue that citizenship should mean far more than just the enjoyment of legal rights and the election of representatives. Many of them view citizenship as involving the building of broad coalitions and mobilization with the potential to frame new agendas and to provide a counterbalance to state power by encouraging citizens to voice their demands, to advocate for special interests and to play a 'watchdog' role (Dagnino et al., 2006; Appadurai, 2002; Edwards and Gaventa, 2001). For others, deepening democracy involves being heard by the state and participating directly in deliberation and decision-making on political and policy issues (Cornwall and Coelho, 2007; Mansbridge, 2003; Avritzer, 2002; Warren, 1992); or else having direct relations with government institutions, as opposed to relations that are brokered by powerful patrons or relations that are characterized by detachment (Houtzager and Acharya, 2010).
In short, the deepening democracy approach highlights the importance of citizen engagement in shaping the opportunities for wider democratic change. Within this approach, however, there is a growing body of literature that focuses on the challenges inherent in getting citizens involved in democratic change.
A first set of challenges concerns a tendency by some commentators to automatically equate the growth of civil society organizations (CSOs) with increased democratization. Lewis (2004) and Houtzager and Acharya (2010), among many others, call attention to the fact that there is often nothing inherently democratic about CSOs and movements. They focus attention on the possible disjunctures between the practices of democracy, as advocated by CSOs, and the everyday realities of clientelism, patronage and authoritarian local politics experienced by their members and ordinary citizens. Several cases highlighted in this volume show empirically how citizens' mobilizations are, to varying degrees, shaped not only by the organizations that mediate them, but also by existing local power dynamics. These cases demonstrate the need for a better understanding of how different modes of rule, authority and political culture interconnect and cut across one another in practice; how and why they last; and how they affect emerging forms of citizen mobilization.
From this perspective a second set of challenges embraced by the authors in this book concerns the task of specifying the conditions under which groups and associations not just mediate but actually produce the democratization of public politics. As Heller states:
Just as a vibrant civil society can promote trust and cooperation, it can also promote particularism that fosters rent-seeking lobbies and exclusionary identities. (Heller, 2000: 498)
In this sense, a much clearer understanding is still needed about the conditions under which a plurality of civil society associations and movements converges to deepen democracy. Several of our authors discuss the degree to which the mobilizations they analyse have built alliances, accessed state resources and gained a voice inside political institutions, and whether this has contributed to meaningful change in the institutions or in state responsiveness.
A third set of challenges concerns the representativeness and legitimacy of those CSOs that engage the state's authority over (and its monopoly on) decision-making (Urbinati and Warren, 2008; Brown, 2008; Ebrahim, 2003). Lavalle et al. (2005) address the complex relationship between CSOs and political representation, arguing that CSOs often fail to ask in whose name they speak and act, or by what mechanisms they are authorized to act and are held to account. Several of our chapters highlight the complexities of such mediated political representation.
These challenges highlight the complex political dynamics involved in citizen mobilization: asynchronous forms of political authority, the challenges of seeking long-term democratic gains and the democratic legitimacy of those that speak in the name of minorities and marginalized citizens. In addition to these three cross-cutting problems, this book is animated by a fourth challenge that is less salient in the literature: given these constraints, how do the diverse forms of citizen engagement shape the possibilities for deepening democracy in different political contexts?
While there is a vast literature concerning citizen mobilization and its associated outcomes and constraints, there is very little comparative empirical research into how different forms of mobilization perform in a variety of political contexts. This shortcoming appears clearly in a systematization of the literature conducted by Peruzzotti (2008). He identified potential 'layers' of political involvement by citizens, each of which is expected to deal with specific challenges and to be capable of making a range of contributions to the political process. The first layers – covered in this volume by associations and social movements – play the role of 'constitutive' mediation, which implies the acquisition of political consciousness, awareness and knowledge of citizenship and rights. The next layers – covered in our cases by citizen involvement in formal governance arenas – have been labelled 'representative mediation' and are more directly linked to processes of political representation. The authors of this book tackle the lack of empirical research into the capacity of these different forms of engagement to bring about the expected outcomes in different political contexts. In doing so, they look at how different forms of mobilization intersect with political contextual differences to produce democratic outcomes.
Next we provide a brief description of the analytical categories used to frame this comparative work.
As was discussed above, our case studies have been grouped around three distinct forms of mobilization that have already been well described in the literature: associational and NGO-driven mobilization; social movement mobilization; and citizen involvement in formal political institutions, including in spaces for participatory governance. These categories were placed on a spectrum running from constitutive forms of political mediation (associations and social movements) to representative forms of political mediation (participation in formal governance structures).
To explore how different forms of mobilization played out in different political contexts, we classified the contexts, following an aggregation of democracy indices and indicators produced by the Polity IV project, Freedom House and the Economist Intelligence Unit. According to this aggregation, countries were clustered into two groups related to the characteristics of their political regime. These are shown in Table 1.1.
Despite the different variables used to calculate the indices (which include the competitiveness of the political system, the constraints on the chief executive and political rights and liberties), Brazil, India and South Africa were consistently clustered at the high end of democratic state functioning. All three are middle- to upper-middle-income states with strong democratic institutions, are relatively decentralized and have a variety of sites for citizen participation (including formal political participation, various participatory governance mechanisms and relatively strong civil societies). In terms of human development within this cluster, Brazil performs particularly well; it is followed by South Africa and then India. Brazil and South Africa have had persistently high levels of income inequality, though this is a feature that is slowly beginning to change in Brazil.
At the opposite end of the spectrum, the political indicators of Angola and Nigeria show similar patterns. These are relatively unaccountable states, where there are fewer opportunities for citizens to make their voices heard in the democratic arena. In addition, both (though particularly Angola) are considered relatively 'fragile' states according to a number of measures, including their ability to deliver advances in human development. Bangladesh and Kenya – the other two countries that appear in this volume – tend to move between the extremes of this spectrum and to have less stable outcomes across political and social variables. The quality of democracy in those two countries is somewhat mixed, as is their performance in terms of basic human development indicators.
With respect to democratic outcomes, we look particularly at those with the potential to address the kind of deficits pointed out by Luckham et al. (2000): hollow citizenship, weak horizontal accountability and lack of vertical accountability. The democratic outcomes in our case studies have already been analysed by Gaventa and Barrett (2010) as part of a wider body of research into citizen engagement and participation. Although we took their work as a point of departure, we ended up with a somewhat different classification of outcomes, identifying three broad categories.
The first set of outcomes covers those that concern building citizenship, particularly when citizens gain a greater awareness of their rights and empowered self-identities, and new capacities for political participation. The second set includes outcomes where particular practices of participation and collective action have built new citizen agendas on access to rights and services. The third set focuses on strengthened procedural accountability, working towards the construction of inclusive political processes that enhance the systems of checks and balances between society and government. Achievements in the first two categories help to tackle issues of hollow citizenship and weak horizontal accountability, while achievements in the third category deal with a lack of vertical accountability.
This analytical framework made possible a comparison of how different forms of citizen mobilization concerned with deepening democracy tackled the challenges described in this section in the seven countries that made up our universe. We now turn to the cases.
Citizen mobilizations in the global South
We present eleven case studies that explore particular strategies of citizen mobilization in the seven countries of the global South listed in Table 1.1. First, we discuss examples of the three forms of mediated citizen mobilization discussed in the introduction. We go on to examine how citizens and associations have developed different styles of activism and have chosen their preferred forms of mobilization in two contexts.
Mediated mobilization
Associational mobilization: constructing citizenship Relationships between development and human rights NGOs and wider associational networks that work with poor populations are explored in case studies from Kenya, Bangladesh and Angola, where socio-economic inequalities and lack of political accountability are widespread. They focus on democratic outcomes related to an extension of a rights-based understanding of citizenship, improved welfare outcomes, promotion of formal political participation, and policy changes.
(Continues...)
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Table of Contents
Foreword - John GaventaIntroduction - Vera S. Coelho&Bettina von Lieres
Part I: Associational mobilization: constructing citizenship
2. Have NGO Political Empowerment Programs at the Grassroots Level Contributed the Deepening of Democracy in Kenya? - Celestine Nyamu Musembi
3. Microfinance and Social Mobilization: Alternative Pathways to Grassroots Democracy? - Naila Kabeer and Simeen Mahmud
4. The Nucleo Representativo das Associações (NRA) of Dombe Grande, Angola: building democracy and citizenship at the local level - Idaci Ferreira and Sandra Roque
Part II: Social movements: contesting political authority and building state responsiveness
5. We got it in our heads that we should do the job of the state the Indigenous Peoples - Movement and the Health System in Acre, Brazil - Alex Shankland
6. The 2007 Movement and the Role of Citizen Action in the Consolidation of Democracy in Nigeria - Jibrin Ibrahim and Samuel Egwu
7. How Deep is Deep Democracy? Global Citizenship in Local Spaces - Steven Robins
Part III: Citizen involvement in formal governance mechanisms
8. The Infinite Agenda of Social Justice: Dalit Mobilization in the Institutions of Local Governance - Ranjita Mohanty
9. Public Involvement and Social Mobilization: A win-win game? - Vera S. P. Coelho, Alexandre Ferraz, Fabiola Fanti, Meire Ribeiro
10. Dynamics of Political Change and transformation: Civil Society, Governance and the Culture of Politics in Kenya - Duncan Okello
Part IV: Where and how to participate?
11. Passivity or Protest? Understanding the dimensions of Mobilization on Rights to Services in Khayelitsha, Cape Town - Lisa Thompson and Ndodana Nleya
12. How styles of activism influence social participation and democratic deliberation - Arilson Favareto, Yumi Gonçalves, Frederico Menino, Carolina Galvanese, Vera S. P. Coelho