Paradox of participation: giving or taking part?

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Abstract
In this article we address our experiences with a so‐called participatory approach in a Vietnamese‐Belgian water management project. This project aimed, in its social science component, at stimulating and studying processes of reflexive social learning and of participation and negotiation on local water management issues and on project activities. In this article we intend to show how specific project‐related strategies and attempts towards facilitating participation fail and how other initiatives seem to succeed or at least to elicit valuable processes of negotiation and learning. We start from the commonly held view on participation as committed to reverse or subvert power relations. However, our research experiences indicate that participation is always part of an operation of power, governing people to behave themselves in a particular determined way. From this Foucauldian governmental perspective, we are able to reconsider the success and failure of participatory approaches, not so much in terms of the effectiveness of their application, but rather in terms of the possibility to refuse ‘participatory’ government. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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