When FAO’s Report (1976) recommended ‘organisations of the rural poor' as an essential pre-requisite for any public programmes for socio-economic development of marginal farmers and landless labour, it was based on an analysis of several examples including then popular local movements like Bhumi Sena & Shramik Sangathan (in Maharashtra). When SEWA began to organise women, home-based workers, in the late 1970s in Ahmedabad, it was based on an understanding of trade unions as collective associations of the poor labourers. When MYRADA began to organise poor rural women to start small savings groups in the mid-1980s in Karnataka that became the foundation for the Self-Help Group movement in India and around the world. Popular participation, collective mobilisation and strong organisations of the poor and the marginalised have gradually become commonplace in many development programmes nationally and globally. Recognition of the need for collectivisation as a union, association and/or organisation is historically rooted in the popular movements aimed to challenge discrimination, oppression and exclusion from access to rights and resources. Since the 1980s, this strategy has gradually become a part of the official policies and programmes for the socio-economic development of vulnerable and poor households. The savings-and-credit movement became the Self-help Group (SHG) model, then graduated into the micro-finance industry in the twenty-first century. Most public service programmes—from social forestry to watersheds, and from primary education to health care---gradually adopted a model of formally designed participatory mechanism, expected to be self-selected by local communities in the early 1990s. While the early impetus to cooperatives as a form of the economic organisation began to lose credibility as the ownership of ‘co-operators’ declined due to ‘external’ control, a similar phenomenon began to occur in trade unions as non-worker outsiders occupied positions of decision-making. In essence, collective mechanisms to join resources, capacities and motivations by the poor and the marginalised generally began to lose their sense of representative accountability to their constituencies. With statutory mandates to local governments gaining traction towards the end of 1990s, sub-committees of local governments, comprising elected members, began to be constituted around most of such socio-economic development programmes in the country. Despite constitutional provisions to such bodies as Gram Sabha (Village Assembly) in India, the downward accountability of elected councillors to the constituency did not materialise adequately. As a consequence, many development practitioners and policymakers have begun to argue for the direct participation of the marginalised households in managing the programmes and initiatives of socio-economic development. Participatory budgeting innovations from Brazil and women’s enterprises from Bangladesh travelled widely and rapidly across the world in the past two decades. New forms of SHG cluster associations and Farmers Producer Organisations (FPOs) are efforts to scale up to meso levels socio-economic development interventions through such principles of direct participation. Yet, governance of such entities entails electing (or selecting) representatives to supervise (if not undertake) the day-to-day operations of such collectives. The challenge of holding such representatives to remain accountable to their base of members (or shareholders) remains. PRIA’s experiences in supporting community-managed socio-economic programmes have demonstrated the need to strengthen both direct and representative forms of participation. In externally stimulated interventions to collectivise, PRIA’s experience suggests the need for great caution, easy pace and substantive and ongoing investment in learning as a collective. Building capacities of participatory and accountable leadership amongst representatives (elected or appointed) in PRIA’s experience requires clear mandates and independent resources. As such collective grows, the managerial functions (and appointed staff to perform the same) tend to inadvertently ‘dominate’ decision-making, while participation of members of the collective recedes. In the post-pandemic context, locally community governed arrangements for various social and economic enterprises appear desirable, and inevitable. If such community-governed mechanisms for agriculture, health care, water and sanitation services, education and skilling, non-farm economic enterprises etc have to become sustainable for marginalised and vulnerable households, then special systems and efforts need to be put in place to ensure that participation and representation of ‘share-holders’ remain mutually accountable.The Samwad on “Participation, Representation and Accountability: Strengthening the Movement” was organised by PRIA (New Delhi) in partnership with APMAS (Hyderabad) and International Cooperative Alliance Domus Trust, India on November 17, 2021, to explore the following questions:
Click here for the webinar recording