Participation
in Development and the ‘Alliance of Civilizations’
By Jason Yossef Ben-Meir
University of New Mexico
Albuquerque
The United Nation’s
High Level Group for the Alliance of Civilizations
recently issued its final report, which included
ambitious and important recommendations to bridge
the divide between Western nations and the Muslim
world. The Group’s 20 eminent members were
brought together by Secretary General Kofi Annan,
and include former President of Iran, Seyed Mohamed
Khatami, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and André
Azoulay, Advisor to King Mohammed VI of Morocco.
The report’s recommendations form a holistic
approach to alleviating global inequalities and
bridging the Western-Islamic rift. Recommendations
include: education that expands a sense of a common
humanity, media literacy skills, and empowering
initiatives directed towards youth and other groups;
international exchanges with diverse participation;
measures that address the challenges of migration;
achieving the Millennium Development Goals (“the
urgency of which can hardly be overstated”);
and other initiatives.
I suggest that fully incorporating local community
participation in the identification and management
of development projects throughout the Muslim
world, an approach strongly consistent with the
Millennium Development Goals and the recommendations
of the Alliance Group, will significantly decrease
the divide with the West. Before I explain how,
I will begin by stating, just as the Alliance
report does (as well as the 2003 Report of the
Advisory Group on Public Diplomacy for the Arab
and Muslim World), that without a just solution
to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the horrible
violence in Iraq and the intensifying violence
in Afghanistan, efforts to bridge the divide “are
likely to meet with only limited success.”
Participation in community development involves
men and women of villages, neighborhoods and regions
together defining their priorities for projects
(in education, health, economic development, environment,
etc.) and a plan of action to achieve them. Participatory
activities are often utilized to help local people
analyze and discuss their social conditions from
a range of perspectives as part of the decision-making
process for projects. Here in Albuquerque, New
Mexico, for example, a group of citizens working
towards social change in their community went
through a series of development planning activities
that incorporated the use of visuals, charts and
mapping. They determined that a community center
for their youth was most important, and are currently
taking important steps towards achieving that.
In the High Atlas Mountains of Morocco, local
communities most often rank potable water, irrigation
and projects for women and youth to be among the
top development priorities, and villages that
have experienced participatory planning received
real benefits from projects they subsequently
established.
Participation in community development shares
the same ‘guiding principles’ expressed
in the Alliance report: First, “Poverty
leads to despair, a sense of injustice, and alienation
that, when combined with political grievances,
can foster extremism. Eradication of poverty would
diminish those factors linked to economic marginalization
and alienation and must therefore be aggressively
pursued.” Communities planning local development
in a participatory way base projects on the self-described
interests of the local people, which work against
alienation.
The fact that communities determine and have ownership
of the projects provide the basis for their success
in generating a vast range of new socio-economic
and environmental benefits in extremely diverse
contexts.
Second, the participatory approach takes the form
of democratic governance that the Alliance encourages:
“To be successful, democratic systems must
emerge organically from within each society’s
culture, reflecting its shared values and adapted
to the needs and interests of its citizens. This
is only possible when people are free and feel
in control of their destiny.” The participatory
process is democracy that emerges from within
because it grows from dialogue and interaction
among local community members and is driven by
their own needs and interests.
Participatory community development also relates
to observations in the report of the impact of
the international system on diverse nations and
cultures, as well as internal factors in Muslim
societies that inhibit development. Many feel,
the report states, that the “international
system…offers…greater conformity and
homogenization of cultures, complete with the
dislocation of families and communities brought
about by urbanization, the negation or appropriation
of traditional lifestyles, and environmental degradation.”
We have learned from experiences around the world
that a preventive against dislocation and the
brutal and uneven effects of globalization is
diversification of production and income. Diversification
requires new development projects and building
decision-making skills of people and communities
to better enable them to adapt to changing conditions.
Participatory activities help people base their
decisions on a range of perspectives and information,
leading to development projects that are thoughtfully
designed and expand the ways human needs are satisfied.
Participatory planning helps communities not only
deal with globalization and other international
challenges that impact their development, but
also assists people in analyzing and responding
to conditions within their own country. The Alliance
report says that “all Muslim societies would
benefit from increased dialogue and debate to
identify those factors internal to their own societies
which have inhibited their development and full
integration into global political, economic, and
intellectual communities, and to generate ideas
on how to overcome these barriers.”
Participatory development can help in this regard
because in the process as community members determining
priority projects, they analyze social, economic,
environmental, historical, technical and institutional
factors that affect their lives and prospective
projects. Not only does this analysis and dialogue
further public understanding of internal barriers,
but is in itself an indigenous democratic reform
process that helps to overcome those barriers.
The participatory approach to community development
helps to achieve an Alliance of Civilizations
through shared means - empowering education and
development. The Alliance stresses civic and human
rights education, service learning and movement
away from thinking in exclusive terms. Participation
in community development advances this kind of
education for communities as they together plan
and implement development projects that meet their
needs. Participatory development is simply a practical
methodology to help communities create and pursue
a common agenda for social development and change.
But if it were facilitated throughout the Muslim
world, its effect can be a true Alliance of Civilizations.
(Jason Yossef Ben-Meir is president of the High
Atlas Foundation - www.highatlasfoundation.org
- a US nonprofit organization dedicated to the
rural community development of Morocco. He teaches
sociology at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque.)
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