Unfolding the multiple realities of participation: The case of a participatory water supply programme in rural Cambodia

Abstract

This thesis aims to provide an empirically grounded understanding of why and how the gap emerges between ideals and realities of the participatory development model. It offers ethnographic insights into the process through which multiple meanings of participation produced by actors are negotiated in practice in the context of a South Korean NGO’s participatory water supply programme in rural Cambodia.

The focused attention on actors and their reworking of the participatory development model is an attempt to move away from treating development intervention as a linear input-output process but as a socially produced space in which varying interests, meanings and (non-)actions of actors intersect and compete. Two main arguments underpin this attempt: first, the gap between a development model and its practice is not a mere technical problem that needs to be fixed or managed; rather, it should be seen as an intrinsic feature of development intervention, emanating from the industry’s imperatives to control the uncontrollable and predict the unpredictable. Second, realising positive claims made for participatory approaches to development requires addressing more directly the differential agency of actors to shape the development process. To this end, the thesis reviews a historical trajectory of the participatory development model in Western development discourse and how the model has been localised by development actors in South Korea – a country that officially became an aid donor in 2010. Such a macro-level analysis is then supplemented with extensive field observation on the day-to-day dynamics in and around one South Korean NGO as it juggles multiple responsibilities and surrounding networks. The perspectives of the programme beneficiaries are also presented in relation to the social, cultural and political contexts in which they live.

By bringing in ethnographic detail and the contextualised accounts of participatory experiences, this thesis contributes to advancing a more nuanced discussion of the geographies of participatory development.