How Does Community Participation Work? Human Rights and the Hidden Labour of Interstitial Elites in Ghana

Abstract

Human rights and international development organizations are increasingly promoting community participation as a critical component of successful programmes. Not all methods of participation are equal. Some might be misleading or downright harmful. But these practices remain widespread and for their proponents, full of emancipatory promise. This article joins the debate on community participation by casting critical attention on one of the most easily overlooked acts of community participation: the act of gathering people for a community meeting. Who gathers ‘community’? How do they understand their activities? What consequences does participation have for them? In an ethnography of human rights and development work in Ghana, we find that activists who mobilize local attendance engage in hidden labour that is time-consuming and sometimes socially costly, but they gain an opportunity to exert some power and strengthen their social networks. Practitioners should think more frankly about the practices that undergird community participation. ‘Local volunteering’ would perhaps be fairly integrated into the formal organizational structure as semi-skilled labour.