Thursday, February 19, 2009

Participation as a buzzword

William Easterly has an interesting post over at Aid Watch on "buzzwords" in development literature - focusing on an article that discusses the way in which the rhetoric of "participation" is used "to convey good intentions to give the 'power to the poor' over aid affairs, while never in fact ceding any such powers". Richard Stewart has made a similar point about the way in which using "accountability"as a slogan in global governance literature more generally has rendered it of little use analytically. Worth a read, anyway...

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