I have been reading Participation as Process-Process as Growth: What we can learn from Grameen Bank Bangladesh by Andreas Fuglesang and Dale Chandler. In their book, Fuglesang and Chandler note that Dr. Muhammad Yunus (founder of the Grameen Bank) takes a different approach to change from Alinsky and Freire. They state that while Alinsky and Freire advocated "to some extent, conflict and confratation as a means of synthesizing action for liberation and development, the Yunus approach is analytical, process oriented and non-confrontational....to counteract and supercede oppressive structures, it builds alternative, more effective and enabling socio-economic frameworks through which people can participate in action towards their liberation...and it attempts to do so on a large scale" (Fuglesang and Chandler 1995). They continue to describe the Yunus approach as "organizational learning and development...the issue is to develop an organization which is responsive to the needs of the participants and capable of sustaining this responsiveness" (Fuglesang and Chandler 1995). My questions are:
Should we always aim at establishing new frameworks or sometimes attempt to transform existing frameworks?
How does the Grameen Bank ensure that it remains responsive to the needs of the participants? As Green and Haines (2008) question in Asset Building and Community Development, "a big question that NGOs face is, who are they accountable to? If they work for and with the poor in developing countries, or at least specific constituencies in specific developing countries, are they accountable to them or are they accountable to the agency that has provided funding for their operations and projects." Is this where we refer back to the democratic morality that should be institutionalized?
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Morality and sequential aggregation; or, how do we get from individual morality to collective goods (a collective norm that reflects core values and regulating principles that initiate and sustain cooperative human interactions).
In an important sense, the framework is not the organization but the embodiment of regulating (democratic) principles in operation of socially distant and more formal organizations -- the principles and process of participation.
The core principles/values emphasize inclusion, active engagement, and cooperation. The result is more and stronger bonding capital. Bonding capital is precursor/precondition to bridging capital. In practice and process, its aggregation of individual effort into increasingly powerful collective effort and achievement.
Sustainability (adaptive capacity) relies on both forms of capital.
Posted this link about Barefoot College in comment on another blog. One can argue that essence of Barefoot College and Grameen Bank is "Participation as Process." Growth is what we might term increased capacity.
You might want to read Elinor Ostrom's Collective Action and Evolution of Social Norms.
Here's excerpt,
"...(excerpt from Elinor Ostrom’s Collective action and Evolution of Social Norms. in)
148 Journal of Economiic Perspectives
The Evolution of Rules and Norms in the Field
Field studies of collective action problems are extensive and generally find that cooperation levels vary from extremely high to extremely low across different settings. (As discussed above, the seventh core finding from experimental research is that contextual factors affect the rate of contribution to public goods.) An immense number of contextual variables are also identified by field researchers as conducive or detrimental to endogenous collective action. Among those proposed are: the type of production and allocation functions; the predictability of resource flows; the relative scarcity of the good; the size of the group involved; the hetero- geneity of the group; the dependence of the group on the good; common under- standing of the group; the size of the total collective benefit; the marginal contribution by one person to the collective good; the size of the temptation to free ride; the loss to cooperators when others do not cooperate; having a choice of participating or not; the presence of leadership; past experience and level of social capital; the autonomy to make binding rules; and a wide diversity of rules that are used to change the structure of the situation (see literature cited in Ostrom, forthcoming).
Some consistent findings are emerging from empirical field research. A frequent finding is that when the users of a common-pool resource organize them- selves to devise and enforce some of their own basic rules, they tend to manage local resources more sustainably than when rules are externally imposed on them (for example, Tang, 1992; Blomquist, 1992; Baland and Platteau, 1996; Wade, 1994). Common-pool resources are natural or humanly created systems that gen- erate a finite flow of benefits where it is costly to exclude beneficiaries and one person's consumption subtracts from the amount of benefits available to others (Ostrom, Gardner and Walker, 1994). The users of a common-pool resource face a first-level dilemma that each individual would prefer that others control their use of the resource while each is able to use the resource freely. An effort to change these rules is a second-level dilemma, since the new rules that they share are a public good. Thus, users face a collective action problem, similar in many respects to the experiments discussed above, of how to cooperate when their immediate best-response strategies lead to suboptimal outcomes for all. A key question now is: How does evolutionary theory help us understand the well-established finding that many groups of individuals overcome both dilemmas? Further, how can we under- stand how self-organized resource regimes, that rarely rely on external third-party enforcement, frequently outperform government-owned resource regimes that rely on externally enforced, formal rules?
The Emergence of Self-Organized Collective Action
From evolutionary theory, we should expect some individuals to have an initial propensity to follow a norm of reciprocity and to be willing to restrict their own use of a common pool resource so long as almost everyone reciprocates. If a small core group of users identify each other, they can begin a process of cooperation without having to devise a full-blown organization with all of the rules that they might eventually need to sustain cooperation over time. The presence of a leader or entrepreneur, who articulates different ways of organizing to improve joint out- comes, is frequently an important initial stimulus (Frohlich, Oppenheimer and Young, 1971; Varughese, 1999).12
If a group of users can determine its own membership-including those who agree to use the resource according to their agreed-upon rules and excluding those who do not agree to these rules-the group has made an important first step toward the development of greater trust and reciprocity. Group boundaries are frequently marked by well-understood criteria, like everyone who lives in a particular commu- nity or has joined a specific local cooperative. Membership may also be marked by symbolic boundaries and involve complex rituals and beliefs that help solidify individual beliefs about the trustworthiness of others.
Design Principles of Long-Surviving, Self-Organized Resource Regimes
Successful self-organized resource regimes can initially draw upon locally evolved norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness and the likely presence of local leaders in most community settings. More important, however, for explaining their long-term survival and comparative effectiveness, resource regimes that have flour- ished over multiple generations tend to be characterized by a set of design princi- ples. These design principles are extensively discussed in Ostrom (1990) and have been subjected to extensive empirical testing.13 Evolutionary theory helps to ex- plain how these design principles work to help groups sustain and build their cooperation over long periods of time.
We have already discussed the first design principle-the presence of clear boundary rules. Using this principle enables participants to know who is in and who is out of a defined set of relationships and thus with whom to cooperate. The second design principle is that the local rules-in-use restrict the amount, timing, and technology of harvesting the resource; allocate benefits proportional to required inputs; and are crafted to take local conditions into account. If a group of users is going to harvest from a resource over the long run, they must devise rules related to how much, when, and how different products are to be harvested, and they need to assess the costs on users of operating a system. Well-tailored rules help to account for the perseverance of the resource itself. How to relate user inputs to the benefits they obtain is a crucial element of establishing a fair system (Trawick, 1999). If some users get all the benefits and pay few of the costs, others become unwilling to follow rules over time.
In long-surviving irrigation systems, for example, subtly different rules are used in each system for assessing water fees used to pay for maintenance activities, but water tends to be allocated proportional to fees or other required inputs (Bardhan, 1999). Sometimes water and responsibilities for resource inputs are distributed on a share basis, sometimes on the order in which water is taken, and sometimes strictly on the amount of land irrigated. No single set of rules defined for all irrigation systems in a region would satisfy the particular problems in managing each of these broadly similar, but distinctly different, systems (Tang, 1992; Lam, 1998).
The third design principle is that most of the individuals affected by a resource regime can participate in making and modifying their rules. Resource regimes that use this principle are both able to tailor better rules to local circumstances and to devise rules that are considered fair by participants. The Chisasibi Cree, for example, have devised a complex set of entry and authority rules related to the fish stocks of James Bay as well as the beaver stock located in their defined hunting territory. Berkes (1987, p. 87) explains that these resource systems and the rules used to regulate them have survived and prospered for so long because effective "social mechanisms ensure adherence to rules which exist by virtue of mutual consent within the community. People who violate these rules suffer not only a loss of favor from the animals (important in the Cree ideology of hunting) but also social disgrace." Fair rules of distribution help to build trusting relationships, since more individuals are willing to abide by these rules because they participated in their design and also because they meet shared concepts of fairness (Bowles, 1998).
In a study of 48 irrigation systems in India, Bardhan (1999) finds that the quality of maintenance of irrigation canals is significantly lower on those systems where farmers perceive the rules to be made by a local elite. On the other hand, those farmers (of the 480 interviewed) who responded that the rules have been crafted by most of the farmers, as contrasted to the elite or the government, have a more positive attitude about the water allocation rules and the rule compliance of other farmers. Further, in all of the villages where a government agency decides how water is to be allocated and distributed, frequent rule violations are reported and farmers tend to contribute less to the local village fund."
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