Participatory Citizenship: Identity, Exclusion, Inclusion

Abstract

Representative, deliberative or participatory democracy? What form of government, or governance, is most suited to the challenges faced by individual citizens, communities and nation states in the globalized economies of the 21st Century? Mohanty and Tandon stress the importance of addressing these issues at a number of levels, drawing on theoretical and practice perspectives within the context of the Indian sub-continent – whilst being mindful throughout that the emerging lessons, debates and thinking presented by contributors to ‘Participatory Citizenship’ have a much wider relevance. The editors and their contributors never refer directly to community development. This is, in itself, interesting. In the context of ‘developing countries’, does the term still carry connotations of patronage and colonialism and lack the more radical political resonances of its more recent past in Western Europe? Whilst these questions are not addressed directly by the various authors, they do raise important challenges for community development theorists and practitioners: ‘Can marginalised citizens be agents capable of effecting changes? What are the structural barriers to this? What enabling environment is required to make citizens act and engage? How development is to be executed so that it includes and not alienates people?’