Practicing Development through a Participatory Process

"Only when people transform themselves through committed involvement can the process be effective and lasting. The practitioner's role is to be a catalyst and affirm the people's vocation."

This 5-page essay summarises author Suzanne Jamison's approach to community development work with traditional and indigenous communities. In it, she draws on the theories of Paulo Freire. As Jamison puts it, on Freire's approach, practitioners - "those who have the education, theories, and answers but are not of the community" - must facilitate recognition that the dominant social order creates and imposes systems and then gets the oppressed to buy into them. "The practitioner who works with the people engages with them in a mutual praxis informed by the human yearning to be truly free and to create a system wherein the oppressor can also attain freedom. This is true generosity: The oppressed have concern for their own oppressors and the common sense to realize that as long as there is an unjust social order, transformation is impeded."

To demonstrate how practitioners can break the barrier of isolation, Jamison presents the story of a community video project in the state of Arizona, in the United States (US) about 30 years ago. People were trying to organise the farm workers, but it was difficult to overcome the climate of fear created by the growers' practices of isolating the workers in camps and threatening them deportation if there were any moves towards collective action. The videographer, a Mexican from California, took a portable video camera into the migrant camps at one farm, taped the workers' living conditions and their stories, and then went to the next farm where he showed those workers the previous tape, taped their stories and conditions, and so on. "Sharing stories and circumstances coalesced the workers as they realized they were not alone, and it brought together the documented and undocumented workers who recognized their common exploitation. These tapes were shown at Congressional hearings in Washington, DC and resulted in legislation that changed many of the practices, but unfortunately did not change the system."

In contrast to the strategy exemplified in the farmer workers' case, Jamison reflects that "[n]on-Natives often arrive in the community with 'good intentions' to solve perceived problems. The first place they go is to the tribal government or some other institution. They seldom take time to be with the people in their quotidian activities, to find out what is really going on, and then they wonder why their solutions are shelved along with all the others. They identify with Native leaders who have internalized their own oppression because these individuals project a façade which non-Natives can recognize: that of the oppressor. Most of the middle-class, regardless of what race, are not interested in changing a system from which their power derives."

She concludes that people must arrive at their own paedagogical methods to internalise and re-contextualise the new parameters of their existence and freedom. "The practitioner and the people have to be prepared for the chaos that this movement will release as the boundaries of oppression are breached, creative transitions stretch capacity, and a new covenant is established."

Click here to download the essay in PDF format.