Structuring People: The Myth of Participation and the Organisation of Civil Society in Development (Sozialwissenschaftliche Zugänge zu Afrika) 3658359021, 9783658359027

Citation preview

Sozialwissenschaftliche Zugänge zu Afrika

Eva Marie Schindler

Structuring People The Myth of Participation and the Organisation of Civil Society in Development

Sozialwissenschaftliche Zug¨ange zu Afrika Reihe herausgegeben von Jonas Metzger, Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen, Gießen, Deutschland Jürgen Schraten, Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen, Gießen, Deutschland

In dieser Buchreihe werden deutschsprachige Einführungen und Übersichten in die sozialwissenschaftliche Analyse afrikanischer Gesellschaften veröffentlicht. Ihr gemeinsames Charakteristikum ist, dass sie eine gegenwartsbezogene Bestandsaufnahme von relevanten sozialen, politischen und kulturellen Themen bieten, die zwar exemplarisch aber auch charakteristisch für diese Gesellschaften sind. Der sozialwissenschaftliche Zugang zu afrikanischen Gesellschaften ist immer noch schwierig, weil die lokalen Bildungssysteme meist nur geringe Ressouren für sozial- und kulturwissenschaftliche Arbeit zur Verfügung stellen können. Die Wissenschaften selbst sind Bestandteil eines globalen Machtgefüges, das dem afrikanischen Kontinent nach wie vor eine subalterne Rolle zuweist. Die Buchreihe „Sozialwissenschaftliche Perspektiven auf Afrika“ möchte einen Beitrag zur Verbesserung dieser Situation leisten, indem sie zur Beschäftigung mit afrikanischen Gesellschaften ermuntert, Einstiege erleichert und Zugänge zu aktuellen Forschungsständen gewährleistet. Zu den Einzelbänden sind Autor*innen eingeladen, die umfassende Bestandsaufnahmen, bevorzugt in komparativen Zugängen zu jeweils mehreren Gesellschaften, anbieten möchten. Sie sind ermuntert, durch die Präsentation ihres jeweils spezifischen Blickwinkels den eigenen Forschungsweg zu profilieren und einen direkten Zugang zu relevanten sozialwissenschaftlichen Diskussionen der behandelten Gesellschaften zu bahnen.

Weitere Bände in der Reihe https://link.springer.com/bookseries/16476

Eva Marie Schindler

Structuring People The Myth of Participation and the Organisation of Civil Society in Development

Eva Marie Schindler Berlin, Germany Dissertation, Universität Potsdam, 2021 Dissertation erschienen unter dem Titel: “What we have done is just to put the people in form of a structure”—The myth of participation and the organisation of civil society

ISSN 2662-6071 ISSN 2662-608X (electronic) Sozialwissenschaftliche Zugänge zu Afrika ISBN 978-3-658-35902-7 ISBN 978-3-658-35903-4 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-35903-4 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Responsible Editor: Stefanie Eggert This Springer VS imprint is published by the registered company Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH part of Springer Nature. The registered company address is: Abraham-Lincoln-Str. 46, 65189 Wiesbaden, Germany

Acknowledgements

I could and would not have completed this thesis without the academic, moral, and material support and companionship of my research participants, my supervisors, my colleagues, friends, family, and funding organisations, all of whom I would like to thank from the bottom of my heart. First and foremost, I am deeply indebted to everyone in Uganda who made my field work possible by being willing to speak to me about their experiences with participation in development interventions in interviews or informal conversations, by allowing me to participate in their work and lives, or by sharing documents with me. I am beyond grateful that you shared your stories, insights, and wisdom with me so generously. I also want to thank everyone who supported my research by setting up contacts, and those who helped me organise myself in the field. My warmest thank you goes out to my research assistants, Betty and Josylene, who helped me navigate the local languages spoken in the municipalities I studied and the intricate details of Ugandan English. Professor Shuaib Lwasa and the Makerere University Urban Action Lab supported my research project by assisting with my research permit. Astrid, your home in Kampala was my oasis throughout my time in the field where I often found the calm and clarity I needed for my research and analyses. I also greatly appreciate the office space in Kampala that a German political foundation provided me with and the companionship of everyone working for the foundation. My supervisors, Professor Maja Apelt and Professor Sabine Kuhlmann, gave me invaluable advice throughout the years. Their guidance helped me find my way through the jungle of writing a doctoral thesis many times and they supported me in times of doubt. They contributed significantly to the successful completion of this thesis and I am indefinitely grateful to both. I am also deeply thankful to Maja for the many days together at the library, our lunches and coffees, the

v

vi

Acknowledgements

many conversations about everything under the sun and those about my thesis. Most of all, I would like to thank Maja for always believing in me. Your support was indispensable for completing this thesis. I am grateful to the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) and the Koordinationsbüro für Chancengleichheit (Coordination Office for Equal Opportunities) at the University of Potsdam for their generous scholarships. I am thankful to my colleagues and the professors of the Research Training Group on “Wicked Problems, Contested Administrations: Knowledge, Coordination, Strategy” (WIPCAD) at the University of Potsdam for the encouraging discussions and constructive criticism in colloquia, workshops, classes and over lunch. Thank you also to the administrative support team, who assisted in everything from enrolment to travel costs. I am grateful to my colleagues from the Chair of Organizational and Administrative Sociology at the University of Potsdam for insightful debates and inspiring perspectives on my research, which always pushed my analyses forward. I especially want to thank Max Oliver Schmidt with whom I shared a job and an office and whose humorous outlook on the daily grind of doctoral research often brightened my days. I cannot thank the members of my interpretation group enough. The discussions with Sina, Anna, Lisa, Lucia, and Maria were fruitful and inspiring. The analytical pathway this thesis has taken was greatly influenced by them, and conceptual clarity oftentimes originated from or was refined in the interpretation group discussions. I am also deeply thankful to Sina and Anna for our productive writing camps. Lydia, Arlena, Jennifer, Diane, Alejandro, Lisa, and Abraham are friends and colleagues who read and commented parts of my thesis at various stages, who shared long days and short lunches in the office or at the library. Thanks a million for all the inspiration, support, guidance, for the laughs and distractions, and for your valuable feedback. Sina has been a close friend and ally throughout this journey. Her critical questions and constructive comments have impacted my research substantially and made it better. Our discussions and conversations over coffee and wine extended far beyond the academic realm and have profoundly impacted me. I deeply appreciate your companionship throughout the research process and am beyond grateful for your friendship. Heartfelt thanks go to my family. My parents, Christel and Joachim, always encouraged me to follow my own path. Your unconditional love and support are the foundation for everything else and there are no words to express how

Acknowledgements

vii

thankful I am to you. My siblings, Luisa and Janis, as well as Luisa’s husband Ramsay and daughter Stella, regularly put up with my thesis-related grumpiness and thankfully provided opportunities for much-needed distractions. My twins, Emilia and Jonathan, gave me just enough time to finish the thesis draft before coming into this world. Our familial, multi-generational Covid-19 house share was the productive and supportive environment I needed to finish the revisions on the final thesis. I would have never even started, let alone completed this thesis without my husband Ronny. He encouraged me to embark on this journey, helped with all my IT questions and accepted years without holidays. Most importantly, he endured my most desperate moments and always stood by my side. I am eternally grateful for your love and support.

Contents

1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.1 Participation in Development Interventions: Research Themes and Questions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.2 Theoretical Concepts: Rationalized Myths and Partial Organization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.3 Research Design: A Multi-sited Ethnography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.4 Empirical Context . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.4.1 Two Development Interventions as Anchors for Studying Participation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.4.1.1 TSUPU and USMID: An Introduction . . . . . . . . 1.4.1.2 The Field of Organisations in TSUPU and USMID . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.4.2 Uganda’s Politico-administrative System over Time . . . . . 1.5 Chapter Overview and Findings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

1 5 12 14 15 15 17 19 25 32

2 Theoretical Framework . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.1 Participation as an Orthodoxy in Development . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.2 A Neo-institutionalist Perspective on Participation in Development . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.3 International Development as a Field of Organisations . . . . . . . . . 2.4 Participation as a Rationalized Myth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.5 Municipal Development Forums as Partial Organization . . . . . . . 2.6 Analytical Framework . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

37 38

3 Methodological Framework . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.1 An Interpretive Research Design . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.2 Data Generation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

65 66 70

42 44 49 57 62

ix

x

Contents

3.2.1 Methods . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.2.2 Fieldwork . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.3 Contemplating the Field: A Reflexive Journey . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.3.1 Access and Immersion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.3.2 Positionality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.3.3 Ethics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.4 Data Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.4.1 Coding Process . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.4.2 Case Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.4.3 Core Topics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 Responding to the Myth of Participation through Interpretation and Decoupling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.1 Cities Alliance: Participation as Empowerment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.2 World Bank: Participation as a Tool for Monitoring and Accountability . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.2.1 Understanding Participation as a Tool for Monitoring . . . 4.2.2 Different Types of Monitoring through the MDFs . . . . . . 4.2.3 The MDFs as Mediator . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.2.4 MDFs as Functional Participation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.3 Local Administrations: Participation as a Donor Conditionality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.4 Intermediate Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 Organising Civil Society by Building Membership . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.1 Citizens as Partners and Objects of Transformation . . . . . . . . . . . 5.2 Creating Members: The Right People for Participation . . . . . . . . . 5.2.1 A Preconceived Notion of Who Belongs to the Community . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.2.2 Building on Existing Groups and Relationships . . . . . . . . 5.2.3 Understanding the System: Behavioural Expectations and Professional Requirements . . . . . . . . . . . 5.3 Intermediate Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Organising Civil Society by Setting Rules . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.1 Formalisation of the MDFs’ Structures and Processes . . . . . . . . . 6.2 Formalisation of the MDFs’ Interactions with Municipal Bureaucrats . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.2.1 Sending letters: Documenting Participation . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.2.2 Meetings: Listening to People’s Needs? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

70 73 80 80 88 95 101 102 107 110 113 114 119 120 124 126 130 132 138 143 144 148 150 153 156 164 169 170 176 177 179

Contents

6.3 Narratives of the MDFs’ Prospective Formalisation in Legal Frameworks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.4 Intermediate Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

xi

186 192

7 Discussion and Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.1 Summary and Discussion of Findings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.1.1 Explaining Different Interpretations of the Rationalized Myth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.1.2 Understanding Decoupling of MDFs in Municipal Administrations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.1.3 Partial Organization as Deciding on a Relationship . . . . . 7.2 Contribution of the Study . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.3 Limitations of the Study . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.4 Avenues for Further Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

197 198

203 207 211 217 219

Annex I—Interviews, Observations, and Documents . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

223

Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

235

199

Abbreviations

AE BMZ CA CAO CBO CDO CNDPF DLI DTC EO EP EU Delegation GPT GTM IGG LGA MDF MF MoFPED MoLG MoLHUD NGO NRA NRM PfR

Assistant Engineer Bundesministerium für wirtschaftliche Zusammenarbeit und Entwicklung Cities Alliance Chief Administration Officer Community-based organisation Community Development Officer Comprehensive National Development Planning Framework Disbursement-linked indicator Deputy Town Clerk Environment Officer Economic Planner Delegation of the European Union to Uganda Graduated Personal Tax Grounded Theory Methodology Inspector General of Government Local Governments Act Municipal Development Forum Municipal Forum Ministry of Finance, Planning and Economic Development Ministry of Local Government Ministry of Lands, Housing and Urban Development Non-governmental organisation National Resistance Army National Resistance Movement Program-for-Results

xiii

xiv

PP RC RDC TC TIN TPC TSUPU UNCST UPC URA USMID WB

Abbreviations

Physical planner Resistance Council Resident District Commissioner Town Clerk Taxpayer Identification Number Technical Planning Committee Transforming the Settlements of the Urban Poor Uganda National Council for Science and Technology Uganda People’s Congress Uganda Revenue Authority Uganda Support for Municipal Infrastructure Development World Bank

List of Figures

Figure 1.1 Figure 1.2 Figure 1.3

Field of Organisations in TSUPU and USMID . . . . . . . . . . . Uganda’s System of Local Governments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . District Creation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

21 29 32

xv

List of Tables

Table 3.1 Table 3.2 Table 3.3

Fieldwork Overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Overview of Researched Municipalities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Coding Examples . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

73 75 104

xvii

1

Introduction

March 2017. It is a hot and sunny day in A-Town, and I have joined a team of eight municipal employees and the Municipal Development Forum’s president on a round through town to inspect shop owners’ trading licenses. The Municipal Development Forum (MDF), a participatory mechanism introduced as part of foreign donors’ development interventions, is currently presided by Florence. She is a woman in her 30s who earns her living as a merchant in the local market. Florence sacrifices most of her time for her engagement in the MDF but remarks that she is proud to serve her people and her community this way. We begin the round on a road that is only a short walk from the municipal offices. It is a bustling commercial street, lined with small shops selling shoes, clothes, CDs and movies or offering printing and copying services, with hairdressers and barbers, with small internet cafés and local restaurants. The municipal officers, rather than working in the finance department, are employees of different departments and divisions who were asked to support the exercise because womanpower was needed. The Municipal Development Forum president serves as a representative of the community, a middleaged town agent is the official in charge. The rest of the team consists of the Assistant Health Inspector of one of A-Town’s divisions, four young health education officers and two enforcement officers. We walk from shop to shop and check whether people have trading licenses and are registered with the Uganda Revenue Authority (URA), i.e. whether they have a taxpayer identification number (TIN) that enables them to meet their tax obligations. Most of them do not, and so what ensues is the shutting down of many of the businesses, which consists of the two enforcement officers locking the shop doors with government padlocks and sealing them. Some shop owners pre-emptively close their shop as they see the inspection group approaching. Their logic seems to be that you cannot be fined if you cannot be checked. Sometime during the exercise, the town agent in charge points out that it is good that I am with them because it allows them to be firm with people and shows them that they are being monitored. He also points to some of the garbage in the streets and © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2021 E. M. Schindler, Structuring People, Sozialwissenschaftliche Zugänge zu Afrika, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-35903-4_1

1

2

1

Introduction

tells me that the people constantly complain that the municipality does not come often enough to pick up the garbage from the streets but that they do not realise that they have to pay taxes for that, and if they do not, the municipality does not have enough money to offer services. And that they also do not understand that they have to do their part and cannot just throw the garbage in the street any day, but that they should collect it and put it out when the garbage truck comes. In theory, we are supposed to only check for trading licenses. However, the first shop that is checked and consequently closed down seems to have been a community-based organisation, a training centre for women who never finished their education. After the enforcement officers close it down and kick out all the women who were in the training centre, the owner, an elderly woman, comes running after the group and complains that she was never assessed and thus cannot have a license. She demands of the town agent in charge to assess her organisation on the spot and allow her to pay whichever fees necessary so that the centre can stay open. The town agent replies that he cannot assess her because it is categorised as a school and she would need to get it assessed by the school inspector. It remains unclear to me why he would be allowed to close down the location, despite not being responsible for its assessment, but there is no time to ask since the group rushes onwards to the next store. Aside from checking for trading licenses of the odd shoe store or copy-and-print centre, we also walk into restaurants and check the condition of their kitchens. Rather than closing them down, they are reprimanded in case of substandard hygiene conditions. At some shops, it seems to me that municipal employees are being harsh and fail to explain to often very unknowing business owners how the system really works. They tell them to pay and then get a taxpayer identification number with URA, but most people seem to not really know what that is. Towards the end of the activity, the town agent decides that the area we are walking in has already been surveyed and that people who are saying that they were not assessed yet, are simply lying to see if they might have to pay less than was said last time. He closes all the businesses in that area. The exercise ends when the two enforcement officers run out of padlocks and seals. All the while, the MDF president keeps quiet and does not really get involved in the whole exercise. Later that day, when I speak to her about the whole experience, she tells me that this was regarded as a revenue collection activity and is actually a requirement for an upcoming World Bank assessment in the framework of one of the development interventions. In the eyes of a World Bank representative, whom I interviewed two weeks later, Florence’s presence was not itself an exercise in citizen participation. Rather, it was part of a training for the Municipal Development Forums “to understand the whole issue of own-source revenue and what their role is going to be. … They’ve already briefed them about it, … we’re going to train you to make you understand”.1

1

All individual names used in this thesis are pseudonyms. Additionally, in order to anonymise the research participants even further, masculine and feminine pseudonyms and

1

Introduction

3

(O9: inspection of trading licenses, A-Town, March 2017; EI59: Carine, WB Uganda, April 2017)2

This opening vignette details an observation in A-Town3 , one of the municipalities where I carried out the empirical research for this thesis. It highlights numerous themes and collective actors of relevance to the research. The focus of this thesis lies on participation in the framework of aid interventions. With projects and programmes being the dominant organisational form of aid interventions, it analyses this research subject through the lens of two urban development interventions in Uganda, Transforming the Settlements of the Urban Poor (TSUPU) and the Uganda Support to Municipal Infrastructure Development Project (USMID). TSUPU was a Cities Alliance Country Programme, focused on the overarching objective of managing the rapid growth of Uganda’s urban centres and creating inclusive cities that involve all citizens in processes of urban planning and development (Cities Alliance, 2010: 8). The programme was implemented between 2010 and 2016. USMID was a World Bank programme, run since 20134 and focused on the financing of infrastructure projects in 14 selected secondary cities as well as capacity building in those municipal administrations.5 Within these two aid interventions, the Municipal Development Forums (MDFs) became established as the central participatory mechanisms. The MDFs were organised by establishing a number of functions and structures, such as a president and an executive committee (for a detailed analysis see Section 6.1, Formalisation of the MDFs’ Structures and Processes). In my research, I followed these MDFs in practice across multiple sites, ranging from local administrations in three Ugandan towns to central ministries and the offices of international organisations in Uganda’s capital Kampala. The opening vignette thus introduces the reader to two of the most important organisational actors in the field: the local pronouns are used at random. This means that the gender used for an individual in the thesis does not necessarily coincide with the gender of individual participants in the study (see Chapter 3). 2 Annex I explains how the empirical data is referenced in the text and provides a list of interviews, observations and other empirical data used in this thesis. 3 The other two municipalities studied in this thesis are anonymised as B-Ville and C-City. Section 3.2.2 (Fieldwork) provides information about these municipalities. 4 USMID had originally been scheduled to run until 2018 and was then extended for five years. It is now scheduled to run until 2023. 5 I use the past tense in my writing about my empirical research. Consequently, I also use the past tense with respect to USMID, despite the fact that USMID is still being implemented at the time of writing.

4

1

Introduction

administration and the MDFs. My analysis as presented in this thesis takes the MDFs as empirical cases of the myth of participation and the organisation of civil society. The vignette further anticipates some of the central research themes and findings. Not only does it show the difficult and somewhat conflictual interaction between municipal bureaucrats and communities. Representatives of the state here demonstrated their power by forcefully closing down businesses without a warning or showing any signs of empathy. At the same time, the president of the MDF was present during this exercise, supposedly as a representative of these communities. In reality, the forum’s role was to support the municipal administration. It becomes clear at the end of the vignette that participation of the MDFs in local revenue collection activities was not the idea or desire of municipal bureaucrats but a donor requirement to pass an upcoming World Bank assessment and receive more funding. From the theoretical perspective of sociological neo-institutionalism, it is thus an environmental expectation for the local administration. The MDF here became an instrument in the enforcement of bureaucratic rules and regulations. The vignette thus also sheds first light on the existence of a difference between “the community”6 and the MDFs. While the former was an adversary to the municipal administration in this situation, the MDF functioned as an ally. The notion of the MDF as the administration’s ally further explains the need to train the MDF members to understand administrative issues and the role foreseen for it in tackling these issues. Lastly, the vignette touches upon one of the research’s methodological challenges: the researcher’s positionality. The vignette shows that the town agent perceived me as an additional control instance whose presence allegedly allowed the group of municipal bureaucrats to be firmer in its revenue collection exercise. This is similar to the role of a donor who monitors programme implementation. Indeed, the perception of the researcher as part of the world of donors and international development was often relevant throughout the field research. In the following, I introduce the topic and empirical object of this research: participation in development (Section 1.1). This includes a brief discussion of the literature, which positions the thesis in a larger thematic context, as well as the formulation of the research questions guiding this thesis. Section 1.2 and 1.3 present the theoretical concepts and research design, respectively. This is followed by a description of the empirical context (Section 1.4), specifically the 6

Unless they mark the beginning and end of a quote from the literature or the empirical data, I use double quotation marks when I want to express my own critical distance to a term commonly used in the field, as is the case for the term “the community” here.

1.1 Participation in Development Interventions …

5

two urban development interventions which served as an anchor for the field research (Section 1.4.1), and the politico-administrative context in which these interventions took place (Section 1.4.2). Section 1.5 provides an overview of the chapters in this thesis and its findings.

1.1

Participation in Development Interventions: Research Themes and Questions

In international development interventions, citizen participation and the empowerment of marginalised communities have long been important as both means and ends (Mansuri and Rao, 2013: 25). Nederveen Pieterse speaks about civil society, empowerment and participation as “ubiquitous” in development (Nederveen Pieterse, 2010: 15). This section shows that the term ‘participation’7 has numerous significations in practice and is also studied in manifold ways. In the following I, therefore, specify what type of participation this thesis is focused on and how I studied it. Pateman notes that “the term ‘participation’ is used to cover a very wide range of disparate activities” (Pateman, 2012: 7). In the field of development overall, the terminology used for participatory interventions changes to adapt to popular discourses in development: “[e]ach new wave of enthusiasm for participation has been marketed slightly differently, harnessing progressive-sounding buzzwords from the development discourse of the time” (Cornwall, 2006: 78). The World Bank’s recent “Strategic Framework for Mainstreaming Citizen Engagement in World Bank Group Operations” can serve as a case in point: in this document, the World Bank recounts the evolution of the citizen engagement concept within its organisation and highlights the establishment of a WB-NGO committee in 1982, the launch of the WB Participation Sourcebook in 1996, the emergence of the concept of social accountability “throughout the 2000s” as well as Governance and Anticorruption Strategies in 2007 and 2012 as predecessors of the concept of citizen engagement, which “began to emerge in the Bank in 2013” (World Bank, 2014: 6). At present, participatory development is often cast within the framework of ‘community-driven development’, ‘empowerment’ or ‘social accountability’ (Cornwall, 2006; Hickey and King, 2016; O’Meally, 2013). Participation as a

7

Unless they indicate a quote within a quote, I use single quotation marks to highlight a term or concept that is used in the field. Single quotation marks are further used to signal the use of a colloquial term.

6

1

Introduction

principle further remains a vital part of interventions focused on good governance, democratic governance or decentralisation (see Section 2.1, Participation as an Orthodoxy in Development). Beyond changing buzzwords, the connotations of the various concepts also vary and change, and participation “means different things to different people in different settings” (World Bank, 1996: xi). Cornwall and Brock point out that such differences even exist “within the same discourse”. Thus, “despite the apparent uniformity of today’s development consensus, different actors invest key terms like poverty reduction, empowerment and participation with a range of different meanings” (Cornwall and Brock, 2005: 1046–1047). The authors call this an “expansive semantic range” (Cornwall and Brock, 2005: 1046). Cornwall further argues that the 1980s saw a “recasting” of participation in neoliberal terms, with participatory interventions being “evaluated for their costeffectiveness and cost implications” (Cornwall, 2006: 75). The idea of beneficiary communities’ participation in the development process became associated with making contributions to the development project itself, either in cash or in kind (Cornwall, 2006: 72). As part of the good governance paradigm since the 1990s, participatory governance arrangements became popular as a way to monitor the implementation of development interventions and improve the accountability of governments to their citizens (Speer, 2012: 2380). Today, many of these diverging interpretations and “ideologies” (Cornwall, 2006: 75) of participation coexist in development interventions. Participatory development is not a “coherent and systematic approach to development, but rather an at times convoluted set of ideas and approaches” (Spies, 2009: 70, author’s translation; see also Bebbington et al., 2007; Kühl, 1998). One major stream of research on participation focuses on developing typologies or other ways of ordering these manifold approaches, concepts, and meanings as well as on determining whether empirical instances of public participation are indeed “genuine participation” (Cornwall, 2008: 271). Often implicitly normative in nature, these typologies rank participation and posit that the more power over decision-making citizens have, the better and more genuine the participation becomes. They characterise bad participation as passive or even manipulative, where forums exist simply as a pretext, a façade or as a way of informing citizens of decisions already taken. Four dimensions along which mechanisms of participation vary are commonly identified: o Function of participation: does the administration merely seek to inform citizens, does it want to know citizens’ preferences, or does it let citizens partake in actual decision-making?

1.1 Participation in Development Interventions …

7

o Range of participants: are the people participating representative for the citizenry as a whole? Who should participate in a given instance? o Impact of participation: do discussions link back to public action? How are the results of participation used by the administration? o Level of institutionalisation8 : does the involvement of citizens have a one-off character or is it institutionalised as a permanent mechanism? The most cited typology remains Arnstein’s “ladder of participation”, first published in 1969. Arnstein differentiates between eight rungs of participation. She shows that there are levels of participation that can be classified as “nonparticipation”. With the first two rungs of the ladder, “manipulation” (1) and “therapy” (2), she delineates participatory instruments, which aim at the education of citizens whom the conveners of participatory meetings believe to not be knowledgeable enough to participate. A somewhat more advanced stage of participation are different degrees of “tokenism”, which includes the rungs of information (3), consultation (4) and placation (5). Here, citizens are informed or even heard, but the right to decision-making is reserved for government. Proper participation, Arnstein argues, involves giving real power to citizens. “Citizens can enter into a (6) Partnership that enables them to negotiate and engage in tradeoffs with traditional powerholders. At the topmost rungs, (7) Delegated Power and (8) Citizen Control, have-not citizens obtain the majority of decision-making seats, or full managerial power” (Arnstein, 1969: 217). Research on participation in development commonly also discusses the models by Pretty (1995) and White (1996) (e.g. Cornwall, 2008; Holland et al., 2015). Pretty’s typology is similar to that of Arnstein in the sense that he describes the spectrum as ranging roughly from tokenistic to genuine. Specifically, Pretty defines seven types of participation, beginning with “manipulative participation”, where representatives of the wider citizenry are involved in development programmes and projects but have no power to influence them. The seventh and ‘highest’ type of participation is “self-mobilization”, where people initiate social change independent of donor support or other external organisations (Pretty, 1995: 1252). White distinguishes top-down and bottom-up interests in participation as well as forms and functions of participation. While top-down interests include legitimation and efficiency, bottom-up interests are, inter alia, inclusion, leverage, and empowerment. White

8

In participation research, the term institutionalisation is not used in the neo-institutionalist sense as taken-for-granted elements and collectively shared scripts of social reality. Rather, it explicates whether a participatory mechanism is a permanent fixture.

8

1

Introduction

argues that forms and functions of participation are paired and range from nominal participation, which can be specified as participation only on paper and with a display function, to transformative participation, which serves as a means to the end of social change (White, 1996). Most recently, Holland et al. derived a framework for analysing participation which they claim expands on existing typologies by including an analysis of “the wider network of power relationships within which community or beneficiary participation occurs” (Holland et al., 2015: 89– 92). Their framework analyses forms of participation, participants, motivations, conditions and results of participation across the programme or policy cycle. Their exemplary analysis of participation in the Malawian health sector, however, focuses exclusively on the analysis of local level interactions and does not take into account power relations between different levels of government. Not distinctly concerned with participation in development, Fung’s democracy cube can be seen to categorise varieties of participation in a similar vein. He argues that participation varies along three dimensions: the participants, decision-making mechanisms and the link between participation and public action (Fung, 2006). A further stream of research is focused on whether participation works, either from a functionalist perspective, which asks how to structure participatory interventions so that they have impact (Holland et al., 2015; Mansuri and Rao, 2013; Speer, 2012), or from a critical perspective, which highlights the role of power and power relations (Cleaver, 1999; Cooke and Kothari, 2001a; De Wit and Berner, 2009; Dill, 2009; Mosse, 2001; Rigon, 2014). In light of the fact that participation is not a fixed set of ideas and approaches and in contrast to normative typologies as well as evaluative studies of ‘what works’, in this thesis, I do not predefine what participation is or is supposed to be with the aim of eliciting successes, dunning failures or assessing whether participation was genuine or tokenistic. Rather, this research is interested in the meaning-making around a specific participatory mechanism introduced as part of two development interventions. With Spies, I argue that it is important to study those situations and processes where the models and rhetoric of development are implemented practically and to analyse “which importance is attributed to these ideals, norms and moral conceptions of the different actors and what actually happens beyond these models, ideals and discourses of development when they become subject or context of social action” (Spies, 2009: 77, author’s translation). This is particularly interesting in a context such as the Ugandan one, where the relationship between government and civil society is described as strained and the phenomenon of shrinking spaces for civil society has been increasingly discussed in recent years (Buyse, 2018; Smidt, 2018; van der Borgh and Terwindt, 2012; Wanyama, 2016). A representative of the Delegation of the European Union

1.1 Participation in Development Interventions …

9

to Uganda, for example, explained that civil society organisations were accused of being agents of foreign governments and some faced “harassment” in districts where the EU ran programmes, and that overall in Uganda, government support for civil society was dwindling, all on the basis that civil society was perceived as competition by the government, which finds its authority and legitimacy challenged (SSI9: senior staff, EU Delegation, March 2017). This thesis specifically focuses on the collective actors involved in development interventions as organisations and seeks to elicit the theme of participation in development interventions from an organisational perspective. Concretely, it analyses how participation is understood by the organisations involved in its implementation and considers the organisational consequences arising from different understandings and interpretations for participatory mechanisms, and in particular the effect on their organisationality. As Watkins et al. explain with respect to NGOs in development, “the goals of participation, empowerment, and sustainability constrain the technologies they adopt, the strategies they pursue, and much else about the ways they function as organizations” (Watkins et al., 2012: 298). Taking a similar perspective, this thesis analyses the organisational ramifications of participation in development interventions. It thus attempts to answer the following research questions: 1) Do the different organisations involved in the implementation of development interventions understand and interpret participation differently? If so, how? 2) Do these understandings and interpretations have organisational consequences for participatory mechanisms? If so, what do these consequences look like and how can they be explained? In order to bring out the strength of my interpretive approach to the research subject, I consider it important to establish the conceptual clarity which several authors have called for in the analysis of participatory interventions. Cornwall, for example, demands “‘clarity through specificity’—spelling out what exactly people are being enjoined to participate in, for what purpose, who is involved and who is absent” (Cornwall, 2008: 281). In a similar vein, Hickey and Mohan argue for “a greater level of honesty and clarity from both critics and proponents as to what form of participation is being debated; greater conceptual and theoretical coherence on participation; and more considered claims regarding its potential to transform the power relations that underpin exclusion and subordination” (Hickey and Mohan, 2004a: 20–21).

10

1

Introduction

In the following, I heed these calls by clarifying my usage of the terms participation, citizens, civil society, community, Municipal Development Forums and development interventions. In the specific context of my research, participation denotes the involvement of citizens in the development of infrastructure or services in their place of residence through engagement in governmental planning and decision-making. Throughout the study, and particularly in the empirical analysis, terms other than citizens are used, mainly civil society or community. These terms are not synonymous and find reference in vastly different academic debates. They do, however, represent the variance of the terminology used in development practice. Particularly community is often used in the field of development to denote the citizens of a locality. In comparison to civil society, community thus refers to a more limited group of people. Civil society, on the other hand, is often taken to stand for all collective non-state and non-profit actors within a country and is especially equated with non-governmental organisations. This conceptualisation has been criticised by many authors as simplistic and lacking clarity (Banks et al., 2015; Cornwall et al., 2011: 9; Eberlei, 2014: 6; Kontinen and Millstein, 2017: 72; Lewis, 2002: 572). Kontinen and Millstein, for example, note that while they addressed civil society from different angles in their individual work, namely “local social movement activism and community organizing” (Millstein) and “the messy world of organizations and their complex relationships with the international aid industry” (Kontinen), they found many similarities in the everyday life and activities of these movements and organisations (Kontinen and Millstein, 2017: 70). In this thesis, the terms citizens, civil society, and community are mostly used interchangeably to denote the group of people that forms the participants of participatory mechanisms. Municipal Development Forums are the participatory mechanisms which serve as this study’s object of research and thus are taken to epitomise participation. As instances of participation, they, too, are at times equated with the citizens of a locality, albeit not by the researcher, but mostly by the research participants in the field. From the perspective of the researcher, MDFs are instances of induced participation. Participatory forms are often differentiated according to their origin, i.e. whether they originate in bottom-up social movements and grassroots organisations or rather are forums organised by governments or international development actors, i.e. “participation that is orchestrated by an external agency of some kind, be it state or non-governmental” (Cornwall, 2008, p. 281). The terminology for these two types of participation differs between authors, and indeed the meaning associated is also not fully congruent. Mansuri and Rao distinguish organic and induced participation, where the former refers to an achievement of

1.1 Participation in Development Interventions …

11

participatory governance through social movements and mostly confrontational processes while the latter is participation promoted by the state and implemented by bureaucracies (Mansuri and Rao, 2013: 31–32). Miraftab differentiates invited and invented spaces of participation, where the former are “occupied by grassroots and their allied non-governmental organizations that are legitimized by donors and government interventions” and the latter are “also occupied by the grassroots and claimed by their collective action, but directly confronting the authorities and the status quo” (Miraftab, 2004a: 1). She adds that the former are focused on coping mechanisms for the poor while the latter aim at larger societal change and changes in power relations. Dean differentiates prescribed and negotiated participation (Dean, 2017: 216). Given that the MDFs have been introduced within the framework of a development intervention, they can best be characterised as induced, invited or prescribed spaces for participation. The dominant organisational forms of development interventions are projects and programmes9 , which are implemented by and involve a multitude of organisations (see Section 2.3, International Development as a Field of Organisations). In this thesis, the empirical data was generated by focusing on two programmes, both of which involved multilateral donor organisations, Ugandan central government departments and local administrations as well as Ugandan non-governmental organisations. These programmes and especially programme documents are taken to represent official perspectives on participation of those donor organisations financing them.

9

While the literature speaks about projects, the empirical research was done with respect to programmes. This is not least due to the fact that in the early 2000s, projects were strongly criticised in the field of development, both by practitioners and academics, and there was a move towards the implementation of aid interventions in the form of programmes. These were thought to be more comprehensive and less prone to disadvantages such as short time frames and limited focus of activities. As such, they were expected to “reduce transaction costs, allow for the exploitation of synergies and have a better political leverage” than projects (Rosin, 2009: 76, author’s translation). From an organisational perspective, however, programmes are merely an “application of the project form on itself”, and today, neither practitioners nor academia differentiate clearly between the two (Rosin, 2009: 78, author’s translation). Therefore, the theoretical considerations that have been elaborated for projects are very much applicable to the organisational form of a programme.

12

1.2

1

Introduction

Theoretical Concepts: Rationalized Myths10 and Partial Organization11

Citizen participation is such an ubiquitous concept in international development that is has become an orthodoxy or a norm that is unescapable for organisations in the field (see Section 2.1, Participation as an Orthodoxy in Development), i.e. participation is part of the institutional environment in the development interventions. This makes sociological neo-institutionalism an appropriate overall framework for this study since this strand of organisational sociology focuses on the relationship between organisations and their environments. Within the neo-institutionalist framework, participation can be conceptualised as a rationalized myth12 in the field of development interventions. However, as a macrosociological approach, sociological neo-institutionalism does not have a differentiated understanding of organisations and organisationality. In order to better grasp the MDFs from an organisational perspective, the thesis therefore expands the neo-institutionalist framework with the concept of partial organization. Participation as rationalized myth In sociological neo-institutionalism, rationalized myths are institutional expectations from organisational environments about appropriate organisational structures or behaviour (Meyer and Rowan, 1977). Institutional expectations can take the form of rules and laws, social norms and obligations or taken-for-granted beliefs and shared understandings (Scott, 2014). Rationalized myths also oftentimes confront organisations with multiple and partially conflicting expectations which organisations are forced to actively process (Hasse and Krücken, 2005: 70). Because environmental expectations can conflict with organisational goals such as efficiency and effectiveness, organisations often adopt the myth “ceremonially” (Meyer and Rowan, 1977). This indicates that formal organisational structures are adapted to fit environmental expectations, but everyday organisational practices differ significantly from these with the aim of protecting the core functionality of the organisation. 10

This thesis is written in British English and therefore spells the term ‘rationalised’ with an ‘s’. The theoretical concept of the rationalized myth, however, is commonly spelled with a ‘z’ and the thesis adopts this spelling when speaking about the theoretical concept. 11 This thesis is written in British English and therefore spells the term ‘organisation’ with an ‘s’. The theoretical concept of partial organization, however, is commonly spelled with a ‘z’ and the thesis adopts this spelling when speaking about the theoretical concept. 12 Theoretical concepts are emphasised by italicisation when they are first introduced in the text and also upon their first mention in the theory chapter. In the rest of the text, however, concepts are not italicised.

1.2 Theoretical Concepts: Rationalized Myths and Partial Organization

13

Neo-institutional theory describes such a processing of institutional expectations, which arise from rationalized myths, with the concepts of decoupling (Meyer and Rowan, 1977) and organised hypocrisy (Brunsson, 2003). This research is not an in-depth study of the myth of participation itself, not least because of the extensive body of research already existing about participation and its paradoxes in development research, much of which is cited intermittently throughout this thesis. Instead, this thesis addresses the question of how organisations handle the myth of participation as it affects them differentially. Municipal Development Forums as partial organization Ahrne and Brunsson introduced the concept of partial organization as a perspective on “organization outside organizations” (Ahrne and Brunsson, 2011). This phrase refers to those elements of organisation which are commonly found in social orders but do not constitute formal organisations, such as networks, institutions, families and social movements. Ahrne and Brunsson posit that what they call complete organisations have access to five elements of organisation, namely membership, rules, monitoring, sanctions and hierarchy. As a result, complete organisations can decide who can participate, how these people should behave, how this behaviour is monitored and how violations of expected behaviour are sanctioned as well as who decides for other members of the organisation and how she does it (Ahrne and Brunsson, 2019b: 4). In the case of partial organization, some but not all of these elements are present. Partial organization, Ahrne and Brunsson argue, helps to explain “when, how, and why social interaction and social relationships become organized” (Ahrne and Brunsson, 2019b: 27). This perspective allows for an organisational understanding of the Municipal Development Forums, which are not an organisation but do exhibit some organisational elements. In drawing on the concept of partial organization to analyse the organisation of civil society in Municipal Development Forums, this thesis heeds Ahrne et al.’s call to exploit the potential of their framework in the study of the expansion of organisation in society and to examine “different forms and manifestations of partial organization” (Ahrne et al., 2016: 99). Specifically, it adds participatory mechanisms in development to the range of social orders studied from this perspective, such as social movements, terrorist networks and families (Schoeneborn and Dobusch, 2019: 318).

14

1.3

1

Introduction

Research Design: A Multi-sited Ethnography

This study is ontologically grounded in the constructivist paradigm and follows an interpretivist epistemology. Interpretive research “focuses on context-specific meanings, rather than seeking generalized meaning abstracted from particular contexts” (Schwartz-Shea and Yanow, 2012: 23). My research therefore does not aim to generate general findings about participation in development interventions but rather seeks to understand in detail what occurred in the specific case of MDFs in Uganda. Consequently, a specific focus is set on understanding how terms were used in the field. This approach reveals taken-for-granted ideas about and conceptualisations of participation and all that it entails, i.e. citizens and the interaction with them. Interpretive research furthermore emphasises the role of reflexivity throughout the research process. During the phases of data generation and analysis, this reflexive journey manifested in field journal and memo writing. The written thesis considers in particular the three topics of access, positionality and ethics (see Section 3.3). The empirical research was conducted as a multi-sited ethnography (Cohn, 2006; Hannerz, 2003; Marcus, 1995). In contrast to a traditional ethnographic approach, I therefore employed multiple methods for the generation of empirical data. In addition to observation with varying degrees of participation, ethnographic interviews and document analysis constituted important sources of data. The field research furthermore extended across multiple research sites, representative of the variety of organisations in the field and in focus in the thesis. Specifically, I conducted field work in three separate phases over a period of seven months (see Table 3.1: Fieldwork Overview). An exploratory field visit to Uganda in November 2015 allowed me to identify the field of relevant organisations and provided first insights into “this animal of the forum” (EI60: Ronald, MoLHUD, April 2017). The second phase in the field in November and December 2016 focused on interviews with representatives of and observations in central government ministries, national non-governmental organisations and multilateral organisations in Uganda’s capital Kampala. Local administrations stood at the centre of the third phase of field research between January and April 2017.13 In the analysis of empirical data, I followed analytical strategies common in ethnographic research, consisting of three main steps. Firstly, in an extensive and iterative coding process based on the principles and processes described in the grounded theory approach by Charmaz (Charmaz, 2014), I proceeded through 13

Although in reality, as Section 3.2 shows, these phases were not as clearly delimited as is posited here.

1.4 Empirical Context

15

the generation of codes emerging from the data to the ordering of codes and the generation of categories. This was followed by a case analysis, in which I interpreted particularly meaningful observations, interviews, and documents in a more detailed manner, mainly in the form of vignettes and interpretive memos. This stage of analysis was supported by regular discussions of empirical data in an interpretation group with other doctoral researchers. In the last stage of data analysis, I identified the thesis’ core topics. Beyond the ordering and grouping of findings into analytical themes and categories, an important element of this step was the iterative process of abductive reasoning, in which I constantly moved back and forth between the empirical material and potentially relevant theoretical approaches.

1.4

Empirical Context

1.4.1 Two Development Interventions as Anchors for Studying Participation This thesis studies participation in the framework of aid interventions through the analysis of two urban development interventions in Uganda: The Cities Alliance Country Programme TSUPU and the World Bank programme USMID. While the former was focused on the proactive and inclusive management of urban growth, the latter financed urban infrastructure projects. These programmes, their documents and activities are in the empirical analysis taken to stand representative for the organisations involved in their implementation. These urban development interventions in Uganda were chosen as empirical sites for a several reasons. Firstly, urban development has recently gained renewed prominence on the agendas of international organisations in the form of processes and events such as the inclusion of a goal focused entirely on cities (SDG 11) in the Sustainable Development Goals, which the United Nations adopted in September 2015 as their overarching framework guiding development interventions until 2030 and the adoption of the New Urban Agenda by UN-Habitat in October 2016. This renewed attention is not least due to the acknowledgement that since 2008, more than half of the world’s population has been living in cities and this percentage is expected to increase over the next decades. For sub-Saharan Africa, the international narrative emphasises that low levels of urbanisation are contrasted with high urbanisation rates and a danger of an “urbanization of poverty” (Mitlin, 2011). At the same time, because the percentage of populations living in urban areas in sub-Saharan Africa today is lower than in other parts of the world

16

1

Introduction

and a significant share of urban growth is expected to take place in the currently small secondary cities, the international community underlines that the development can still be steered in another direction and “a major reconceptualization of [Africa’s] approaches to urban development can still be undertaken” (United Nations Human Settlements Programme, 2014: 7). Uganda is one of the least urbanised countries in Eastern Africa, yet one of the fastest urbanising countries in the world and the Ugandan government is officially committed to proactively managing urbanisation. One example of such policies is the creation of strategic cities in an attempt to break the dominance of the primary and capital city Kampala. Secondly, urban development interventions have a long history of participation and virtually all programming of the key international development actors working on urban development—namely the Cities Alliance, the World Bank and UN-Habitat—commonly contains participatory elements, through which citizens are included in planning and decision-making processes in the framework of the programmes. However, experiences with these participatory elements are not very encouraging. In particular, elite capture of participatory institutions has been reported as a major implementation challenge (De Wit and Berner, 2009; Dill, 2009; Rigon, 2014; Sheely, 2015). Thirdly, at the outset of this thesis project the MDFs were reported as exceptionally successful instances of inclusion and participation and were advocated in forums such as UN Habitat’s Habitat III conference in 2016. Fourthly, the continuation of the MDFs in a separate urban development programme and their planned integration into Uganda’s existing legal frameworks as well as the congruence between involved organisations from central government ministries to municipal administrations and civil society organisations in the two interventions made for an interesting case from the perspective of organisational research. Indeed, the programme documents of TSUPU and USMID reference each other and position the programmes as complementary to each other. TSUPU’s programme document stated that it was “aligned to future investments including the World Bank Uganda Support to Municipal Infrastructure Development Project” (Cities Alliance, 2010: 59) and USMID’s programme appraisal document named the Cities Alliance as a contributor to USMID through “the development and operationalization of Municipal Urban Forums (MF) that bring together various stakeholders to play the role of monitoring” (World Bank, 2013b: 14). This section in the following presents these two interventions as the setting in which MDFs were introduced, concomitantly providing an overview of relevant organisations and other collective actors in the study.

1.4 Empirical Context

17

1.4.1.1 TSUPU and USMID: An Introduction Transforming the Settlements of the Urban Poor (TSUPU) was a programme of the Cities Alliance, a “global partnership supporting cities to deliver sustainable development” (Cities Alliance, 2019a). Within Cities Alliance’s portfolio of activities, TSUPU fell under the category “Country Programme”, which are longterm and large-scale programmes usually involving actors at national, local and community level (Cities Alliance, 2019b). TSUPU was set in the context of significant decentralisation efforts that were undertaken in Uganda throughout the 1990s and 2000s (see Section 1.4.2, Uganda’s Politico-administrative System over Time). As a result of decentralisation, “legal and institutional mandates … empower local governments to make decisions on issues that fall within their jurisdictions, promotion of popular participation and improvement in service delivery” (Cities Alliance, 2010: 7). Within this context, the Cities Alliance identified the challenge of a high rate of urbanisation in Uganda’s secondary cities. These municipalities, while formally empowered by the decentralisation process to manage their own activities, were found to lack the capacity to proactively manage urbanisation. The rationale for the programme was thus exactly this: the proactive management of urbanisation in Uganda’s secondary cities. In this undertaking, community empowerment and participation were part of the guiding principles for TSUPU. TSUPU financed activities that were concerned with the documentation of the approach to mobilisation and empowerment of local communities that was championed and promoted by the International Network of the Urban Poor (INUP) and included the establishment of local community savings groups and settlement-level urban poor organisations. Following the formation of community groups, MDFs were established in the five participating municipalities. The MDFs were described as spaces “where organised urban poor, local government, service providers, private sector and other stakeholders meet on a regular basis to exchange views, debate priorities and agree on common actions” (Cities Alliance, 2010: 20). The MDFs were seen as “the fundamental building block towards good governance and the creation of on-going public community partnerships” (Cities Alliance, 2010: 20). In the framework of TSUPU, the MDFs worked on Municipal Development Strategies and the identification, planning and implementation of infrastructure projects in the community, financed by the programme. For the national level, the programme envisioned the establishment of a National Urban Development Forum, the development of a National Urban Policy and a Strategic Urban Development Plan, all tasks which lay within the responsibility of the Ministry of Lands, Housing and Urban Development (MoLHUD).

18

1

Introduction

Throughout the programme, students and lecturers of urban planning and urban studies from Makerere University were involved in the programme in the framework of internships in municipalities and public lectures. The systematic approach of the country programme framed this as a measure to integrate the education of new urban planners into programmes working on real-life, current challenges. Financial arrangements for TSUPU saw Cities Alliance funds dispersed in two streams. The main activities were funded through the first stream. The funds for this stream were dispersed through the Ministry of Finance, Planning and Economic Development to the MoLHUD, which then distributed the money to the municipalities. Municipal administrations were then responsible for distributing funds to the Community Upgrading Fund, which was to finance the community projects initiated by Municipal Development Forums. In a separate second stream, the Cities Alliance provided funds to those organisations which conducted supporting activities for the programme, e.g. to the World Bank for its operative support and to the International Network of the Urban Poor, which distributed the funds to the NGO Hand-in-Hand for the mobilisation of slum dwellers and other citizens for the forums. Like TSUPU, USMID was developed in a context of demographic and urbanisation challenges, decentralisation and other institutional reforms and, ultimately, recentralising tendencies (see Section 1.4.2, Uganda’s Politico-administrative System over Time). The programme document specifically refers to the high growth rates and increasing economic importance of secondary cities in Uganda as the background for the programme (World Bank, 2013b: 3). Within the World Bank’s portfolio of different types of activities, USMID was classed as a “Program-for-Results” (PfR), which indicates that it was implemented via Uganda’s administrative and political organisations and processes. Furthermore, funding was directly dependent on regular assessments of the programme’s achievements (World Bank, 2019a). Monitoring and evaluation, therefore, played an important role throughout a programme’s implementation. In the case of USMID, implementation through existing organisations and processes denotes that the World Bank supplied two specific grants to an existing programme for local government development and decentralisation. The Local Government Management and Service Delivery (LGMSD) programme has been running in Uganda since 2000 (piloted in 1997) and has long been the Ugandan programme to support local government development and decentralisation as well as institutional reforms. In light of the foreseen urbanisation challenges, USMID added two specific grants to LGMSD: The Municipal Development Grant (MDG) and the Municipal Capacity Building Grant (MCBG). USMID’s objective was the

1.4 Empirical Context

19

development of municipalities’ capacity for urban service delivery (World Bank, 2013b: 10). In comparison to TSUPU, USMID was thus not exclusively focused on improving services for the urban poor but rather for the entire municipality. At the local government level, USMID had two main areas of engagement: urban infrastructure investments and capacity building activities. The aim was to “strengthen the institutional capacities of both the MoLHUD and the municipal LGs [local governments] for the achievement of the Program objectives and results” (World Bank, 2013b: 37–38). The programme document restricted infrastructure investments to a pre-defined subset of investment activities eligible for funding. The selection was based on consistency with the municipal service delivery mandate as provided for under the Local Government Act (LGA): “urban roads and associated infrastructures, urban solid and liquid waste management, water and sewerage extension to peri-urban areas, urban local economic infrastructure, urban transport, urban beautification” (Republic of Uganda, 1997, CAP243). The Municipal Development Forums (which USMID’s programme document calls Municipal Urban Forums or MFs) were to be involved in the preparation of projects to be funded under the programme. USMID’s programme document pointed out that the MDFs were “consistent with the legal requirement which provides for bottom-up participatory planning and budgeting in Uganda LGs” (World Bank, 2013b: 39) (see also Section 1.4.2, Uganda’s Politico-administrative System over Time). The financing arrangement differed from that of TSUPU in the sense that in USMID, the Bank of Uganda received funds from the World Bank and paid these out directly into the accounts of municipal governments in the form of loans (World Bank, 2013b: 54). This in theory removed the MoLHUD as an intermediary which in TSUPU was responsible for the payment of funds to the local level.

1.4.1.2 The Field of Organisations in TSUPU and USMID As a central construct of neo-institutional theory, the organizational field 14 describes the environment that shapes organisational choices and actions (see Section 2.3, International Development as a Field of Organisations). In order to understand the implementation of MDFs as mechanisms for participation in Uganda’s municipalities, it is necessary to understand the environment in which 14

This thesis is written in British English and therefore spells the term ‘organisational’ with an ‘s’. The theoretical concept of the organizational field, however, is commonly spelled with a ‘z’ and the thesis adopts this spelling when speaking about the theoretical concept.

20

1

Introduction

they were conceived, established and continue to exist. In this thesis, I therefore draw on the essential cornerstones of the concept of the organizational field to understand the organisational environment in which the MDFs are embedded. In order to express that I do not study the organizational field in depth, I use the term “field of organisations” instead of organizational field. The MDFs’ field of organisations is comprised of a multitude of organisations and other collective actors, mainly those involved in TSUPU and USMID. Figure 1.1 summarises this field of organisations.15 As a global network of national governments, multilateral organisations, associations of local governments, international NGOs, private foundations and other collective actors, the Cities Alliance calls itself a “global partnership supporting cities to deliver sustainable development” (Cities Alliance, 2019a). The network was formed with the goal to tackle urban poverty and was a driving force in the inclusion of its own goal to “improve the lives of 100 million slum dwellers by 2020” in the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), reflected in Goal 7, Target 11. In TSUPU, the Cities Alliance was responsible for the overall supervision of programme implementation, which entailed conducting regular supervision missions, reviewing monitoring reports from the Ugandan organisations involved in the programme and documenting programme process and lessons learned (Cities Alliance, 2010). The network did not, however, have a physical presence in Uganda but rather drew on its network organisations for programme implementation. In the case of TSUPU, the local World Bank office was centrally involved in the implementation, especially with respect to the disbursement of funds. As a World Bank official explained: “We get trust funds from Cities Alliance, bank-executed trust fund. … With the bankexecuted trust fund, the role of implementation lies with the bank. By then they didn’t have an office established in Uganda, so they channelled their money through the bank, we did monitoring and supervision of consultants” (EI27: Geraldine, WB Uganda, March 2017).

Trust funds are one of the World Bank’s channels of development assistance, an instrument through which the organisation’s activities are financed. Bankexecuted trust funds are employed when a programme’s activities “support the 15

Besides the organisations presented in this section, other organisations were involved in TSUPU and USMID. In both programmes, for example, the Ministry of Finance, Planning and Economic Development (MoFPED) was responsible for the dispersion of funds but otherwise not involved in the implementation of the programme. This section presents only the central actors in the field of organisations as it presented itself in the empirical research.

1.4 Empirical Context

21

World Bank’s work program” (World Bank, 2019b: 43). In comparison, under recipient-executed trust funds “the Bank channels donor funds to recipients who implement the agreed activities” (World Bank, 2019b: 43). As Geraldine describes, in the case of TSUPU, the World Bank was given funds from the Cities Alliance and was responsible for the implementation of the programme’s activities, including monitoring and supervision. Additionally, the World Bank had the spending authority and as such was in the position to take important decisions in the dispersion of TSUPU’s funds.

Source: Own representation based on (Cities Alliance, 2010; World Bank, 2013b).

Figure 1.1 Field of Organisations in TSUPU and USMID

The World Bank is furthermore the donor organisation which funded USMID. As a multilateral organisation, the World Bank has a strong presence in Uganda and the capacity to convene and convince both the donor community and government ministries. In USMID, the World Bank Uganda Office was responsible for reviewing and monitoring the overall implementation process. It reviewed the achievement of programme results through regular six-monthly implementation status and result reports as well as through the assessment of the disbursementlinked indicators (DLIs), the achievement of which was a precondition for the disbursement of funds. DLIs in USMID were focused on the municipal administrations and included the delivery of local infrastructure according to a municipality’s annual action plan and the filling of several positions in the

22

1

Introduction

municipal administration, particularly that of town clerk. The World Bank team furthermore provided support to the other organisations involved in the programme with respect to implementation issues, institutional capacity building and monitoring systems (World Bank, 2013b). As the programmes were aimed at urban development, the main counterpart of both TSUPU and USMID was the Ugandan Ministry for Lands, Housing and Urban Development. The MoLHUD is one of 18 central government ministries in Uganda. Its mandate is “to ensure a rational, sustainable and effective use and management of land and orderly development of urban and rural areas as well as safe, planned and adequate housing for socio-economic development” (Ministry of Lands, Housing and Urban Development, n. d.). In TSUPU and USMID, the MoLHUD played the main coordinating role for all activities and organisations involved, and it carried the responsibility for reporting to the donor. This meant that the MoLHUD had to ensure that the implementation of the programmes went according to plan, both regarding the quality and timeframe (Cities Alliance, 2010: 13). With respect to the Municipal Development Forums, the MoLHUD positioned itself as an advocate of the participatory mechanism, providing “training, support, supervision, monitoring and reporting as well as lobbying and advocacy on [the MDFs’] behalf” (EI41: Raymond, MoLHUD, March 2017). This also included ensuring the MDFs’ continuous funding and pushing for the MDFs’ ‘institutionalisation’16 . One ministry representative even positioned the ministry as community mobiliser for the forums (EI40: William, MoLHUD, March 2017). Ronald from the MoLHUD called his colleague Raymond “the boss of MDFs” (EI60: Ronald, MoLHUD, April 2017). Raymond himself formulated “I have to oversee the operations of MDFs, support, supervise, involve myself into their trainings, orientation” (EI41: Raymond, MoLHUD, March 2017). He further specified what this involved: observing the elections for MDF executive every two years17 , giving guidelines on how to do elections and

16

In the field, “institutionalisation” was used to describe the integration of MDFs into Uganda’s existing legal frameworks in order to ensure their sustainability over time. The meaning of “institutionalisation” in the field is thus more akin to the use of the term in participation research (see Section 1.1). It does not signify institutionalisation in the neoinstitutionalist sense of taken-for-granted elements and collectively shared scripts or frames of social reality. The narrative of institutionalisation of MDFs in the field is analysed in detail in Section 6.3. 17 However, no representative of the MoLHUD was present in either of the MDF meetings in A-Town or in B-Ville I observed, although both meetings involved the election of a new forum executive.

1.4 Empirical Context

23

organising trainings on different topics. Ronald echoed some of the points Raymond made about the MoLHUD’s role with respect to the MDFs: “I have … participated in facilitating re-elections for the executive committees, I have done numerous trainings for different MDFs. … I also have been part of the planning team and the budgeting team for MDFs’ activities” (EI60: Ronald, MoLHUD, April 2017). Nathanael, a senior officer in the area of urban development at the MoLHUD and part-time Cities Alliance representative in Uganda, even attributed to himself an incentivising role, portraying himself as pushing the MDF leadership to fight for innovative approaches in project implementation that were seen by the MoLHUD as beneficial to the community: “I sold the idea to the MDF leadership, I told them, why don’t you go and discuss with the mayor and the councillors and tell them that this law provides 25% of the own source revenue to go back” (EI64: Nathanael, MoLHUD, April 2017). What he implied was that he made the MDF aware of an administrative rule that required 25% of the revenues generated by a project in a specific community to be reinvested in that community. The Ugandan ministry formally responsible for the oversight of local governments is the Ministry of Local Government (MoLG). In charge of coordinating the implementation of Uganda’s decentralisation policy, the MoLG provides support to local governments through technical assistance and capacity building initiatives and ensures that local governments comply with the statutory requirements and adhere to national policies and standards through their inspection directorate. In light of its formal responsibilities and its self-understanding as the ministry in charge of local governments, the MoLG constituted an important link to the local governments in the development interventions under study. In TSUPU, it was tasked with ensuring that the participating municipalities complied with the project “norms”. Compliance encompassed, for example, including the programme in the municipalities’ development plans and keeping proper records of receipts and expenditures for the audit of public funds (Cities Alliance, 2010). In practice, however, the MoLG’s involvement was limited. Representatives of local governments often interacted directly with the funders and the MoLHUD, and interviews showed that the MoLG felt somewhat bypassed by the activities. Ibrahim, a senior officer in the MoLG, expressed this discrepancy between the ministry’s role on paper and its actual involvement: “I don’t think there was involvement of the ministry for TSUPU. … Our mention was only in the documentation. … So, that TSUPU programme was not properly streamlined and I don’t have much about it” (EI23: Ibrahim, MoLG, March 2017). He emphasised that the involvement of the MoLG in TSUPU was so limited that he could not provide much information about it. In contrast to this, several MoLHUD

24

1

Introduction

bureaucrats characterised their role as that of supervising, supporting and training local governments in their area of expertise such as standards of physical planning (PI11: Alex, MoLHUD, November 2015; EI12: Nathanael, MoLHUD, February 2017; EI40: William, MoLHUD, March 2017). The MoLG, however, sees this supervision and training as its own role. MoLG’s Ibrahim explained that the MoLG supervises local governments and appoints local bureaucrats and, as a consequence, needs to be included if a government programme or development intervention is to be taken seriously on the local level. “I’ll start by saying that ... for any big programme in this country … to succeed, in terms of implementation in the local governments, the Ministry of Local Government should be involved. Because if you don’t involve the Ministry of Local Government, that programme may fail. You know, officials in the local governments pay more allegiance to Ministry of Local Government than they do to other ministries. Because we are the mother ministry for them. Like the town clerks in those municipalities, we are the people who appointed them, who discipline them, who deploy them. So, if there is a programme and they see the Ministry of Local Government is involved, they’ll take it seriously” (EI23: Ibrahim, MoLG, March 2017).

Ibrahim used the term ‘mother ministry’ to explicate the relationship between the MoLG and the local governments, indicating that the central government is in a position to educate and lead local governments. In USMID, on the other hand, both ministries, MoLG and MoLHUD, were equally part of the Programme Steering Committee. This committee included the permanent secretaries of all the relevant sector ministries and took policy decisions. The MoLG was identified as one amongst numerous relevant sector ministries for USMID in the programme document. The MoLHUD, however, served as the key implementing ministry of USMID, having “overall responsibility for implementation and accounting for the Program funds to the National Parliament” and was “responsible for producing and submitting to IDA annual Program reports” (World Bank, 2013b). On the operational level, USMID set up a National Programme Technical Committee (PTC), which involved key technical staff from a number of relevant ministries, departments and agencies. The committee addressed administrative issues which could have impacts on programme implementation. Important collective actors in the field of organisations of TSUPU and USMID were furthermore the involved municipal administrations. TSUPU’s programme document recognised that the municipal level is where all the action happens: “It is at the municipality level where slum dwellers engage with government on a daily basis. … In effect the municipality is the key partner of the community

1.4 Empirical Context

25

in the pursuit of public community partnerships to resolve problems and unleash creative energy” (Cities Alliance, 2010: 15). The programme document therefore places much focus on the engagement of municipal governments, recognising that the success of what was planned rose and fell with “the degree to which municipal government at both the political and administrative level takes ownership of the process” (Cities Alliance, 2010). In USMID, the municipal administrations were responsible for planning, budgeting, implementing and reporting on the programme activities (World Bank, 2013b). In particular, the town clerk and the heads of departments in the municipality were responsible for these tasks. Given the importance of central government ministries and municipal administrations in the implementation of TSUPU and USMID, I provide a brief introduction into Uganda’s politico-administrative system in the following section.

1.4.2 Uganda’s Politico-administrative System over Time This section explains Uganda’s politico-administrative system in order to provide an understanding of the different levels of government and administration which play a role in the empirical analysis. Almost all analyses of administrative systems in countries south of the Sahara inevitably begin with a reference to colonial legacies, like the following: “African administrative practices have been particularly shaped during the colonial domination … This reality complicates analysis of African public administration” (Jreisat, 2010: 617). In order to govern the vast and often uncharted territories of their colonies with a limited number of people, colonial bureaucracies were often confined to the capital cities while the rest of a country was usually subjected to indirect rule, where traditional authorities such as kings, chiefs and elders wielded power (Erdmann and Engel, 2007; Jreisat, 2010). Indirect rule was the solution to the problem of how “a tiny and foreign minority [could] rule over an indigenous majority” (Mamdani, 1996: 145). The colonisers would merely attempt to control the traditional authorities which would then rule the local population on their behalf. As a consequence, traditional authorities and institutions remain important in politics and administration until the present day. Uganda is no exception in this regard. As in many other states south of the Sahara under British colonial rule, a system of British District Commissioners was established in Uganda. Underneath these commissioners, traditional authorities held the power over, inter alia, taxation and local councils (Green, 2015: 492).

26

1

Introduction

Ugandan politics and administration in the postcolonial era, Rubongoya argues, were characterised by “the awkward superimposition of foreign forms of legitimation” such as legal-rational bureaucracies “upon a shattered indigenous structure of power” (Rubongoya, 2007: 23). After independence from British colonial rule in 1962 until the rise to power of Yoweri Museveni in 1986, Uganda experienced mainly three different governments. Milton Obote was Uganda’s first post-independence prime minister; the President at the time was the King of the large and powerful Kingdom of Buganda in central Uganda, Edward Mutesa. The system of local governance, created when Uganda became independent in 1962, granted the Buganda Kingdom a federal status, whereas the other kingdoms in Uganda were granted only semi-federal status and the rest of the country was maintained in a unitary system. This hybrid system of local government thus recognised the authority of traditional leadership. However, in 1966, the Central Government ousted the King Mutesa and Obote declared himself president. The new Constitution of 1967 “dissolved all kingdoms’ federal status … [,] took power away from the district assemblies and split the country into 18 equal districts” (Green, 2015: 493). Milton Obote’s rule was characterised by the repression of political and personal freedoms, he “resorted to coercion as the primary source of power” (Rubongoya, 2007: 22). Consequently, his government lacked consent and in 1971, Colonel Idi Amin, then the Commander of the Ugandan Army, seized power in a military coup. Idi Amin’s dictatorship lasted until 1979. Under Idi Amin, the number of local government districts was increased to 37 in 1974. After waging and losing a short war with Tanzania, Amin fled the country in 1979. Following a transition government, Milton Obote’s Uganda People’s Congress (UPC) party won the 1980 election and Obote began his second period as President of Uganda. The election was contested, however, and the following years saw the rise of the National Resistance Army (NRA), a rebel army led by Yoweri Museveni. The NRA “began to create local government cells in territory it controlled under the name of ‘Resistance Councils’ (RCs). … After securing enough territory, the NRA allowed the RCs to take on the responsibility of governing villages as well. They did not collect taxes but instead judged local disputes, maintained sanitary regulations, kept roads clear and for security purposes registered everyone” (Green, 2015: 493).

Obote’s power eroded over time, not least because his second presidency was as repressive as his first. After a military coup had left Uganda in a state of chaos, Museveni’s NRA seized power in late 1985 and called for elections in early 1986.

1.4 Empirical Context

27

Today, Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni has been in power for more than three decades. His NRA transitioned into a party which calls itself National Resistance Movement (NRM). Term limits on presidential office were removed with a constitutional change in 2005. Bratton and van de Walle have called this form of presidentialism a typically stable, predictable, and valued informal institution in Africa’s neopatrimonial regimes (Bratton and Van de Walle, 1997: 63). They describe the main characteristics of this type of presidentialism as follows: “One individual (the strongman, ‘big man’, or ‘supremo’), often a president for life, dominates the state apparatus and stands above its laws. Relationships of loyalty and dependence pervade a formal political and administrative system, and officials occupy bureaucratic positions less to perform public service, their ostensible purpose, than to acquire personal wealth and status” (Bratton and Van de Walle, 1997: 62).

In February 2016, Museveni was once more confirmed in office in a nationwide election even though the election was highly contested by the opposition and criticised as not fair by international observers (European Union Election Observation Mission to Uganda 2016, 2016). Interviewees have depicted Museveni’s Uganda as one of increasing authoritarianism, low levels of trust in public institutions and a society believing in conspiracy theories more than anything else (e.g. PI2: resident director, German political foundation, November 2015). For international donors, however, Uganda has been somewhat of a ‘poster child’, praised as an “anchor of stability” in the East African region (Auswärtiges Amt, 2015). From the beginning of his reign, Museveni’s government worked closely with international agencies on implementing economic, political and administrative reforms. Modernisation was to come to Uganda by way of structural adjustment, the decentralisation of government and the introduction of a multi-party system. In its early days, the government was very committed to a decentralised system of local governments. Green notes that it is “difficult to overstate how much emphasis the NRM put on the success of its local government programme upon taking power” (Green, 2015: 493–494). The system of decentralisation established under Museveni has been called everything from “highly ambitious” (Lewis, 2014: 572) to “one of the most far-reaching local governance reform programmes in the developing world” (Francis and James, 2003: 325) and “one of the most radical devolution initiatives of any country at this time” (Mitchinson, 2003: 241). Under the government of Museveni, the existing local government system was changed by significantly advancing political and fiscal decentralisation. The creation of additional districts was in the beginning also perceived as a means of

28

1

Introduction

bringing services closer to the people. In 1987, the system of local governments was institutionalised. It is based on five tiers of local governments and administrative units: a village (Local Council I), parish (Local Council II), sub-county (Local Council III), county (Local Council IV) and district (Local Council V), with the district being the highest level of local government (see also Figure 1.2). For urban areas, the denotation is slightly different. Municipalities are at the fourth level of local government, similar to counties in rural areas. Instead of sub-counties, the third tier of local government in urban areas is denoted a division, while the second tier is called ward instead of parish and the first tier is named a cell or a zone rather than a village (see Figure 1.2). This system acquired constitutional status with the 1995 Constitution of Uganda whose Chapter 11 provides for a decentralised system of local government endowed with the power to exercise delegated functions and services of government (Republic of Uganda, 1995, Chapter 11). Whereas the upper three levels of local government, Local Council III to Local Council V, have elected political governments as well as an administrative structure, at the level of Local Council II and Local Council I, the government consists merely of administrative units (World Bank, 2013b: 36). Decentralisation is far-reaching in the sense that it extends to the political, administrative and fiscal domain. Political power is devolved to elected local government officials. The administration is also decentralised, giving local governments the power to appoint persons to hold or act in any office in the service of a district. Fiscally, local governments have the right to levy, charge, collect and appropriate taxes. With the establishment of a system of local government grants, the constitution further institutionalised fiscal decentralisation. Conditional, unconditional and equalisation grants were introduced and until this day hold a great importance for local government finances. The 1997 Local Governments Act (LGA) specified the provisions of the constitution and gave effect to the devolution of functions, powers and services. It described the political and administrative system of local governments and formalised revenue sharing mechanisms between the different levels of local councils. Local governments are given numerous powers. They encompass the power to formulate local policies and set local service delivery standards, to prepare local development plans, to make own budgets and raise own revenue, for example through the issuance of trading licenses and fees, to recruit their own staff and to alter or create new ward or parish boundaries within their area of jurisdiction (Republic of Uganda, 1997). The LGA further specifies local government functions, which include urban planning, sanitation, refuse collection

1.4 Empirical Context

29

Source: (Own representation, based on Dobronogov et al., 2014: 32; World Bank, 2013b: 36)

Figure 1.2 Uganda’s System of Local Governments

and disposal, parks and open space, primary health care clinics and hospitals, education, fire protection (Republic of Uganda, 1997). Recent academic studies of Uganda’s system of decentralisation, however, are largely critical, pointing out political capture of the administration and a lack of effectiveness. These manifest themselves in the dependence of local government on the central government for financing, a lack of competent staff in local administration and government, and excessive district creation. Green’s critique is representative: “More recently it has become obvious that the Museveni government’s main interest in the LC system has not been to provide good public services but instead to maintain the ruling NRM’s network of power at the local level, especially after electoral party politics was legalized again in 2005” (Green, 2015: 494) (see also Awortwi, 2010, 2011; Awortwi and Helmsing, 2014; Lewis, 2014). Green criticises a lack of independence of local governments from the central government and more specifically from the grip of the NRM. On the district level, for example, two top-level positions in the district administrations—resident district commissioner (RDC) and the chief administrative officer (CAO)—are filled by appointment from the president and the central government’s MoLG, respectively. While the RDC is indeed officially the representative of central government interests at the local level, the CAO is in theory the administrative head of a district and should operate in the interest of local government.

30

1

Introduction

The Resident District Commissioner, as interviewees have pointed out, is highly influential in all district government activities (PI5: resident director, German political foundation, November 2015). Two other interviewees remarked: “Local governments don’t have real autonomy. Every district has an RDC, who has no clear mandate and no restriction of his power. Also, the CAO is a central government official sent to the district. They take instructions from up, not from down. ... Also, the districts are 100% dependent financially on the centre. Museveni abuses it. He stated publicly, if you don’t vote NRM, you don’t get services” (PI12: programme officers, German political foundation, November 2015).

The comment highlights that the RDC and the CAO are widely seen as ‘lobbyists’ of central government interests. Through the MoLG, which, as I have indicated above, is responsible for oversight of local governments across the country, the central government further maintains control over local governments. Interviewees have moreover pointed out that administrative staff and employment strategies are being used for the politicisation of administration: “Administration are mostly NRM people hired by NRM people. One of our experiences from a project on political pluralism was that district officials thought they weren’t allowed to offer services to opposition people, they thought that opposition doesn’t have a place in government. The NRM party cannot be separated from state institutions, district institutions” (PI12: programme officers, German political foundation, November 2015).

Rubongoya similarly argues that Museveni’s government has a “penchant for centralizing power and using the state apparatus to mobilize society for its (NRM) survival” (Rubongoya, 2007: 27) and that “institutions such as LCs [Local Councils], RDCs [Resident District Commissioners] … et cetera [provide] structure and regularity to informal networks of NRM support” (Rubongoya, 2007: 178). The control of local government through central government does not only show itself in human resource questions. It also relates directly to questions of municipal planning. Uganda’s “Comprehensive National Development Planning Framework (CNDPF)” prescribes a cascaded planning system in which long-term, medium-term, and short-term development planning are interconnected. Local development plans have to be linked to the National Development Plan and the nation’s 2040 Vision. The National Vision is a long-term planning instrument which spells out “aspirations and projections about the desired future” (National Planning Authority, 2009: 11) in a 30-year time frame. The five-year National Development Plan sets out objectives and strategies for government ministries

1.4 Empirical Context

31

and agencies in the medium term. In the short term, annual plans and budgets set priorities for the year. The CNDPF foresees that the activities in annual plans and budgets “shall be selected to realize the objectives and strategies in the 5-Year National Development Plan” (National Planning Authority, 2009: 15). The financial situation of most local governments is equally dire in regard to their lack of autonomy. Until 2005, the local governments heavily depended on income from the graduated personal tax (GPT). According to Green, the GPT accounted for 84% of local revenue at the district level. However, the GPT had been highly controversial because of an opaque system of assessment and its high administration costs, amounting to 30% of GPT revenue (Green, 2015: 499–500). In 2005, the tax was therefore abolished, severely limiting local governments’ ability to raise own-source revenue and leaving the local governments almost entirely reliant on central government grants for their budget. Since the majority of grants are conditional, central government can exert a high level of influence over local government activities. Lewis contrasts the percentage of unconditional grants with the number of districts over time and demonstrates that the former decreased while the latter rose significantly between 1990 and 2010 (Lewis, 2014: 580). The second National Development Plan confirms that conditional grants from central government accounted for an average of 91 per cent of local government finances between 2010 and 2015 (NPA, 2015: 73). Since the beginning of his time in office, and increasingly since the change to a multiparty system in 2005, the government of Yoweri Museveni has created new units of local government (see Figure 1.3). Officially portrayed as a means of “bringing services nearer to the people” (Ministry of Local Government, 2014: 22), most academic analyses have identified this as a strategy to decrease local governments’ bargaining power vis-à-vis the centre and to create patronage networks throughout the country. Academic commentators, therefore, conceptualise the creation of new districts as either neopatrimonialism (Awortwi and Helmsing, 2014; Green, 2015) or recentralisation (Lewis, 2014). While beneficial to the ruling NRM party, the creation of new districts has strained already limited government resources, spreading both human and financial resources thinly. Consequently, in addition to dire finances, most local governments also have extremely low levels of staffing. According to the second National Development Plan, average staffing in municipalities across the country is at 57 per cent of the approved structure (National Planning Authority, 2015: 73). On the level of individual organisations, the figure is sometimes even lower. This problem has increased over time due to the rapid creation of new districts.

32

1

Introduction

Source: Own representation, data retrieved from (Ministry of Local Government, 2014).

Figure 1.3 District Creation

Overall, this brief overview shows how local administrations in Uganda are embedded in the system of governance and government. It reveals the limited autonomy of local governments and their dependence on as well as accountability to central government. This leads to complicated relationships and interdependencies which play out in and become exacerbated by the development interventions under study in this research.

1.5

Chapter Overview and Findings

The thesis advances the understanding of participation in development interventions from the perspective of organisational sociology in two regards. Firstly, it shows that for organisations at different levels of government, i.e. multilateral organisations and international networks as well as national ministries and local administrations in aid-recipient countries, participation functions as a rationalized myth. Participation of beneficiaries in development interventions cannot realistically be opposed by the organisations and thus becomes integrated in programmes regardless of the type of intervention. The study further considers the

1.5 Chapter Overview and Findings

33

consequences of the myth of participation for different actors and reveals that the multilateral organisations and international networks were able to integrate the myth into their programmes and processes by interpreting it in accordance with existing organisational scripts and values (see Section 4.4). In contrast, local administrations reacted to the myth mainly by a symbolic implementation of the participatory mechanism the development interventions introduced, thereby decoupling this mechanism from their own core activities. Secondly, the thesis finds that the attempts to make participation compatible with organisational rationalities went beyond interpretations and decoupling and included the partial organization of citizens. Specifically, the empirical analysis demonstrates that in the framework of development interventions, a membership was established drawing from the broader group of citizens of a locality. Once membership was established, the thesis sets forth, the organisations in the field introduced rules to further organise citizens. As the discussion in Chapter 7 shows, the relationship between these two elements of partial organization was hierarchical since rules only applied to members. By combining the two theoretical concepts of the rationalized myth and partial organization, this study demonstrates how organisations attempt to organise an institutionalised expectation and at the same time reveals the fragility of the partial organization. The rest of the thesis is structured as follows: Chapter 2 expands on the theoretical basis of the thesis. It begins with an account of the history of participation as a dominant concept in international development and its evolution into an orthodoxy in the field (Section 2.1). It frames the research by introducing sociological neo-institutionalism as an overall theoretical framework for the analysis of participation in development interventions (Section 2.2) before detailing the neo-institutionalist concepts of the organizational field (Section 2.3) and the rationalized myth (Section 2.4) with a specific focus on the application of these concepts on the field of international development and participation. The theory chapter proceeds by explaining the concept of partial organization (Section 2.5), which complements the neo-institutionalist perspective by enabling a better understanding of the organisation of citizens into Municipal Development Forums. Section 2.6 then presents the analytical framework, which shows how the theoretical perspectives are operationalised in this study. Chapter 3 delineates the research design and methodological approach. It considers the ontological and epistemological groundings of the research and briefly outlines multi-sited ethnography as the overarching approach (Section 3.1). The chapter then describes in some detail the data generation process with respect to methods employed and fieldwork conducted (Section 3.2). Section 3.3 provides

34

1

Introduction

a reflexive account of challenges in the field and Section 3.4 explains the process of data analysis. Chapters 4, 5, and 6 form the core empirical analysis of this thesis. Following the logic of abductive reasoning, these chapters interlace the analysis of empirical data with the review of relevant literature. Chapter 4 focuses on the myth of participation and how the Cities Alliance and the World Bank as well as local administrations in Uganda processed the myth. Chapters 5 and 6 explore MDFs as instances of partial organization. Chapter 5 analyses the partial organization of citizens through the creation of a membership. It demonstrates different ways in which the organisations in the field ensured that the forums’ members were adequate and useful partners within the framework of the development intervention and for the local administration. Chapter 6 shows how bureaucratic organisations on the international, national and local level organised citizens by setting extensive formal as well as implicit rules for the Municipal Development Forums. It further interprets the narrative of a prospective institutionalisation of the forums in legal frameworks as rule-setting in the making and thus a further instance of partial organization. The concluding Chapter 7 briefly reviews the empirical findings and then discusses them on the basis of three questions: 1) How can the different interpretations of the rationalized myth in TSUPU and USMID be explained? 2) How and why do municipal administrations react to the myth of participation with decoupling? 3) What can be learned from the perspective of partial organization about the relationship between the organisations in the field and the civil society? The conclusion then continues with an account of the study’s main contributions before pointing out learnings for practitioners. Specifically, the thesis’ key theoretical contribution is an extension of the existing understanding of how organisations deal with institutionalised expectations such as the myth of participation. It does so by adding the perspective of partial organization, which provides insights into the complex interplay and connections between institutions and decided orders. Methodologically, the study adds to the existing body of ethnographies of development interventions and ethnographies of administrations in the Global South18 (Bierschenk and Olivier de Sardan, 2014; de Herdt and Olivier de Sardan, 2015). The main empirical contribution of the study lies in its focus on participation in urban development interventions in secondary cities of

18

Reflecting a critical perspective on global north-south relations, I use the terms Global South and Global North to specify what has in the past often been denoted “developing” and “developed” or “third world” and “first world” countries (Dados and Connell, 2012).

1.5 Chapter Overview and Findings

35

the Global South as opposed to capital cities, metropolitan regions, or megacities. From a practitioner’s perspective, the thesis provides insights regarding the sustainability of participatory mechanisms as well as issues of power and politics. Lastly, the chapter assesses the study’s limitations and discusses avenues for future research.

2

Theoretical Framework

The Municipal Development Forums (MDFs) are participation mechanisms established in several Ugandan municipalities as part of the urban development intervention TSUPU and constitute the empirical object of this research. The theoretical and analytical framework presented in this chapter introduces the theoretical instruments which are employed to capture and analyse the MDFs as instances of participation. In this thesis, I look at participation in development interventions through the lens of organisational studies theory. Specifically, I combine two approaches, namely the concept of the rationalized myth from sociological neo-institutionalism and Ahrne and Brunsson’s partial organization, to capture the reality of participation in development. In the following, I first introduce the reader to the history of participation in development to underline how it became an orthodoxy, which implies that the integration of participation into projects and programmes is practically inevitable for organisations in the field of development interventions (Section 2.1). Section 2.2 then presents the basic premises of sociological neoinstitutionalism and shows that this theoretical approach is well suited to study participation in development. The following two sections describe the neoinstitutionalist concepts of organizational fields (Section 2.3) and of rationalized myths (Section 2.4) with a specific focus on the application of these concepts on the field of international development and participation. Section 2.5 addresses the shortcomings the neo-institutionalist approach has in explaining the empirical observations and findings, and expands the theoretical framework to include the concept of partial organization. With respect to externally induced participation mechanisms such as the MDFs in Ugandan municipalities, the concept of partial organization is able to explain the organisation of civil society from an organisational perspective. The analytical framework for this thesis is presented

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2021 E. M. Schindler, Structuring People, Sozialwissenschaftliche Zugänge zu Afrika, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-35903-4_2

37

38

2 Theoretical Framework

in Section 2.6. It shows how the theoretical concepts manifest in the observed empirical phenomena.

2.1

Participation as an Orthodoxy in Development

Participation has long become an orthodoxy, meaning that the integration of participation into projects and programmes is practically inevitable for organisations in the field of development interventions. This section provides a brief overview of the history of the concept in development practice before discussing its current status in the field. The concept of participation began to rise to prominence in the field of development in the 1970s (Cornwall, 2006, 2008; Cornwall and Brock, 2005; Spies, 2009).1 As Cornwall explains, participatory development criticised topdown models of development for failing to meet the demands of the poor and saw the need for beneficiaries of development interventions to be involved in their own fate: “One of the recurring themes within the participation literature is the use of the term ‘top-down’ both to criticise development initiatives and to explain their failure. … If only, it is argued, people were really enabled to ‘do it for themselves’, if only participation was genuinely grassroots, if only the state would allow popular organisation to infuse the peasantry, then participation’s promise would bear fruit” (Cornwall, 2006: 71–72).

Freire’s “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” is commonly identified as the key contribution providing theoretical underpinnings to participatory movements in the 1970s. Freire understood poverty as intricately linked to power relations and characterised the poor as oppressed. While aware of this oppression, he sets forth that the poor typically adopt the worldview of their oppressors, i.e. perceiving the way out as becoming more like their oppressors. He argued that a process of reflection and analysis was necessary for the oppressed to develop and construct an understanding of their oppression and then step into action and overcome this situation (Freire, 2000) (see also Cleaver, 1999). From this empowerment perspective, participation involves an active struggle for change. Critical 1

Several authors point out that continuities exist from colonial times, especially in the case of participation as part of decentralisation programmes, which bear resemblance to the concept of indirect rule often employed by colonisers to retain control of the vast territories they were trying to subdue (see Cornwall, 2006).

2.1 Participation as an Orthodoxy in Development

39

discourses were followed by an increasing growth in non-governmental organisations (NGOs), which were built on principles of self-help, participation, and empowerment. The 1980s saw the so-called participatory turn (Spies, 2009: 64), as the result of which participation increasingly became a principle of the development interventions of governments from the Global North and was deemed a major success factor for projects. This went hand in hand with the integration of participatory methods such as Participatory Appraisal into the approaches used in the planning and implementation of aid projects and programmes, albeit at the beginning mainly in NGOs and not in governmental aid organisations. Robert Chambers is usually identified as ‘father’ of these methods. He is attributed the development and promotion of the Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA), a method which is used in all stages of a development project cycle, the “appraisal, research, analysis, planning, action, monitoring, evaluation, facilitation, convening, organizing, or many other activities” (Chambers, 2017: 122). The goal of PRA is to enable “local people to share, enhance and analyze their knowledge of life and conditions, to plan and to act” (Chambers, 1994: 953; see also Cooke and Kothari, 2001a: 5). By the 1990s, participation was not only on the agenda of all large donor organisations, it also came to be seen as an essential element of good governance (Speer, 2012). Good governance emerged as an agenda in international development in the 1990s and has since become the dominant approach to state reform in development interventions. Lie has called good governance one of three pillars of a “new aid architecture” (Lie, 2015: 4–5) and Hickey speaks about its incorporation into “development ideology” (Hickey, 2012), illustrating the profound impact of the concept on the field of international development. The good governance agenda comprises the development of democratic institutions, the promotion of rule of law, the implementation of widespread decentralisation reforms, political participation as well as sound public financial management.2 2

Good governance is an elusive concept with definitions varying between development organisations. The World Bank’s Worldwide Governance Index (WGI) is built upon six categories, namely voice and accountability, political stability and the absence of violence, government effectiveness, regulatory quality, the rule of law and control of corruption (for an analysis of the WGI see Erkkilä and Piironen, 2014; World Bank, 2019d). Drawing on several of the World Bank’s World Development Reports, King depicts the good governance agenda as “focused on building democratic, decentralised governments, capable of responding to active, empowered citizens supported by CSOs” (King, 2015: 742). Grindle, using the same texts, differentiates between characteristics of good governance (such as decentralisation, an independent judiciary and a sound regulatory system), institutions for good governance (e.g. participation and transparent budgeting), and specific laws, policies, services and strategies for good governance in which community development and the empowerment and engagement of the poor are important factors (Grindle, 2004: 528). She also points out that in

40

2 Theoretical Framework

Participatory governance, in this framework, was seen to improve government responsiveness to people’s needs: by involving citizens in the making and implementation of governmental decisions, they were enabled to hold governments to account (Cornwall, 2006; Holland et al., 2015; Speer, 2012; Spies, 2009). After a phase of increasing popularity and institutionalisation of participation into development interventions in the 1990s, critical reviews and studies of the implementation of participatory development interventions in the early 2000s identified challenges such as a de-linking from struggles for power and the individualisation of empowerment, the depoliticisation of civil society, elite capture of participatory processes and the influence of local power dynamics (Cleaver, 1999; Cooke and Kothari, 2001a; De Wit and Berner, 2009; Dill, 2009; Mohan and Stokke, 2000; Mosse, 2001; Rigon, 2014). These studies argue that while people are given the opportunity to voice their concerns, for example in meetings, and sometimes even partake in decision-making, aid interventions usually suffer from a lack of critical analysis with respect to power relations and are not open to actions that people define themselves. Rather, aid interventions commonly have pre-defined goals and activities, and use participation in order to achieve people’s buy-in. Nonetheless, participation is today a mainstay in the field of international development. In the literature, participation is attributed the status of an “orthodoxy” in the field (Cornwall, 2006; Cornwall and Brock, 2005; Gaventa and Barrett, 2012; Henkel and Stirrat, 2001; Kühl, 1998; Mohan, 2007; Speer, 2012), in the sense that it is usually a part of aid interventions in one way or another and is rarely questioned (Pateman, 2012: 7; Spies, 2009: 75). “Participation has gained the status of development orthodoxy. … it has become something to the World Bank’s 1997 World Development Report, “developing countries were advised to pay attention to 45 aspects of good governance; by 2002, the list had grown to 116 items” (Grindle, 2004: 527). Similarly critical, Andrews highlights that indicators for good governance often comprise long lists of characteristics (Andrews, 2008: 379). In a later working paper, Grindle summarises the characteristics of good governance in the eyes of the World Bank as “accountability and transparency, efficiency in how the public sector works, rule of law, and ordered interactions in politics” (Grindle, 2010: 2). Of course, other organisations in the field of development carry forward their own definitions of good governance. The United Nations Development Programme, as Grindle points out, “singles out characteristics like participation, transparency, accountability, effectiveness, and equity” (Grindle, 2010: 2), the German Ministry for Economic Co-operation and Development lists the principles of good governance as transparency, accountability, efficient and effective administrative action as well as the participation of the entire population and the consideration of the needs of vulnerable populations (Bundesministerium für wirtschaftliche Zusammenarbeit und Entwicklung, 2019).

2.1 Participation as an Orthodoxy in Development

41

which no one could possibly be opposed, an essential ingredient in getting development interventions and policies right” (Cornwall, 2006: 62). Watkins argues that development is governed by a “powerful moral logic that requires participation, empowerment, and sustainability” (Watkins et al., 2012, p. 298). Nederveen Pieterse names participation as one of the dominant concepts and paradigms in the field of development. Together with, inter alia, good governance, transparency, democracy, civil society, and empowerment, participation forms part of a “hegemonic language” (Nederveen Pieterse, 2010: 197), which conceals differences between actors in the field of development. He asks: “Who can reasonably object to ‘good governance’, ‘democracy’, ‘civil society’, ‘transparency’?” (Nederveen Pieterse, 2010: 197). Pateman calls participation in development “an act of faith” (Pateman, 2012: 7). Spies speaks of a “dogma”, denoting that participation is a principle of development practice that is not questioned nor empirically proven and for most development practitioners is both a conviction and a precondition for ethical interventions (Spies, 2009: 78, author’s translation). Anderl analyses participation as a norm, commonly implemented through good governance projects “initiated by development agencies from OECD countries and the UN level” (Anderl, 2017: 154). As a result, elements of participatory governance or citizen participation today form an important element of development interventions across different types of donor organisations (state, civil society), levels of interventions (global, national, local) and sectoral foci (health, environment, state-building, etc.). As Robins et al. note, participation is embedded into development practices across the world: “[T]he technologies of ‘invited participation’, through which citizens and their representatives are lent opportunities to contribute to the shaping of plans and policies, have become an established part of development practice in most countries” (Robins et al., 2008: 1070; see also Speer, 2012: 2379). The German Ministry of Economic Co-operation and Development, for example, calls participation a “design principle” (Gestaltungsprinzip) of German development co-operation (Bundesministerium für wirtschaftliche Zusammenarbeit und Entwicklung, 2018). The World Bank’s recent framework for citizen engagement seeks to guide a scaling up of participation with the aim of “improved results” (World Bank, 2014: 6) and mainstreaming citizen engagement across the organisation’s policies and programmes. For the Cities Alliance, participation is among its core working principles; “participation of target communities” and “empowerment of the most vulnerable” form part of its Standard Operating Procedures (Cities Alliance, 2013: 33).

42

2.2

2 Theoretical Framework

A Neo-institutionalist Perspective on Participation in Development

From the perspective of sociological neo-institutionalism, participation can be seen as a rationalized myth in aid programmes. This section provides a brief introduction into sociological neo-institutionalism’s theoretical foundations, especially its core concepts of legitimacy, institutions, and organizational fields. The application of these concepts in this thesis is discussed in further detail in Sections 2.3 and 2.4. Concerned with the relationship between organisations and their environments (Brunsson, 2003, 2006; DiMaggio and Powell, 1983; Meyer and Rowan, 1977), neo-institutionalism is “one of the most prominent schools of thought within organization studies at present” (Alvesson and Spicer, 2019: 199). At its heart lie the concepts of legitimacy and institutions. In the neo-institutionalist perspective, organisations do not seek to construct their structures and processes in line with the criterion of efficiency. Rather, they strive for legitimacy in the environment into which they are embedded. Suchman defines legitimacy as a “generalized perception or assumption that the actions of an entity are desirable, proper, or appropriate” (Suchman, 1995). Organisational environments, which are conceptualised as organizational fields, produce legitimacy pressures for organisations: expectations as to what a legitimate organisation looks like, i.e. which structures and processes a legitimate organisation is expected to have established. As Wooten and Hoffman conclude: “[o]rganizational action becomes a reflection of the perspectives defined by the group of members that comprise the institutional environment” (Wooten and Hoffman, 2017: 55). These ideas and expectations regarding appropriate or common ways of organising are called institutions. Scott defines institutions as comprising “regulative, normative, and cultural-cognitive elements that, together with associated activities and resources, provide stability and meaning to social life” (Scott, 2014: 56). Rules and laws, for example, are regulative institutions. Normative elements refer to values and norms. According to Scott, values are “conceptions of the preferred or the desirable together with the construction of standards to which existing structures or behaviors can be compared and assessed” and norms are a specification of “how things should be done; they define legitimate means to pursue valued ends” (Scott, 2014: 64). Cognitive-cultural elements are symbols such as words, signs and gestures, which shape meaning-making in society. Scott specifies that it is “‘the way we do these things’” (Scott, 2014). The logic underlying cognitive-cultural elements, he argues, “is that of orthodoxy, the perceived correctness and soundness of the ideas underlying action” (Scott, 2014:

2.2 A Neo-institutionalist Perspective …

43

68). From a neo-institutionalist perspective, institutions function as rationalized myths for organisations. They are rationalised in the sense that they commonly offer a means to an end relevant in the organisational context. They are myths because they are not linked to the individual organisations’ experiences or needs but rather expectations of the organizational field. In order to achieve legitimacy in their organizational field, organisations need to incorporate these institutions, and they often do so by ceremonially adapting their structures (DiMaggio and Powell, 1983; Hasse and Krücken, 2005; Meyer and Rowan, 1977; Senge and Hellmann, 2006).3 The implementation of participation is riddled with paradoxes and presents a challenge to the bureaucratic organisations in the field, such as aid agencies, ministries and municipal administrations because the expectation of doing participation conflicts with other environmental expectations these organisations face, e.g. the efficient and effective implementation of aid programmes. Sociological neo-institutionalism argues that this then leads to a decoupling or loose coupling between policies and practices, or between means and ends, to the development of structural façades, or to organised hypocrisy evident in a loose coupling between talk and action of an organisation (Bromley and Powell, 2012; Brunsson, 2003, 2006; DiMaggio and Powell, 1983; Meyer and Rowan, 1977). And indeed, this is not an unknown perspective in research on development. Mosse (2014) specifies that “typically in development cooperation encounters there is a ‘loose coupling’ between development policy ideas—goals modes and structures—and the actual organisational practices. … Loose coupling … facilitates the contradictions that are central to development practice, whether this is the co-existence of incongruous principles (efficiency vs. local ownership), incompatible knowledge/epistemologies or ideological and political differences” (Mosse, 2014: 520).4

In other words: Decoupling or loose coupling are functional in the field. 3

Since these seminal works, neo-institutionalist theory has developed significantly and introduced such concepts as institutional entrepreneurship, institutional logics, institutional work and institutional complexity. An overview of the development of neo-institutionalist theory is provided by (Alvesson and Spicer, 2019). Some of these approaches and their relevance for the research in this thesis will be discussed in the conclusion to Chapter 4 (Responding to the Myth of Participation through Interpretation and Decoupling) and the thesis’ overall discussion in Section 7.1.1 (Explaining Different Interpretations of the Rationalized Myth). 4 Mosse furthermore acknowledges that development professionals are aware of these occurrences, but development’s approaches and solutions nonetheless remain dominant: “Expert ideas at the centre seem remarkably resilient in the face of contrary evidence”(Mosse, 2013: 7).

44

2 Theoretical Framework

This thesis adopts a neo-institutional understanding of participation as a rationalized myth in the organizational field of development interventions and describes the organisational consequences in two programmes focused on urban development in Uganda. The following two sections explain international development as a field of organisations and participation as a rationalized myth.

2.3

International Development as a Field of Organisations

In this thesis, international development is understood as a field of organisations. The concept of the organizational field provides an analytical lens for the institutional environment which influences and places demands on the organisations in it, e.g. in the form of rationalized myths. Pache and Santos specify that “[o]rganizational fields … are the level at which environmental processes operate to shape organizational behaviors” (Pache and Santos, 2010: 457), implying it is in the organizational field where environmental expectations play out. In this section, I introduce the concept of the organizational field before briefly characterising the field of international development with respect to its organisations, its central practice of implementation in projects and programmes, as well as institutional pressures in the field as presented in the literature. The concept of international development as a field of organisations serves as a frame for the analysis of participation as a rationalized myth in this thesis. In particular, it allows for an understanding of organisations on the local, national, and international level as belonging to the same field. It furthermore provides a lens for situating the different organisations such as the World Bank, the MoLHUD and local administrations in Section 1.4.1.2 (The Field of Organisations in TSUPU and USMID). The concept of the organizational field The concept of the organizational field was “crafted” (Scott, 2014: 222) by DiMaggio and Powell to grasp those “institutional arrangements and social processes [that] matter in the formulation of organizational action” (Wooten and Hoffman, 2017: 55), i.e. to comprehend the influence of the organisational environment on individual organisations. DiMaggio and Powell define an organizational field as “those organizations that, in the aggregate, constitute a recognized area of institutional life: key suppliers, resource and product consumers, regulatory agencies, and other organisations that produce similar services or products” (DiMaggio and Powell, 1983: 148). They describe that the emergence of an organizational field is characterised by an

2.3 International Development as a Field of Organisations

45

increase in interactions between organisations in the field, the emergence of interorganisational structures of domination and patterns of coalition, increases in the information load for the organisations and rising mutual awareness among organisations that they are involved in a common enterprise (DiMaggio and Powell, 1983: 148). “As such, organisations constituting a field interact, are aware of each other’s existence, consider each other as more or less peer units, though with different power relations and degrees of authority, and are interdependent” (Moe Fejerskov, 2016: 5). Scott points out that “[t]he notion of field connotes the existences of a community of organizations that partakes of a common meaning system and whose participants interact more frequently and fatefully with one another than with actors outside the field” (Scott, 1994: 207–208). Reay and Hinings define organizational fields as “composed of actors who make up communities, and are characterized by the interactions between these actors” (Reay and Hinings, 2005: 352). Fields are, however, not bound geographically but rather “are comprised of units that are functionally interrelated even though they may be geographically remote” (Scott and Meyer, 1991: 117–118). One field can thus include organisations from the local, national and international level, as is the case for the field of international development. The field of international development Descriptions of international development interventions as an organizational field focus either on the organisations or on the activities in the field. Rottenburg outlines the field of development interventions as inhabited by a “world-spanning network of formal organisations which drive and finance what they call development” (Rottenburg, 2002: 2, author’s translation). They are differentiated according to donors and recipients, national and multinational organisations. Rosin portrays the field from the perspective of the German Agency for International Development (GIZ) to include the GIZ as well as official counterparts in recipient governments and local project participants which serve the concrete implementation of individual projects and are commonly the recipients of financial support and capacity building. These local project participants “function as intermediaries between the different programmes of donor agencies, on the one hand, and their respective beneficiary groups on the other” (Rosin, 2009: 9, author’s translation). Rosin notes that if no organisations exist to function as these local project participants, they are usually founded anew by donor organisations. Kühl describes the environment of development organisations as “made up of ministerial bureaucracy, the media and action groups of development policy” (Kühl, 2015b: 270). The field of organisations in focus in this thesis is presented in Section 1.4.1.2. In comparison to the aforementioned authors, Holma et al. focus more on what the field of organisations concerned with aid interventions actually does and how it

46

2 Theoretical Framework

does it: “[the] field of international development contributes to goals agreed on in the United Nations, follows standardized guidelines provided by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, and is famous for its changing trends and approaches” (Holma et al., 2018: 217). Given that the goals in the field of international development are codified in coordinated international agendas such as the Sustainable Development Goals (Sachs et al., 2017), they serve as institutional pressures for organisations. Holma et al. further delineate “the overall privileging and ‘import’ of Western concepts such as civil society and NGOs …, and hegemony of practices related to managerialism” as some of the key characteristics of the field of international development (Holma et al., 2018: 217). Nederveen Pieterse also depicts the field as managerialist and interventionist. According to him, development thinking “involves telling other people what to do—in the name of modernization, nation building, progress, mobilization, sustainable development, human rights, poverty alleviation, and even empowerment and participation (participatory management)” (Nederveen Pieterse, 2010: 117). The main modus operandi in the field of aid interventions are projects and programmes, which are carried out by and require the involvement of a multitude of organisations of various shapes and sizes. These include multilateral organisations, such as the United Nations Human Settlements Programme and the World Bank; bilateral development agencies from the Global North, such as the German Agency for International Development GIZ; government departments in the Global South, such as the MoLHUD in Uganda; non-governmental organisations—which are often classified as international, national or local according to the scope of their work— and local administrations and governments in the Global South. Kühl defines a development project as: “[a] closed, technically, temporally and economically clearly defined undertaking. It is a bundle of activities which is delimited with respect to objectives, regionality and temporality, designed to reach a number of results with regards to a previously agreed upon goal. … Underlying the concept of a project is the idea that through this organisational form, a specific goal can be reached efficiently, quickly and controllably” (Kühl, 1998: 53, author’s translation).

Organisations in the field usually acknowledge that planning out the details of projects or programmes has limitations. The importance of considering social and contextual factors, even in technical projects, which like USMID are focused on investments in infrastructure, is emphasised often. Even though the field’s official narrative claims that this consideration of social and contextual factors leads to a degree of flexibility in project and programme implementation, the general characteristics of aid interventions are still a fixed time frame and budget, a statement of

2.3 International Development as a Field of Organisations

47

objectives and goals to be reached, and an understanding of means-ends causalities underlying the intervention (Rosin, 2009: 12–13). The implementation of development interventions in the form of projects and programmes can also be seen as an institutional pressure which has organisational consequences for the field and its goals. Lewis and Mosse point out that development’s “metaphors of hope”, i.e. the field’s goals, are rearranged in line with the logics of administration and organisation in “a professionalized and increasingly managerialist development industry” (Lewis and Mosse, 2006b: 6). With regard to participatory interventions, Kühl argues that the concept of participation is subordinate to the organisational form of the project. Therefore, “the organisational form determines the functioning of an intervention and not the concept of participation” (Kühl, 1998: 52, author’s translation). Von Heusinger iterates this perspective when she posits that “despite discourses of local ownership, participation and partnership, aid experts primarily aim to implement standardised global blueprints and templates” (von Heusinger, 2017: 73, author’s translation). From this perspective, while a donor might identify participation as an important goal for a given development intervention, the intervention’s implementation follows the requirements of projects rather than the requirements of participation. Kühl argues that this is the case for aid interventions in general: “Foreign aid is officially aimed at implementing projects precipitated by needs that local authorities have identified. However, this relation is often unofficially reversed, and projects basically follow the rules and standards established by Western foreign aid organizations” (Kühl, 2015b: 273). Rosin also highlights that participation is often incompatible with the organisational logic of an aid project. Major decision-making capacities usually remain with the donor organisation, which provides the financial support and administers the funds. The organisational form of the project requires a goal, and this goal structures the participation and involvement of actors within it: “Who participates in which form depends on the guiding questions in the individual steps in planning. The integration of participatory approaches into the form of a project thereby initiates a conflict between different functional logics in which the organisational logic ‘project’ ultimately prevails over that of ‘participation’” (Rosin, 2009: 63–64, author’s translation).

In his case study of participatory projects in Zambia, Wagner shows that the local knowledge resulting from participatory interactions is “filtered” through the project logic and adjusted to fit “existing project parameters” (Wagner, 2013: 334, author’s translation, 2016).

48

2 Theoretical Framework

A dominant source of institutional pressures in the field of international development are donor organisations. They persistently advocate modernisation or narratives of modernisation, “a logic that took both organizations and society down a common path leading to convergence to a (Western) model not only of management and organization, but also of societal structure, values, and governance” (Khan et al., 2010: 1420). Holzer provides the example of “differentiated ministerial bureaucracies” in countries of the Global South and argues that they are commonly the product of a process of copying which was not oriented towards the needs of the national society but to those of international organisations which are in need of contact people in different line ministries and on different hierarchical levels (Holzer, 2006: 268, author’s translation; see also Kühl, 2015b). Holzer thus emphasises that institutional pressures in the field of international development stem from a world culture, which draws on “formal scripts” that provide actors with a set of “cultural rules”; the adherence to which at least has to be plausibly enacted (Holzer, 2006: 268, author’s translation). Hasse and Krücken name human rights, environmental protection, technological progress and the globalisation of economic relations as examples of such expectations (Hasse and Krücken, 2005: 70, author’s translation). The organizational field as an analytical lens This thesis argues that participation is an instance of institutional pressures prevalent in the organizational field of international development. Furthermore, it examines how the pressure is reflected in programmes (the dominant form of interaction in the field) and the organisational consequences that arise from it. Rather than focusing on one individual organisation or comparing different organisations, the empirical analysis thus takes a field-level perspective for the analysis of the institution of participation and its implementation. Taking such a perspective allows for a better understanding of the complexity of organisational relationships and how organisations develop in relation to their environment (Becker-Ritterspach and Becker-Ritterspach, 2006: 132–133). The empirical study analyses the “world-spanning” field of international development (Rottenburg, 2002: 2, author’s translation) through the lens of urban development interventions in Uganda. The organisations in the field were presented in Section 1.4.1.2. Concretely, this field-level perspective manifests in the focus on programmes as arenas where organisations in the field interact (see Chapter 4, Responding to the Myth of Participation through Interpretation and Decoupling) as well as in a joint analysis of organisations on the local, national and international level. Consequently, all empirical chapters include data from organisations on different levels. The setting

2.4 Participation as a Rationalized Myth

49

of rules for civil society, for example, took place both on paper, driven by international donors and national bureaucrats, and in the practices or routines of local administrations (see Chapter 6, Organising Civil Society by Setting Rules).

2.4

Participation as a Rationalized Myth

As set out in Section 2.1 (Participation as an Orthodoxy in Development), participation is not only part of the mainstream in development practice but has even become something of an orthodoxy. From a neo-institutional perspective, this phenomenon can be understood as a rationalized myth, an institutionalised environmental expectation which all organisations in a field need to integrate into their bureaucratically organised processes and structures for the sake of legitimacy. This section introduces the concept of the rationalized myth and shows how it can be applied to participation in development interventions. It then discusses how organisations react to rationalized myths with ceremonial adoption and decoupling. It proceeds to review how the concepts of rationalized myth and decoupling have been used in the analysis of international development interventions, before describing their application in this thesis’ empirical analysis. The section ends with a discussion of the shortcomings of the neo-institutionalist framework for the analysis of participation in development and a first glance at partial organization as an extension of the theoretical framework. The concept of the rationalized myth The term rationalized myth was coined by Meyer and Rowan in their seminal article “Institutionalized Organizations: Formal Structure as Myth and Ceremony” (Meyer and Rowan, 1977: 343). Therein, they outline that formal organisational structures such as “positions, policies, programs, and procedures of modern organizations” (Meyer and Rowan, 1977: 343) often develop or exist not because they have been found the most efficient means to achieve organisational goals but because they instil the organisations with legitimacy in their field. Therefore, these elements of formal structure “are manifestations of powerful institutional rules which function as highly rationalized myths that are binding on particular organizations” (Meyer and Rowan, 1977: 343). Source of these institutional rules is the organizational field (see Section 2.3). Meyer and Rowan characterise rationalized myths as having two properties. First, they are rationalised, meaning they are impersonal prescriptions and constructs which in a rule-like way stipulate means-ends relations (Meyer and Rowan, 1977:

50

2 Theoretical Framework

343–344; Tacke, 2006: 95). Meyer and Rowan cite, inter alia, personnel departments as an organisational structure for personnel selection, and research and development units for the implementation of development programmes in firms as examples of such rationalised structures (Meyer and Rowan, 1977: 344–345). Second, myths are institutionalised within an organizational field. Institutions here are taken-forgranted elements and collectively shared scripts or frames of social reality, be they rules, management fashions, organisational structures or other things.5 Meyer and Rowan give the example of the social status of doctor as an institutionalised rule but also refer to organisational elements such as products, services, programmes and technologies. These can, for example, be the functions appropriate to a specific type of organisations or the technical procedures that have become taken-for-granted means to accomplish organisational ends. Rationalized myths, therefore, manifest in “templates and prefabricated formulae of organizing” (Hensell, 2015: 92). Schriewer, for example, analyses the Bologna Model as a rationalized myth in European Higher Education (Schriewer, 2009). For Baumeler, the concept of the entrepreneurial university is a rationalized myth (Baumeler, 2009). Roggenkamp and White describe hospital case management in the United States of America as a rationalized myth (Roggenkamp and White, 2001). Walgenbach demonstrates that the establishment of quality management systems in accordance with the DIN EN ISO 9000 norm in firms and the attainment of the corresponding certificate is a response to environmental expectations rather than efficiency concerns (Walgenbach, 1998). Scherm and Pietsch show that personnel controlling serves the legitimation of the specialised department of personnel controlling more than it contributes to the improvement of firms’ personnel decisions (Scherm and Pietsch, 2005). For my field of investigation, the concept can be applied as follows: The myth of participation is rationalised in the means-ends relations between participation and desirable outcomes of development interventions. Participation is, for example, seen “to improve development outcomes” (World Bank, 2018: ix), to “make public institutions more responsive to citizens’ needs and demands and thereby more accountable for their actions” (Rocha Menocal and Sharma, 2008: ix), to lead to “improved efficiency, effectiveness, and equity of public service delivery” (Waddington et al., 2019: 8) and have a positive impact on “public financial management such as greater fiscal transparency, improved tax collection, and inclusion of citizen preferences in municipal, sectorial and national budgets; as well as social inclusion” 5

The political science concept of norms (see Anderl, 2017: 155–157) can be seen as similar to the neo-institutional conceptualisation of institutions and is often invoked with respect to participation in development.

2.4 Participation as a Rationalized Myth

51

(World Bank, 2013a: 1). Participation is based on the assumption that the effectiveness of aid depends on the commitment of those who are to “be developed”, whether these are country governments, sub-national governmental units, the civil society or others in the field of development. Keijzer and Klingebiel call this a “new old principle” in the field of development and caution that “[d]evelopment cooperation can only succeed in the long-term if developing-country stakeholders regard externally financed projects as ‘theirs’ and are closely involved in planning, implementing and evaluating them” (Keijzer and Klingebiel, 2019: 2). As the review of the development studies literature about participation as an orthodoxy in Section 2.1 has shown, participation is also institutionalised as a generalised expectation which was, inter alia, codified in the 2005 Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness alongside ownership and partnership (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, 2005) (see also Booth, 2012; Jerve, 2002). Ceremonial adoption and decoupling as organisational responses to rationalized myths Because rationalized myths are institutionalised expectations of the organisational environment, organisations have to incorporate these myths to be seen as legitimate in the organizational field (Hensell, 2015, p. 96). Rationalized myths can therefore have a large influence on how organisations are structured and how formal processes are defined: “The impact of such rationalized institutional elements on organizations and organizing situations is enormous. These rules define new organizing situations, redefine existing ones, and specify the means for coping rationally with each. They enable, and often require, participants to organize along prescribed lines” (Meyer and Rowan, 1977: 344).

DiMaggio and Powell argue that institutionalised ideas result in isomorphism, that is to say organisational structures and processes look increasingly alike across the organisations in a field (DiMaggio and Powell, 1983). However, since myths are external pressures from the organizational field (Tacke, 2006: 97) or, to use Suddaby et al.’s words, “prevailing and highly rationalized expectations of how an organization should function” (Suddaby et al., 2010: 1234), they are not internalised by organisational actors. As a consequence, while influential in the formal structure and processes of organisations, institutionalised and rationalised norms do not determine the actual organisational activities (Tacke, 2006: 96). Instead, in an attempt to achieve or maintain legitimacy in the field, organisations adopt rationalized myths ceremonially (Meyer and Rowan, 1977: 340) while the technical

52

2 Theoretical Framework

core of the organisation remains protected. Accordingly, the formal structures are neither linked to activities nor to each other, a process that organisational scholars delineate as decoupling. This separation between organisational structures and their actions “enables organizations to maintain standardized, legitimating, formal structures while their activities vary in response to practical considerations” (Meyer and Rowan, 1977: 357). Decoupling and its effects have been studied in a large number of different contexts. MacLean and Behnam, for example, shows the decoupling between a firm’s compliance programme and divergent sales practices (MacLean and Behnam, 2010). Hericks investigates decoupling between a company’s gender equality policies and practices (Hericks, 2011). Baumeler looks at the separation of science and application in the entrepreneurial university (Baumeler, 2009). Giuliani et al. study the gap between environmental and social certifications for coffee farms and their actual social conduct (Giuliani et al., 2017). In a recent review of the original arguments about decoupling, Bromley and Powell argue that an increasing rationalisation of society and focus on transparency and accountability of organisations has led to the increasing occurrence of a new type of decoupling: means-ends decoupling. In contrast to the decoupling between policies and practices explicated in Meyer and Rowan’s seminal article, decoupling between means and ends encompasses that “policies are thoroughly implemented but have a weak relationship to the core tasks of an organization” (Bromley and Powell, 2012: 3). Specifically, rules and policies might be implemented but with uncertain effects on outcomes. Bromley and Powell also call this symbolic implementation (Bromley and Powell, 2012: 15). Bromley et al., for example, show that symbolic implementation is common with respect to strategic planning in the non-profit sector in the United States of America (Bromley et al., 2012). Bromley and Powell argue that means-ends decoupling is particularly likely to occur in organisations which are concerned with “the production of complex social or public goods” (Bromley and Powell, 2012: 18). In this context, it is difficult to establish measures of success but the organisational environment, nonetheless, formulates expectations towards evaluation and measurement. The field of international development is a good example: goals such as empowerment are difficult to measure, yet monitoring and evaluation are standard practices in the field. Other reasons for means-ends decoupling are fragmented rationalised environments, e.g. when organisations are directly accountable to a large number of stakeholders, as is the case for local administrations in Uganda. These—by their set-up—are accountable to the MoLG, the sectoral line ministries, donors, and their constituents. As a consequence of means-ends decoupling, the implementation and assessment of those practices decoupled from the core of an organisation is pursued intensely by those organisations most influenced by institutional pressures.

2.4 Participation as a Rationalized Myth

53

Rationalized myths and decoupling in the analysis of international development interventions With respect to international development (interventions), scholars have used the concepts of the rationalized myth and decoupling to analyse the localisation of global norms in different contexts6 (Hensell, 2015; Lipson, 2007; Weaver, 2008). Meyer et al.’s world polity perspective, for example, attributes a constitutive role to international organisations, and in particular the UN system, in the making of world society and postulates a distance between globally institutionalised models and decoupled local practices (Meyer et al., 2005; Meyer and Jepperson, 2005). Freistein shows that poverty measuring instruments and the use of indicators are rationalized myths for the World Bank (Freistein, 2016, p. 369). She argues that international organisations such as the World Bank are bound by the institutionalised logics they themselves promoted as part of the aid interventions: “[International organisations] are not simply strategic actors completely in control of the instruments they use, but are equally caught in the rationalities and technologies they project to recipients of poverty aid. The path dependencies created by starting to use numerical instruments and other forms of indicators have led to a perpetuation and perhaps even acceleration of demands from both outside and inside organisations to create new indicators that are more precise, capture new problems more adequately, reduce and at the same time depict complexity” (Freistein, 2016: 377–378).

Hensell considers the (demand for) coordination between international organisations, NGOs and local agencies in international interventions a rationalized myth: “Coordination and related terms such as ‘alignment’ or ‘harmonization’ have become buzzwords in the debate on development aid. Calls for better coordination can be found in a host of documents, official statements, declarations, policy papers and background analyses. Being constantly evoked like a sacred formula by donor governments, IGOs, NGOs and state agencies, the idea of coordination can be characterized as an institutional rule or rationalized myth” (Hensell, 2015: 97).

Empirically, Hensell shows, this “sacred formula” translates into the ritual integration of coordination into official declarations and the build-up of a coordinating bureaucracy: 6

International relations theory speaks about norm diffusion and identifies three main mechanisms through which localisation occurs: framing (actively constructing a connection between an existing local norm and a global norm), grafting (combining a new norm with an existing one) and pruning (only taking up suitable parts of the norm) (see Anderl, 2016).

54

2 Theoretical Framework “The rule of coordination is not only incorporated into official statements, but is also embodied in a set of coordinating institutions. While all actors have to support the principle of coordination for reasons of legitimacy, political conflicts continue to impede coordination. Thus, a typical and common practice is that the principle of coordination is adopted only ritually by organizations but remains decoupled from their actual everyday activities” (Hensell, 2015: 90–91).

As Hensell describes, the organisations in the field react to the myth of coordination with decoupling coordination from their core activities. The field of human rights has also been analysed from the lens of rationalized myths. Krüger analyses truth and reconciliation commissions, important instruments of transitional justice in the aftermath of civil wars and human rights violations, as rationalized myths and asks how they diffused worldwide (Krüger, 2014). In a similar vein, Cole studies Human Rights Treaties as rationalized myths (Cole, 2012). The rationalized myth and decoupling in this thesis This research is not an in-depth study of the rationalized myth of participation itself, i.e. it does not reconstruct the evolution of the organisational concept into a rationalized myth in the field of development. Rather, it takes the myth of participation as given and focuses on the question of how organisations handle the myth of participation as it affects organisations differentially. For the international organisations in this research, the myth manifests on different levels. The organisations usually have to include participatory mechanisms in the design and formulation of their policies and programmes. As part of environmental and social impact assessments carried out during the design of a new programme, international organisations are commonly required to consult with affected communities about potential negative effects of the programme. They also need to involve communities in the implementation of these programmes and incentivise their project partners in central and local governments to employ participation as an important element of good governance. The empirical analysis in Chapter 4 (Responding to the Myth of Participation through Interpretation and Decoupling) is focused on the latter. It shows that while both programmes, TSUPU and USMID, nominally employed MDFs as participatory mechanisms on the basis of structural equivalence, TSUPU focused on MDFs’ potential for empowerment of the urban poor population, while USMID highlighted the necessity of MDFs for monitoring and accountability purposes. A main reason for this difference, it is argued, lies in the organisations involved in the respective programme, which interpreted participation according to different understandings that are legitimate in the field. The interpretations were reflected in the narrative constructions of differential meanings associated with participation

2.4 Participation as a Rationalized Myth

55

and diverging objectives of the participatory governance mechanism (MDF).7 This is similar to what Wong has set forth for gender mainstreaming. Like participation, gender mainstreaming is a mainstay in development but at the same time contested and understood in various ways: “In the process of becoming mainstreamed, the ideas behind gender mainstreaming took on very different meanings from the initial ones” (Wong, 2017: 116). The empirical analysis in this thesis furthermore shows that the response of the municipal bureaucrats in the field to the expectation of participation was rife with instances of decoupling. This is not surprising given the status of participation as an orthodoxy in development. Nederveen Pieterse has even called civil society, empowerment and participation “slogans” in development (Nederveen Pieterse, 2010: 216) and “development fads and shibboleths” (Nederveen Pieterse, 2010: 176) without much substance or relevance for development practice. Shortcomings of the neo-institutionalist framework for the analysis of participation in development interventions As has been shown, the neo-institutional perspective is useful for understanding how participation functions as a rationalized myth in the field of development. At the same time, though, the conceptualisation of participation as a rationalized myth tends to downplay the agency of organisations in their (strategic) responses to institutional pressures, as is, for example, visible in the World Bank’s adoption of MDFs into USMID as analysed in Chapter 4 (Responding to the Myth of Participation through Interpretation and Decoupling). With respect to the empirical research conducted for this thesis, this means that the neo-institutionalist perspective cannot fully grasp the phenomenon of Municipal Development Forums. This observation corresponds to a common critique which sees these foundational neo-institutional concepts and texts as downplaying organisational agency with respect to “organisational processes of dealing with institutions and individual organisational logics” (Mense-Petermann, 2006: 73, author’s translation) (see also Campbell, 2004; Hallett and Ventresca, 2006; Hasse and Krücken, 2005; Meyer and Hammerschmid, 2006; Wooten and Hoffman, 2017). Early neo-institutionalism is also said to “over-socialise” actors and organisations, i.e. to disregard the existence of individual interests in organisations as well as the ability of actors to engage in strategic activities (Walgenbach and Meyer, 2008: 115, author’s translation). Consequently, it cannot explain well that the implementation of the myth of participation, even if only symbolic in nature, has 7

This can be stated not only for the organisations which form part of the empirical investigation but can also be said for the wider organizational field. Indeed, Lewis and Mosse argue that “the order of development is primarily an interpretive order, socially sustained through ‘interpretive communities’ and necessarily separated from actual events and practice” (Lewis and Mosse, 2006b: 5).

56

2 Theoretical Framework

real organisational consequences. As Bromley and Powell note, “even ceremonial adoption can unintentionally trigger a chain of reactions that have real organizational effects” (Bromley and Powell, 2012: 3). In the empirical case presented in this study, this becomes evident in the organisation of civil society into MDFs in an attempt to make participation compatible with organisational rationalities. This thesis therefore draws on additional theoretical sources in order to address neo-institutionalism’s shortcoming. To appreciate the complexity involved with implementation, it goes beyond establishing the existence of a loose coupling or decoupling between programme policies and implementation practice in development cooperation and asks what specifically happens to the participatory governance mechanism in its implementation process across the different organisations involved. How do organisations react to the myth in practice? What are the organisational consequences that arise as a result of the rationalized myth of participation? I argue that perspectives on organising and organisationality outside of formal organisations are able to explain this organisation of civil society. The concept of partial organization (Ahrne et al., 2016; Ahrne and Brunsson, 2011, 2019a) proved particularly productive to explain the organisation of civil society, which lies at the heart of the implementation of participatory interventions and in this thesis is understood as the rationalisation of civil society through organisations. Drawing on Ahrne and Brunsson’s concept introduces an additional theoretical perspective and thereby an understanding of organisations that differs significantly from neoinstitutionalist theory. While neo-institutionalism sees organisations as shaped by taken-for-granted institutions, Ahrne and Brunsson understand decisions as central to organisation. They argue that “[o]rganization can also be seen as the opposite of institution. … To take something for granted is to avoid making decisions about it” (Ahrne and Brunsson, 2008: 50). Acknowledging the differences and tensions between the two theoretical approaches, this additional perspective allows for an extension of the neo-institutionalist analytical framework with respect to the practical consequences of rationalized myths in organisations and therefore complements it particularly where it has been criticised: the ability of organisations to act upon and react to institutions. The following section introduces Brunsson’s concept of partial organization.

2.5 Municipal Development Forums as Partial Organization

2.5

57

Municipal Development Forums as Partial Organization

It lies in the nature of things that the entire citizenry cannot participate in development programmes, not even when the location of interest is a small or medium-sized town as is the case for the Municipal Development Forums. Rather, a smaller subgroup of so-called civil society representatives is determined to play the role of civil society within the construct of the development programme. However, this subgroup cannot merely remain a loosely connected group of individuals. From local administrations and national ministries to international organisations, the organisational actors can only address and work with civil society when it is somewhat organised, when it displays at least some elements of formal organisation. To make the analytical tools employed in this thesis productive for explaining not only the differential interpretation of the myth of participation in international organisations and their programmes but also the organisational consequences arising from an adoption of this myth, the theoretical framework is broadened beyond neo-institutionalist perspectives of decoupling. It is amended to include a perspective based in classic organisational theories (March et al., 1958) and Luhmann’s systems theory (Luhmann, 2000), namely that a key element of organisations is decision-making. While the neo-institutionalist perspective provides the analytical tools for a differentiated understanding of organisational environments and the importance and consequences of institutionalised pressures for organisations, re-introducing the classic perspective of organisation as decision brings back organisations’ agency in dealing with these pressures. Specifically, the extension of the analytical framework draws on the theoretical concept of partial organization (Ahrne et al., 2016; Ahrne and Brunsson, 2011). An alternative view to that of partial organization would be a systems-theoretical perspective, where groups can be seen as a type of social system. Kühl understands groups, families and social movements as social systems on the same level as organisations, placed between interactions and society (Kühl, 2014). He suggests three possibilities for these different types of social systems to merge: nesting of one system within another, combination of two systems in a non-hierarchical manner, and transitions from one system to another. In this perspective, groups, families, and social movements increasingly organise in a reaction to their environment. Partial organization, however, explicates a situation in which formal organisations organise their environments and is therefore better suited to understanding the phenomenon of Municipal Development Forums.

58

2 Theoretical Framework

This section begins with a brief illustration of the tendency in modern societies to increasingly organise social processes before introducing partial organization as a concept. The section then reviews how the organisation of citizens in development interventions has been analysed in existing studies. Lastly, it shows how partial organization is used to analyse the empirical case in this thesis. The increasing organisation of social processes It is one of the central claims of organisational sociology that an increasing organising of social processes is visible in all areas of society (Kühl, 2008, 2015a, 2015b) (see also Bromley and Meyer, 2015; Meyer et al., 2006; Perrow, 1991). As Kühl puts it, “[o]rganizations have asserted themselves as a dominant social form in a growing number of social fields” (Kühl, 2015b: 261). Kühl specifies, for example, that politics cannot be analysed without taking into account political parties and public administrations, the economy not without firms and unions, and science not without a perspective on the functioning of universities (Kühl, 2008: 261). Bromley and Meyer argue that “faced with any problematic situations, the modern impulse is to create more organizational structures” (Bromley and Meyer, 2015: 4). Hensell points out that “organizations tend to define solutions to problems in ways that favour formal and procedural action—values that legitimize them” (Hensell, 2015: 106). Besides providing legitimacy, formal organisational structures enable communication between the actors in the field (Kühl, 1998, 2015b; Wagner, 2016). Kühl explains that “a major mechanism of the formation or [sic] organization is the prior existence of organizations, because organizations prefer to deal with other organizations in their environments” (Kühl, 2015b: 259). He, furthermore, sums up this tendency of organisations to induce the emergence of more organisations with the simple formula that “[o]rganizations develop because organizations can best communicate with other organizations” (Kühl, 2015b: 263). Thus, similar to decoupling, for the organisations in this case study of MDFs, the organisation of citizens is functional. In the Global South, Kühl argues, foreign aid has been a major influence in the development of formal organisations. He calls this dynamic contact infection (Kühl, 2015b: 259). With specific reference to civil society, Kühl notes: “It is difficult for both Western and for Southern organizations to communicate with amorphous creations such as the ‘target group of impoverished women’ and the ‘Landless Movement,’ to say nothing of ‘civil society.’ For this reason, the development of NGOs should be seen not only as a ‘grassroots’ organizational phenomenon but also as a process of organization formation that resulted from the ‘demand’ of existing organizations for associations capable of acting” (Kühl, 2015b: 264).

2.5 Municipal Development Forums as Partial Organization

59

In other words: the beneficiaries of aid interventions are usually organisations, be they governmental or non-governmental. Rosin notes that if no organisations exist to function as beneficiaries, they are usually founded anew by donor organisations (Rosin, 2009: 9). The concept of partial organization Ahrne et al. distinguish between “organized and non-organized social interactions” (Ahrne et al., 2016: 95). Ahrne and Brunsson (2011) define organisation as a type of social order that can take on varying degrees, which they denote with the terms complete and partial organization. As Apelt et al. point out, this should be seen as a continuum, rather than two definitive states (Apelt et al., 2017: 9). Dobusch and Schoeneborn speak of “organizationality”: “We propose to use the term ‘organizationality’ that allows us to switch from the binary classification of social collectives as either organizations or non-organizations to a more gradual differentiation. Organizationality depends on the degree to which social collectives fulfil the minimum criteria of what constitutes an organization (see also Ahrne and Brunsson, 2011)” (Dobusch and Schoeneborn, 2015: 1006).

At the core of organisation lie decisions, Ahrne and Brunsson define organisation as a “decided order” (Ahrne and Brunsson, 2011: 84; see also Dobusch and Schoeneborn, 2015: 1006). Specifically, they set forth five constitutive elements which are decided in organisation: membership, hierarchy, rules, monitoring and sanctions (Ahrne et al., 2016: 95; Ahrne and Brunsson, 2011: 86, 2019b: 4). This signifies that the complete organisation can decide who will be allowed to join and has knowledge about who is involved (membership), has a structure that can bind members to decisions by allocating initiative and power (hierarchy), introduces rules that members are expected to follow and which usually lay out what the organisation does and how it does it, can introduce monitoring mechanisms to ensure compliance with rules and enforce positive or negative sanctions when those rules are or are not followed. These elements, Ahrne and Brunsson argue, are all existent in complete formal organisations, but only some might be present in instances of partial organization. Cases of partial organization occur when only one of these elements is present but can also be used to characterise instances when almost all of these elements are used (Ahrne and Brunsson, 2019b: 18). With the concept of partial organization, Ahrne and Brunsson refine our perspective of the environment of formal organisations insofar as they recognise the existence of varying levels of organisation in the environment as well as the fact that “formal organizations may be active in organizing their own members as well as

60

2 Theoretical Framework

their environment: other organizations and other individuals” (Ahrne and Brunsson, 2011: 84). They argue that this allows us to see that organisation as a social order exists beyond and outside of formal organisations (Ahrne et al., 2016: 93) and thus “is salient for understanding many social phenomena that happen outside formal organizations” (Ahrne and Brunsson, 2019b: 5). They refer, for example, to the membership clubs that companies offer to their customers, the tendency of groups to appoint a convenor or the ubiquity of standards that organisations are expected to follow. Partial organization should not necessarily be perceived as incomplete organisation in the sense of an opposite to complete organisation as an ideal status. Ahrne and Brunsson point out that partial organization can be a conscious choice, “there may be no need to add more organizational elements because the desired order already exists” (Ahrne et al., 2016: 95–96; Ahrne and Brunsson, 2011: 93). However, Ahrne et al. also acknowledge the possibility that a full implementation of all organisational elements might not be possible in all cases (Ahrne et al., 2016: 95– 96). Whether or not an environment can be organised at all depends on and differs according to contexts and situations. An attempt at partial organization might be met with resistance but could also be embraced to the extent that those who are to be organised demand the use of more organisational elements than originally planned for. Irrespective of this, organisation will always be fragile: as a decided order it accentuates that a different decision could have been taken, opening itself up to contestation (Ahrne and Brunsson, 2011: 90). Perspectives on the organisation of civil society from development studies In development studies, participation in the framework of development interventions has been analysed as an organisation of civil society. Marsland, for example, understands participation as a “mode of ordering citizens in development” (Marsland, 2006: 78). Wagner specifically studies the organisation of civil society in sub-Saharan Africa. He defines “organising community” as the production of organisational connectivity between the community and aid organisations and finds that it occurs, inter alia, through the mobilisation of civil society, the forming of committees or community-based organisations, an adaptation to language codes of the donor organisations as well as by participation in capacity building measures (Wagner, 2013: 338, author’s translation, 2016). All these activities, Wagner argues, make it possible for civil society to be both addressed directly and—to a certain extent— controlled. He understands community-based organisations as “hybrids of formal and informal as well as vertical and horizontal organisational orders” (Wagner, 2016: 80, author’s translation). In his empirical work, Wagner describes the registration of community-based organisations as a formalisation of community-based groups,

2.5 Municipal Development Forums as Partial Organization

61

which provides the CBOs with access to financial support structures that are open only to registered organisations and not informal groups (Wagner, 2016: 242). He understands this process as the partial organization of civil society, since the registered community-based organisations are at the same time a group of volunteers (Wagner, 2016: 242). This “organisational capacity building”, Wagner postulates, thus leads to the establishment of organisational structures within communities that “conform to the logic of the vertical aid structure” and to the (re-)production of community-based organisations as partners for aid agencies (Wagner, 2016: 263, author’s translation). In critical development studies, civil society and its organisation in development interventions have been reviewed under the terms technocratisation and depoliticisation (Ferguson, 1994; Hammett, 2018; Li, 2007). As Hammett points out in his study of rationales for and discourses of citizenship displayed in a citizenship training of the World Bank, engaged citizens are expected to provide constructive input rather than critically challenge larger power structures: “These engaged citizens are, by inference, not expected to be—indeed are discouraged from being—critically engaged: their responsibility is to work towards good governance, and not to critically engage or challenge governments, governmentality and the structural causes and outcomes of inequality and social injustice” (Hammett, 2018: 78).

Similarly, postcolonial literature illuminates how discursive constructions of the objects and subjects of interventions allow donor organisations to conclude a necessity for technological or technocratic rather than political solutions (Hall, 1994; Mitchell, 1995; Said, 1979). A similar critique is formulated under the term NGOisation, which explains that donors too often equate civil society with non-governmental organisations and promote the professionalisation and bureaucratisation of these organisations (Birkholz, 2019; Holma et al., 2018; Lang, 2013). A further point of criticism with specific reference to sub-Saharan Africa has been that civil society in Africa in its entirety is a product of donors created to support donor agendas (Cammack, 2007; Eberlei, 2014; Hammett, 2018). Cammack, for example, points out that “civil society in such states is notoriously weak. On the ground this means that ‘briefcase NGOs’ (those with urban leadership but with little following in the rural areas) have arisen to absorb a great deal of donor money, which is available because international aid agencies are desperate to have non-state actors represented at meetings and to believe they are ‘strengthening’ civil society” (Cammack, 2007: 605).

62

2 Theoretical Framework

She makes the argument that civil society organisations and community-based organisations are formed to fulfil a donor need rather than representing the voices of local citizens. The MDFs as partial organization In this thesis, the concept of partial organization is used to better understand the construct of Municipal Development Forums. The empirical analysis reveals that the MDFs display some elements of formal organisation, namely those of membership and rules (see Chapters 5 and 6). They can, therefore, be seen as the partial organization of civil society. The empirical analysis in Chapters 4, 5, and 6 also reflects some of the criticisms brought forward in critical development studies.

2.6

Analytical Framework

This section outlines how the theoretical framework and concepts are operationalised in the empirical analysis (Chapters 4–6). In Chapter 4, I analyse the myth of participation as it is understood by different international organisations and consequently integrated into their programmes. The analysis shows that for the Cities Alliance, participation is closely associated with empowerment, which means providing poor and marginalised people with the means to participate in political and administrative decision-making processes that affect them (Gaventa and Valderrama, 1999). The World Bank links participatory interventions to questions of democracy and good governance; their principal aim often being to increase the responsiveness of governments to citizens’ voices (Goetz and Gaventa, 2001; Speer, 2012) and to improve government decision-making (Mansuri and Rao, 2013). From this perspective, the value of participation lies chiefly in building citizens’ capacity to hold their governments accountable and thereby strengthening democratic governance to ultimately support the development process of their countries (Joshi and Schultze-Kraft, 2014; Mansuri and Rao, 2013). For the local administrations implementing TSUPU and USMID, the MDFs were more than anything a donor conditionality, i.e. an environmental expectation. Consequently, bureaucrats reacted with decoupling. This finds expression, for example, in the marginalisation of the forums both with respect to their physical office and their interaction with municipal bureaucrats which I depict and analyse in Section 4.3 and Section 6.2. In Chapters 5 and 6, I analyse the partial organization of citizens in the Municipal Development Forums. Specifically, the empirical data shows that through the

2.6 Analytical Framework

63

creation of a construct such as the Municipal Development Forums, civil society was organised through the elements of membership (Chapter 5) and rules (Chapter 6). Monitoring and sanctions, the other elements specified by Ahrne and Brunsson as constitutive of complete organisation, were partly present in the Municipal Development Forums. However, as part of the evaluation of TSUPU and the annual performance assessment of USMID, monitoring and sanctions did not address the civil society in the form of Municipal Development Forums; rather, they were directed towards the assessment of the local administration. Most evidently, the fact that the MDF in contrast to the civil society overall indeed had a defined membership constitutes a first step in partial organization (Chapter 5). This can be seen, for example, in lists of members on display in the MDF office in A-Town. It is furthermore evidenced in the addressing of participants in MDF meetings as “members”. In the MDF meeting in B-Ville, the MDF president began the meeting by saying, “We want to welcome all of you, especially members who have, whom I have not seen for some time, you are very welcome” (O24: MDF meeting, B-Ville, April 2017). In A-Town, the MDF president commented, “Members, we have also tried to cement our working relationship with A-Town Municipal Council and that’s the reason why we are here” (O5: annual meeting of the MDF general assembly, A-Town, February 2017). Chapter 5 furthermore illustrates how the element of membership was addressed by defining who the “right” participants were. It explains a paradox of participation: the fact that participatory interventions are being implemented implies that the civil society was to a certain extent seen as deficient and in need of external support. At the same time, the MDFs were to act as a partner for governments and donors, providing information about potential projects for the improvement of their own locality and monitoring the implementation of these projects through governments and firms. Consequently, organisations had to involve a civil society in decision-making which is partly constructed as deficient, unable, and problematic. Imagine the bureaucrat tasked with including people whom she called “drunks and addicts” (EI34: PP, A-Town, March 2017) in her regular decision-making processes. By partially organising a civil society they deem fit to participate, the organisations involved in the implementation of TSUPU and USMID retained a certain level of control over processes and decisions. It thus allowed them to get a handle on this paradox of participation. The element of membership is exhibited in preconceived notions of relevant stakeholder groups, behavioural expectations, as well as preferences regarding previous experiences of civil society members participating in the Municipal Development Forums. Chapter 6 analyses the means of participation embedded in the MDFs as the partial organization of civil society through rules, which with Ahrne and

64

2 Theoretical Framework

Brunsson are understood as instructions and commands with respect to processes and structures that members are expected to follow (Ahrne et al., 2016; Ahrne and Brunsson, 2011). It shows that both on paper and in practice, the MDFs were formalised, e.g. through a charter specifying their structures and processes, adherence to official communication channels and standardised meetings.

3

Methodological Framework

“I want to start with a confession: my research is the product of circumstance, of serendipity and coincidence, of contingency, of interpretations and being interpreted.” (Wilkinson, 2008: 47)

This chapter provides a detailed account of the methodological approach and methods employed in this thesis. As an empirical study and in the tradition of ethnographic writing, it provides deep insights into the different processes involved in the development of the thesis. The chapter begins with reflections about the overall research design, specifically the ontological and epistemological groundings of the research in the interpretive research paradigm (Section 3.1). Subsequently, it depicts the data generation process (Section 3.2), first outlining the different methods used to generate data (Section 3.2.1), then providing a detailed account of the fieldwork (Section 3.2.2) and its challenges (Section 3.3). Specifically, this reflexive account analyses issues of access and immersion (Section 3.3.1), positionality (Section 3.3.2) and ethics (Section 3.3.3). Lastly, the chapter details data analysis as an abductive and iterative process (Section 3.4), specifying both the “what” and the “how”, i.e. the different steps taken in the analysis of data as well as the processes and tools which were employed throughout these steps.

Supplementary Information The online version contains supplementary material available at (https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-35903-4_3). © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2021 E. M. Schindler, Structuring People, Sozialwissenschaftliche Zugänge zu Afrika, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-35903-4_3

65

66

3

3.1

Methodological Framework

An Interpretive Research Design

Research questions, theoretical and methodological approaches should form a coherent framework. The research strategy should further enable the researcher to address the specific problems of her field of research methodologically (Hartmann, 2011: 150, author’s translation). In a broad understanding, my field of research are international development interventions, which involve a variety of organisations on different levels of government and across localities both within countries and across continents. These diverse actors stand in complex relations to one another and take different stands on participation, a common element in development interventions. Because the field is complex and diverse and participation is often contested, I did not establish a narrow definition of what participation is or is supposed to be at the beginning of my research process. Instead, I worked with a broad understanding of participation as the involvement of citizens in governmental planning and decision-making. This approach enabled me to focus on the perspectives of different actors in the field and their meaning-making around the Municipal Development Forums (MDFs) as a participatory mechanism. In this, I aim to honour the perspectives of critical development and post-development studies, which call out the epistemic violence embedded in political science and development studies when the categories and concepts used are coined in the Global North (Danielzik and Bendix, 2016; Müller, 2016; Ziai, 2016a, 2016b). It is also my presupposition that multiple social realities exist with respect to the practices I analyse in this study. As the researcher, I interpreted the events and interactions I observe. Interviews with different participants provided different interpretations of the reality in my field of research (Schwartz-Shea and Yanow, 2012; Yanow and Schwartz-Shea, 2014b). This study is thus ontologically grounded in the constructivist paradigm and follows an interpretivist epistemology. Interpretive research “… focuses on context-specific meanings, rather than seeking generalized meaning abstracted from particular contexts. … understanding how a word or an object, a ritual, ceremony or other act is used, in context, potentially reveals (or raises questions about) assumed, unspoken or taken-for-granted ideas about a range of values, beliefs, and/or feelings” (Schwartz-Shea and Yanow, 2012: 23).

The understandings of participation, civil society and community, for example, differed between the organisations in my field of research. This, in turn, impacted how the development interventions were implemented.

3.1 An Interpretive Research Design

67

Flexibility is a defining characteristic in interpretive research projects; hence, my research is based on an abductive logic of inquiry. Rather than formulating a hypothesis that is tested in the field, the research began with a “sense of tension” (Yanow and Schwartz-Shea, 2014b: xviii) regarding development interventions in general and their participatory elements in particular. This tension stemmed from my prior experiences working in a development organisation, as well as from literature on participation (Chambers, 2003; Cleaver, 1999; Freire, 2000). The interpretive researcher then “seeks to explicate [the tension] by identifying the conditions that would make that puzzle less perplexing and more of a ‘normal’ or ‘natural’ event” (Schwartz-Shea and Yanow, 2012: 27).1 In practice, this implies that relevant concepts emerged from the data, rather than data being sought after to fit or test theoretical concepts. Theory, in this research logic, was used to understand what was going on in the field and in the generated data (Yanow and Schwartz-Shea, 2014b). Consequently, my research process consisted of moving back and forth between theory and data, between the desk and the field. Yanow and Schwartz-Shea call this the “circle-spiral model” (Schwartz-Shea and Yanow, 2012: 30). Based on the hermeneutic circle, they argue that sensemaking in the research process departs from whatever knowledge the researcher has at the start of her research and moves forward in concentric circles, improving her understanding of the research field. These concentric circles can lead the researcher to a body of literature or into the field, and vice versa. This movement characterised the entire research process, from research design, to the generation of data, the data analysis and the writing process.2 The interpretive research design had implications for the generation and analysis of data. Interpretive research takes language, but also acts and physical objects, as important mediums for meaning-making (Yanow and Schwartz-Shea, 2014b). 1

Abductive research differs from the inductive research logic in so far as it does not seek to provide general principles from its empirical research. Rather, “the explanation(s) it generates is (are) as situated as the puzzle with which it begins” (Schwartz-Shea and Yanow, 2012: 28, parentheses in the original). 2 When focusing on participation in development interventions, one can rightfully ask why it is necessary to take this rather open, flexible and qualitative approach, given that participation has not only been a mainstay in development practice since the mid-1990s but has also been of interest to academics from such diverse fields as geography, urban studies, political science and public administration for several decades. The perspective taken in this research project is that exactly because the body of knowledge on participation in development interventions is extensive, it was necessary to build on an open approach to allow for the possibility to uncover what is relevant in the field. Beyond such considerations, however, a constructivistinterpretivist methodology conforms to my way of seeing the world, and the abductive logic represents my general understanding of how scientific inquiry realistically happens.

68

3

Methodological Framework

With this focus, interpretive research is similar to practice theoretical approaches, which “take orderly materially mediated doing and sayings (‘practices’) and their aggregations as central for the understanding of organisational and social phenomena” (Nicolini and Monteiro, 2016: 110). For this thesis, I engaged in a variety of data-generating strategies, with a specific focus on observation, ethnographic interviews and document analysis. An important consideration behind relying not only on one form of data generation was the desire to gather a variety of perspectives. “All research activities yield evidence that is partial—‘partial’ in the sense of being fragmentary and incomplete, ‘partial’ in the sense of being ripped out of a more holistic context, and ‘partial’ in the sense of being prone to some bias or another” (Soss, 2014: 174, emphasis in the original). Interviews, for example, face the common criticism that speaking in detail about everyday practices is likely to yield a less accurate depiction of them than their direct observation in a ‘natural setting’. Interlocutors might produce something that is not inherently relevant to them (Soss, 2014). The shortcomings of document analysis for studies in the field of international development are explicated by Watkins et al.: “it is not sufficient to rely for information on the texts produced by the project: Rather, the conflicts and tensions of implementation are only visible by examining practices” (Watkins et al., 2012: 295). The consideration of various field sites in the sense of a multi-sited ethnography (Hannerz, 2003; Marcus, 1995) further contributed to the desired multiperspectivity of the data. The strategy I employed in this research with respect to multi-sitedness of the research and different methods of data generation was to achieve something Schatz calls ethnographic sensibility. Ethnographic sensibility understands ethnography as something that extends beyond the immediate instance of ‘being there’ and doing fieldwork. It transcends into the researcher’s deskwork. “It is an approach that cares—with the possible emotional engagement that implies—to glean the meanings that the people under study attribute to their social and political reality” (Schatz, 2009: 5) (see also Kubik, 2013; Pader, 2014: 197–199). This perspective ultimately perceives of ethnography as a quality in the way of doing research rather than a method. At the core of all data generation strategies lay the aim to gather what Charmaz calls “rich data” by engaging in thick description: “Rich data are detailed, focused, and full. They reveal participants’ views, feelings, intentions, and actions as well as the contexts and structures of their lives. Obtaining rich data means seeking ‘thick’ description such as writing extensive fieldnotes of observations, collecting respondents’ written personal accounts, finding relevant documents, and/or compiling detailed narratives (such as from transcribed tapes of interviews)” (Charmaz, 2014: 23; see also Yanow and Schwartz-Shea, 2014a: 148).

3.1 An Interpretive Research Design

69

The concept of thick description goes back to Geertz, who borrowed the notion of thick description from Ryle and his delineation of differences between a twitch and a wink, the same physical movement (“identical”) but with vastly different meanings (Geertz, 1973: 6). Rich data seeks to achieve the ethnographic sensibility mentioned above. It is often gained by considering multiple perspectives on the research subject or object and crafting an intercontextual account of the research situation. Cohn, whose multi-sited ethnography on US national security discourses involved fieldwork in the security sector as well as textual analysis of various reports and other documents, portrays her approach as deriving its strength “from juxtaposition and layering of many different windows” (Cohn, 2006: 93; see also Marcus, 1995; Nicolini, 2009). Ultimately, rich data also provides the contextuality which is often used as a criterion for judging the quality of interpretive research, as it signals that an interpretation is embedded in the research setting. “The centrality of context to interpretive methods lends weight to treating contextuality as a more appropriate indicator of the achievements of interpretive research than ‘generalizability,’ its equivalent in positivist methodology” (Schwartz-Shea and Yanow, 2012: 48, emphasis in the original). In order to be sensitive to the actors’ meaning-making and to what was relevant in the field, “whatever is happening” in the field influenced my focus in data generation (Charmaz, 2014: 36). Instead of building on a finalised analytical framework, I worked with sensitising concepts as points of departure in my fieldwork. “Sensitizing concepts give researchers initial but tentative ideas to pursue and questions to raise about their topics” (Charmaz, 2014: 30) (see also Blumer, 1954: 7; Kelle and Kluge, 2010). Specifically, I focused on situations, interactions and meaning-making as sensitising concepts. These reflect not only the interpretive research design but also the underlying practice-theoretical understanding that organisational realities—“matters such as social order, knowledge, institutions, identity, power, inequalities, or change” (Nicolini and Monteiro, 2016: 110)—are demonstrated in the ordinary activities and practices of organisations. Of course, nobody can have a view from nowhere, no researcher’s mind is an empty canvas to be filled with impressions only from the field: “Each participant-observer goes in with his or her own experiential background, theoretical preferences, research questions, and ideas about how to obtain the appropriate data to answer the initial research questions” (Pader, 2014: 196). Beyond the sensitising concepts, as a researcher, I was shaped by my past experiences, both personally and professionally. Section 3.3.2 considers my positionality in further detail.

70

3.2

3

Methodological Framework

Data Generation

As mentioned above, this thesis can overall be defined as an interpretive multi-sited ethnography. As such, in contrast to classic ethnographic studies, it employed a variety of data generation methods rather than relying solely on participant observation (Hannerz, 2003; Marcus, 1995). This section provides an account of the data generation process. It first presents the different methods used to generate data before describing the fieldwork from a procedural perspective, i.e. outlining the three phases of field research and their respective foci.

3.2.1 Methods The observation of everyday practices of implementation of the MDFs as well as of the interaction between the MDFs and local administrations was one important source of data in this study. Practices are understood as the “doing and sayings” (Nicolini and Monteiro, 2016: 110) of organisational actors. A key assumption of practice-theoretical approaches is that practices are knowledgebased behavioural routines (Reckwitz, 2003, 2008), where the knowledge is incorporated in practices. Practices also have a material dimension in the sense that artefacts, technologies and locations can be relevant (Schäfer, 2016). Observation is seen as “lying in the field like a sponge” as Xymena Kurowska called it in a seminar3 or “hanging out—with a difference” (Pader, 2014: 196), in the sense of following the flow of actors and activities in the field. The observation of interactions between civil society representatives and municipal bureaucrats seemed particularly interesting, as group observations allow an analysis of conjunctive knowledge and collective frames of reference, but also of the differences between different groups of actors in the field. By attending not only to individual and collective actions but also to participants’ language use, non-verbal communication and artefacts and by placing actors and actions in scenes and contexts, the observation tried to capture more types of data than is possible with interviews alone. Complementary to observations, the fieldwork included ethnographic interviews with local bureaucrats involved in the forums (such as physical planners and community development officers), with representatives from the World Bank, 3

Professor Kurowska mentioned this in her seminar “Introduction to Ethnography and Field Research” at the 11th ECPR Summer School in Methods and Techniques from 28–30 July 2016 at the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary.

3.2 Data Generation

71

the Cities Alliance and several central government ministries and agencies and with representatives of community-based organisations and non-governmental organisations. Interviews were conducted to generate data on experiences with the MDFs. They were furthermore used to clarify observed situations or to develop a more in-depth understanding of a research participant’s experience in an observed situation and of the meaning attached to this experience. In contrast to structured or semi-structured interviews, ethnographic interviews do not rely on a questionnaire aimed at eliciting responses to theoretical concepts but are conceptualised as open interviews. They combine the interview techniques of narrative and episodic interviews and are focused on the lived experiences and subjective perceptions of the interviewee with regard to the topics of interest for the research project, namely to understand the daily practices of local administrators and communities in the implementation of the MDFs (Yanow and Schwartz-Shea, 2014a). This openness assumes that logics of action can only be understood through understanding the systems of relevance underlying action and interaction. Ethnographic interviews thus allow interviewees to display their systems of relevance, understandings and sense-making efforts by speaking about lived experiences without external structuring or theoretical preconceptions of their motivations, interpretations or perspectives (Bohnsack, 2000; Kruse, 2014; Soss, 2014). Following Helfferich, the interviews were as open as possible and as structured as necessary (Helfferich, 2009: 169, 181, author’s translation). The interview guideline stated exemplary questions or prompts to be discussed in ethnographic interviews, focusing on the interviewee’s conceptions of what was going on and working with their language (see Annex IV in the Electronic Supplementary Material for an overview of interview questions and prompts). Each individual interview, however, consisted of a dynamic interaction between the interviewee and interviewer, structured around the interviewee’s initial narration about his or her experiences. Interview transcripts were produced for all interviews conducted in order to “precisely capture the ways individuals use words and phrases, organize their narratives, and puzzle through the phenomena under discussion” (Soss, 2014: 176). Some transcripts were produced in the field, which allowed for initial interpretations and reflection on the data generation process. I agree with Soss, who writes that “transcription sessions were the occasions when some of my most fruitful insights and conjectures took shape” and “led to the writing of important analytic memos and to significant changes in the ways I pursued future rounds of interviews” (Soss, 2014: 170). Transcription was possible because, throughout the data generation process, I recorded most interviews and meetings. A few exceptions exist: informal interactions and the interviews with Geraldine and Carine, two officers in the World Bank’s Uganda country

72

3

Methodological Framework

office were not recorded. Furthermore, none of the interviews I conducted during the exploratory field research phase in 2015 were recorded. I nonetheless produced observation protocols and postscripts based on my written notes from these interactions. All names of research participants, municipalities, and civil society organisations used in this doctoral thesis are anonymised. Annex II in the Electronic Supplementary Material details and explains these pseudonyms. Central government ministries, international development organisations and the two urban development programmes analysed were not anonymised (see Section 3.3.3 on research ethics). I collected supplementary documents, such as policy and programme documents, legal frameworks, status reports and work plans of the MDFs as well as relevant newspaper articles throughout my time in the field. They were analysed both for their content, as well as their representation of discourses and accounts, to assess shared definitions surrounding the topic of participation in international development intervention. “As a discourse, a document follows certain conventions and assumes embedded meanings. Researchers can compare the style, contents, direction, and presentation of material to a larger discourse of which a document is part” (Charmaz, 2014: 46). Semi-structured interviews with key informants and experts were conducted during the first field phase in November 2015 to develop a better understanding of the field and to learn about contextual factors such as the Ugandan decentralisation system and the Ugandan physical planning system and land administration. Throughout the second and third fieldwork phase, I continued with this type of interview when deemed necessary. Given that reflexivity is a key concept of interpretive ethnographic research (Yanow, 2014: xxv), a field journal and reflective memo writing were important research practices for me. In these, I reflected on experiences and my role as a researcher and also contemplated theoretical expectations and emerging puzzles in light of the experiences in the field (Schwartz-Shea and Yanow, 2012: 101–102). Following Wilkinson, reflexivity acknowledges that the researcher’s knowledge is always produced from his or her specific position and is not neutral (Wilkinson, 2014: 402). Throughout the fieldwork, I used memos and field notes as a way of recording observations and of reflecting on and interpreting the occurrences of a specific interaction, a day or a week in the field. I initially found research participants for the interviews using snowballing techniques. That is to say, I built on existing knowledge and contacts established during the exploratory field visit in November 2015 and interviews conducted in November and December 2016. I countered the problems commonly associated with ‘snowball sampling’, especially the worry that this leads to a biased view

3.2 Data Generation

73

of the field because all contacts can ultimately be traced back to the interaction with one person, by seeking different lines of access (Perera-Mubarak, 2014: 207–209). Before the first field research, I had conducted a Skype interview with a representative of the International Network of the Urban Poor, who later put me in touch with the local Ugandan NGO Hand-in-Hand. I was able to secure office space with a German foundation whose work had only limited overlap with my research interests, but which was able to provide contacts within the Ugandan central government. Lastly, I also used private contacts as additional field entry. A colleague from the University of Potsdam had an old acquaintance who worked for the World Bank in East Africa, two flatmates in Kampala worked on projects with the Kampala Capital City Authority and were able to connect me to their counterparts there. Overall, my goal in choosing different sites and types of organisations and actor groups was to maximize the exposure to different perspectives and multiple interpretations of the field (Schwartz-Shea and Yanow, 2012: 85).

3.2.2 Fieldwork The empirical data for this thesis was generated throughout three phases of fieldwork conducted between November 2015 and April 2017. In line with the overall methodological approach of this research, the field work plan developed over time. Table 3.1 presents an overview of the three phases of field research. Table 3.1 Fieldwork Overview November 2015

November—December 2016

January—April 2017

Overview of the field

Research Ethics Approval

Continuation of activities from November—December 2016

Exploratory interviews

Research permit

Observation in national-level NGO Hand-in-Hand

Establishment of a network Interviews in Kampala with Observation and interviews of contacts representatives from the in several municipalities international community, central government ministries and national-level NGOs and CBOs Source: Own representation

74

3

Methodological Framework

To get a first grasp of the realities ‘on the ground’ and to begin staking out the field of actors and organisations with the aim to somewhat delimit my research, I embarked on an exploratory study in November 2015, spending a month in Kampala to conduct first interviews. I also visited a Ugandan municipality that had a functioning Municipal Development Forum for two days.4 Vorrath presents this phase as the “crucial groundwork of talking to experts, establishing a network of contacts and engaging with the general research environment” (Vorrath, 2013: 59). Before travelling, I had organised a placement at the Kampala office of a German political foundation, both in order to have a desk to work from and in the hope of establishing first contacts with local and international experts. I then followed a snowballing technique for the interviews, letting the first interview partner refer me to the next person and so on. My second stay in Uganda took take place in November and December 2016. During this time, I conducted interviews with representatives from the World Bank, the Cities Alliance as well as the relevant central government ministries, the Ministry of Lands, Housing and Urban Development (MoLHUD) as well as the Ministry of Local Government (MoLG). At the same time, this field research phase was also strongly shaped by organisational activities. Before arriving, I had already begun the necessary steps for a formal research permit in Uganda, which involved receiving approval from the Research Ethics Board of my home university and of a research ethics committee in Uganda. These processes continued well into the second phase of field research and were ultimately not completed until the third phase of field research. At the same time, I established a connection with the local Makerere University, both a requirement for the application for a research permit and a welcome opportunity to establish an academic interchange with local researchers. I furthermore prepared my third fieldwork phase by establishing contacts with local administrations and setting up observation opportunities. The third fieldwork phase took place between January and April 2017 and was dominated by observation and interviews in several organisations which were actively involved with the MDFs, the core research object of my doctoral research. Specifically, I had organised a placement with two municipal administrations in which MDFs were implemented to observe everyday practices and routines of local bureaucrats in working with the MDFs. Two criteria were central to selecting these municipalities as field sites: the date of MDF establishment and the level of activity of the MDF based on the assessment by interviewees 4

I anonymised this municipality as Exploration Town in the list of interviews in Annex I. Exploration Town does not reappear in the remaining chapters of the thesis.

3.2 Data Generation

75

from NGOs, the Cities Alliance and the MoLHUD in interviews conducted in November and December 2016. As set out in Chapter 1 (Introduction), MDFs were first established in five Ugandan municipalities in the framework of the TSUPU programme and only several years later in nine further municipalities and in Kampala. In order to gain a nuanced understanding of the development of MDFs over time, I chose two of the initial five municipalities for longer periods of observation. One of the additional nine municipalities was included mainly through interviews because observation opportunities were limited. The level of activity was taken as a criterion of selection because it was judged to differ significantly across the country’s municipalities. Municipalities were chosen to represent different ends of the spectrum, expecting that this would allow a more nuanced understanding of the researched phenomenon. Table 3.2 provides an overview of the three researched municipalities. Throughout the third fieldwork phase, I furthermore continued to conduct interviews in Kampala with representatives from the international community, central government ministries and national-level NGOs and CBOs and completed the application process for the research permit. Table 3.2 Overview of Researched Municipalities Characteristic

A-Town

B-Ville

C-City

Date of MDF establishment

MDF established under TSUPU

MDF established under TSUPU

MDF established under USMID

Expected level of MDF’s activity

Medium to high

Low

High

Level of access

Placement in municipal administration, pre-planned and spontaneous observations, interviews and interactions

Pre-planned observation and interviews

Pre-planned observation and interviews

Use of material in data analysis (see Section 3.4.1, Coding process)

Material used for initial coding

Material used for focused coding

Material used for focused coding

Source: Own representation

76

3

Methodological Framework

In the three phases, I conducted 100 interviews, of which 27 were exploratory interviews in November 2015. In the second and third research phase, I conducted 64 ethnographic interviews and nine semi-structured interviews. In these 100 interviews, I interviewed a total of 96 people. Some interviews were group interviews, while some people were interviewed several times over the course of the field research. Observation included nine planned meetings of different kinds, e.g. of MDFs, municipal administrations, community-based organisations and between various other collective actors relevant in the field. All nine meetings were directly related to or involved the MDFs. Observation, furthermore, extended to countless informal and formal interactions as well as four site visits to TSUPU and USMID projects organised especially for the researcher (see Annex I for lists of interviews and observations). Fieldwork is characterised as a rather turbulent process (Murray and Overton, 2003; Yanow and Schwartz-Shea, 2014b) and Wilkinson reminds us that “we have a responsibility to ‘tell it as it happened’, rather than how we would have liked it to be or a neatly edited selective account” (Wilkinson, 2008: 60). My experience was no exception. My first encounter with the field in November 2015, for example, can be best described as ‘stumbling into the field’. On the day I arrived in Kampala, my luggage remained at the connecting airport, I got ripped off at the foreign exchange office, was told I definitely needed a taxi for the tenminute-walk between the hotel I had booked for the first two nights and the store where I could buy some clothes, and payed roughly 400% of the regular price for that taxi ride. The first sentence in my field journal reads, “First day and I seem to have fallen into so many traps already”. This notion of muddling through remained a characteristic element of my time in the field and the actual data generation activities were much less the set of discrete steps that I had imagined. Rather, it was a continuous and interdependent process, which required a constant adjustment of my plans to account for realities. Subsequently, I moved back and forth between localities and organisations in a flexible manner. In particular, three types of experiences were recurrent: chance encounters, unforeseen complications and the spontaneous nature of field research. Particularly at the beginning of my field research, contacts which retrospectively turned out to be the most important ones were often established in chance encounters. When I arrived in the field, for example, I began writing emails to potential interviewees to request meetings. My success, however, was limited: I hardly received any answer at all. Then, two weeks into my first phase in the field, I met two people at an event about the exploitation oil and gas revenues for sustainable development in Uganda, a topic that had nothing to do with what I was interested in researching. These two contacts retrospectively were the ones

3.2 Data Generation

77

who ‘started the snowball’, so to speak, i.e. they provided the first useful contacts which opened the door to my field of research. They therefore had a crucial impact on how the research proceeded. One of these people, Annett, was a highlevel staff member at the World Bank’s Kampala Office, who then put me in touch with the relevant staff members who were working on urban development and involved with the programmes my research focused on. By chance I was manning the event’s registration desk5 in the exact moment she showed up late for the event, which allowed for a short exchange without time pressure on me to register other participants or without having to get her attention in one of the breaks where other participants would have surely been party to my request. George, the other contact I made at this meeting put me in touch with a former senior officer of UN-HABITAT, the UN programme tasked with urban development. When I met the former senior officer of UN-HABITAT, he was working on a consulting contract for UN-HABITAT but using a desk in the MoLHUD. It was a fortunate coincidence that this desk was in the office adjacent to that of Nathanael, a senior officer in the area of urban development at the MoLHUD, and at the time of our meeting also temporarily the Cities Alliance representative in Uganda and responsible for one of the two programmes I was looking at. Nathanael proved to be a useful contact, someone who later began to serve as my gatekeeper to the local governments and who I repeatedly met with during all three of my fieldwork phases. In contrast, most of the emails I had written never resulted in any useful interaction. At times, however, contacts led to dead ends or produced unforeseen complications. George, whom I met at the aforementioned event, for example, also put me in touch with Dominic, a high-level political bureaucrat at the MoLG. I was thrilled about this contact because, besides the MoLHUD, the MoLG was the second ministry involved in the two aid interventions TSUPU and USMID which had established the MDFs. Although Dominic did not have much to say about the MDFs, he provided me with another contact at the MoLG to speak to and promised me a letter of support to carry with me to the municipal governments. After the meeting, I did some research to find out more about Dominic and found that he had been suspended from his position on charges of corruption and was in fact barred from entering the ministry.6 Still, because I had no other contacts in 5

The event had been organised by the foundation which provided me with office space. In return, I helped out at several of their events. 6 I was not able to do this before the interview because at the time I still had significant challenges understanding Ugandan English and I had not written Dominic’s name down correctly from George so my internet search before the interview yielded no results. It was only after

78

3

Methodological Framework

the MoLG, yet, I used Dominic’s suggestions for my way into the ministry. However, throughout the field research, I continued to have difficulties getting a foot in the door at the MoLG and never managed to get the same level of interaction as with the MoLHUD. Following the experience with Dominic, I relied on the MoLHUD contacts as my gatekeepers, which affected access and immersion on the municipal level (see Section 3.3.1, Access and Immersion). Corruption also frustrated my planned placement with the NGO Hand-in-Hand. The NGO had played an important role in mobilising citizens to participate in MDFs, and I had thus hoped to observe the organising of citizens across different municipalities while working for Hand-in-Hand as an intern. However, when I was due to begin the placement, the organisation had recently uncovered a corruption case in its leadership. It was, therefore, not working on regular tasks but instead focused on on-going internal investigations and organisational re-structuring activities. Of course, in an interpretive approach there needs to remain some level of spontaneity and reaction to the circumstances in the field. As Marcus elucidates in his account of multi-sited ethnography, “not all sites are treated by a uniform set of fieldwork practices of the same intensity. Multi-sited ethnographies inevitably are the product of knowledge bases of varying intensities and qualities. To do ethnographic research, for example, on the social grounds that produce a particular discourse of policy requires different practices and opportunities than does fieldwork among the situated communities such policy affects.” (Marcus, 1995: 100) (see also Hannerz, 2003).

In a similar fashion, the selection of sites was often “both ‘pre-planned’ and ‘opportunistic’” (Cohn, 2006: 94). In reaction to the new-found situation, I conducted in-depth interviews with the members of the NGO rather than observing their activities. The focus of my field research shifted further towards the observations in municipal administrations. The field research in A-Town and B-Ville took place in March and April 2017. The two experiences were vastly different from one another. In A-Town, I was able to use a desk in the office of the economic planner and frequently spent time at the office of the MDF. A day in A-Town usually consisted of a mix between shadowing different administrators of the municipality or the MDF president in their work, attending meetings between the MDF and the local administrators and conducting interviews. Sometimes, the interviews were pre-planned, oftentimes the interactions occurred spontaneously. In B-Ville, I was allowed to sit on a I had received the official title of his position at MoLG from him, that I was able to find this information.

3.2 Data Generation

79

visitors’ chair in the community development officer’s office while not being engaged in other activities. There was no available office space for me to use, and indeed the MDF itself did not have an office at the municipal administration. Field research in B-Ville was thus more dominated by pre-arranged interviews and official meetings rather than spontaneous interactions. Overall, however, there was no such thing as ‘a typical day in the field’. It was crucially important to be as spontaneous as possible as research participants would often invite me to attend a meeting, spend some time in conversation or suggest a visit to some project site without advance notice. Some days I spent observing meetings and everyday interactions in a local administration; other days I hung out at the MoLHUD waiting for an interview partner or waiting out a rainstorm. I spent some days criss-crossing Kampala from one interview to the next and others travelling only to the research ethics committee and back, using the rest of the day to analyse what I had observed or heard in previous interviews. What all my days had in common was the extremely limited amount of time spent ‘off duty’, the preciously rare opportunities to retreat and clear my head. Rather, I often felt like I was spending the whole time in a frenzy, trying not to miss anything, taking in everything that was happening and at night sitting and reflecting on the day or transcribing interviews, as well as preparing for the next day. A friend once conceptualised field research as an experience akin to “trying to keep a crocodile at bay”—a characterisation that resonates with my experience. Yanow and Schwartz-Shea outline the complex situation of generating data in an interpretive research process: “one ‘discovery’ leads to another—much as a hermeneutic circle-spiral might suggest. The different kinds of engagements in the research setting took place ‘at the same time’—some of them within a single day, others within a single week or, at times, month. It is only in retrospect that the learning process can be described in what sounds like a very patterned way. At the time, all of the strands of puzzlement felt intertwined, much more like a tangled ball of yarn than like a neat circle-spiral” (Schwartz-Shea and Yanow, 2012: 32).

Field research is not done in a linear but in a spiral, iterative process. Rather than gathering data in the field and then analysing it at home, the researcher observes and takes notes or interviews and records and immediately reflects and analyses. Thus, a place to retreat from ‘the field’ is necessary to do reflection. At the same time, the researcher is never only a private person but always more or less ‘on duty’, even when only sitting and reflecting.

80

3.3

3

Methodological Framework

Contemplating the Field: A Reflexive Journey

This section provides a reflexive account of the field research and as such is an analytical addition to the descriptive account provided in Section 3.2.2 (Fieldwork). It discusses challenges encountered with respect to different dimensions of access to the field overall and to the different parts of the field, and it reflects on the role of my positionality as a researcher for the data generation process as well as the data generated. It furthermore provides an account of the steps taken to receive research ethics approval, analyses the limitations of such processes and examines additional ethical considerations that became relevant in the field.

3.3.1 Access and Immersion The success of fieldwork crucially relies on the ability to gain access to the field of research, to relevant organisations and actors. Leslie and Storey portray the process of getting what they call “research ‘permission’” (Leslie and Storey, 2003: 81) as two-staged: the first level consists of complying with formal requirements, such as visas and government research permissions (see Section 3.3.3, Ethics). The second level requires the researcher to negotiate with what they call “local ‘gatekeepers’” (Leslie and Storey, 2003: 82). A gatekeeper is often defined as someone “in an organisation [who has] the power to withhold access to people or situations” necessary for the research (Miniechello et al. (1997), cited in Scheyvens et al., 2003: 153). Seen in a more positive light, a gatekeeper is someone who can introduce the researcher into the field and give her legitimacy with other potential research participants. My experiences, which diverged from these ideal visions of gaining access in the field, are elicited in the following. Good and bad gatekeepers While almost every book on field research mentions the importance of gatekeepers, the question of who makes a good gatekeeper, is often treated as if it were selfevident. The only exception I found in the literature was Perera-Mubarak (2014) who acknowledges that “recommendations by the ‘wrong’ people … can backfire and hinder access” (Perera-Mubarak, 2014: 214). I would contend that it is actually a choice the researcher consciously has to make. There might be research situations where choosing a gatekeeper, indeed, does not pose a problem. In my specific case, however, towards the end of my time in the field, I was left wondering whether I had not better chosen a different ‘way in’. For several reasons, my initial entry point to the municipal administrations was Nathanael from the MoLHUD, who had

3.3 Contemplating the Field: A Reflexive Journey

81

been significantly involved in TSUPU, one of the programmes I was researching. However, over the course of my fieldwork, I understood that despite being the key actor on the national level, the MoLHUD was not the only gatekeeper to consider when establishing access in the local administrations. As one of my interviewees from the MoLG pointed out to me, the MoLG is the “mother ministry” to local governments. It is responsible for their oversight, it appoints the leadership positions in local bureaucracies such as the town clerk and is, therefore, an important actor to involve in government programmes and development interventions that are implemented on the local level (EI23: Ibrahim, MoLG, March 2017). I suspect that gaining access to the local administrations through my contact at the MoLG could have increased their trust in my research. However, there was another factor I had not given due consideration: I trusted my MoLHUD gatekeeper when he referred me directly to the community development officers in the local administrations, the bureaucrats responsible for the interaction with MDFs. It seemed to be only a matter of a phone call to ‘get in’, to be told, “Yes, please come to do your research here. We are waiting for you”. In A-Town, however, once I arrived on site, I was quickly told by the CDO: “So in anything, we must document through the office of the town clerk so that the sequencing of activities is done in line with the systems. The town clerk will address it to the right office, then the right office will implement” (EI25: CDO, A-Town, March 2017; see also O11: researcher’s introduction to municipal bureaucrats, A-Town, March 2017). I had clearly failed to acknowledge the administration’s town clerk as a relevant gatekeeper. Throughout my fieldwork, I could not shake off the feeling that the CDO, who I had thought would be my gatekeeper to the municipal administration in A-Town, did not trust me because I had not respected the formal hierarchy and sought access through the town clerk. To a certain extent, these experiences reflect what has been described as one of the issues with gatekeepers and research based on snowball procedures (Morgan and Grugel, 2017; Scheyvens et al., 2003). However, it also shows that the idea of having but one gatekeeper oversimplifies the complex realities in the field and the different layers of access. “Visas and government approval do not necessarily represent the end of the road regarding consent. Indeed, in some fieldwork contexts official approval is only the first step of many towards gaining legitimacy. … In many instances it will be local ‘gatekeepers’ who will need to be satisfied before an adequate level of fieldwork can be undertaken” (Leslie and Storey, 2003: 82; see also Scheyvens et al., 2003: 155).

Leslie and Storey argue that this can be formal or informal, as people will show different degrees of enthusiasm for the research. However, neither “the government

82

3

Methodological Framework

officials” nor “the villagers” are a unitary whole that can grant general access. Nor can powerful individuals grant efficient access to all subordinates. Due to the multisited nature of the research, it was not simply the one village elder that traditional studies in anthropology often convinced to grant access. Rather, there were several organisations on different levels of government which I had to get on board with the study. Over the course of my field research, for example, I often wondered whether I should have sought the approval of the LC1 chairmen in the areas I studied. Local Council 1 (LC1) is the lowest level of local government in Uganda (see Section 1.4.2, Uganda’s Politico-administrative System over Time), and the chairman at this level is the type of village leader who is often named as the relevant gatekeeper for research in sub-Saharan Africa (Ogora, 2013). It remains an uncertainty in this research. I would argue that it goes beyond the issue of the “good” gatekeeper. Establishing trust and continuously working on relationships in the field are crucial steps in the negotiation of access with gatekeepers (Morgan and Grugel, 2017; Siegel, 2017; Thomson et al., 2013a). Formal access and building rapport Conducting research in government, be it on the international, national or local level, means negotiating access with closed, hierarchical organisations. My first step in this negotiation was the application for a research permit in Uganda. But of course, formal approvals of a distant central government agency such as the Uganda National Council for Science and Technology (UNCST) are of little importance for formal access to the individual organisations and in the daily negotiation of informal, relational access. And while I was aware that much of the work consists of building relationships in a rather intangible and flexible manner, I also fell into some traps. I perceive my mishaps to have resulted from different perspectives on how to achieve access, or different cultures of organising between myself and my research participants. Throughout my entire field experience, I was not able to overcome my desire to fix observation placements for my research beforehand and in writing. When I mentioned this desire to my gatekeepers, it was usually met with the assertion that such formality was not necessary and that a telephone call followed by a personal introduction would suffice. Morgan and Grugel highlight the same about Morgan’s research in Latin America: “you need to be flexible about time and not imagine that you are going to get the schedule sorted in advance … You need to pursue your research on the ground, find out who you can phone while you are there, and who you may have to phone multiple times” (Morgan and Grugel, 2017: 131). Time and again, I did exactly that. My experience with the CDO in A-Town that I sketched out in the section on “Good and bad gatekeepers” in this section, however, reveals that in spite of what to me seemed to be an informal way of going about things, conducting

3.3 Contemplating the Field: A Reflexive Journey

83

observational research can in fact involve bureaucratic procedures and expectations to comply with formalities. Nonetheless, “formal” access, understood as getting the chance to conduct observations and interviews in the field of research, was gained easier than I thought. I conducted observation of everyday activities and meetings in two local governments and one national NGO. With a little bit of persistence, I also gained relatively easy interview access to several central government ministries and agencies, as well as the World Bank in Uganda. After a while, however, I hit the proverbial brick wall. Thomson et al. remind us that “we cannot expect people to respond to us with openness, nor expect that they will tell us their real opinions and experiences when they have just met us” (Thomson et al., 2013b). In addition to the obvious challenge of establishing relationships from scratch, I encountered limitations to my access on several occasions when trying to participate in meetings as an observer. The following observation from A-Town shall serve as an example here. I had only been in A-Town for a couple of days when a group of consultants came to discuss the results of their assessment which was to provide the foundation for the World Bank’s decision on whether to fund a second phase of USMID in A-Town. Both the community development officer and the environment officer had invited me to attend the meeting. I was excited about this opportunity to observe the interactions between consultants contracted by the World Bank, local bureaucrats and MDF representatives. When it was time to present the results, I was sitting in the Municipal Hall, eagerly awaiting the beginning of the meeting. Right before the meeting began, the community development officer came to me and whispered, “OK, Eve. We are now starting, so…”. I pretended not to understand but knew immediately what was happening. “Oh, great!”, I replied, “I look forward to it.” “No,” he said, “you have to leave now. This meeting is official.” (O13: USMID assessment debriefing meeting between municipal bureaucrats and the assessing consultants, A-Town, March 2017)

Needless to say, I felt crushed that I had seemingly not managed to gain enough trust to be allowed to participate in the meeting I had previously been invited to. I also had no clue as to what had happened and where communication had gone wrong. But after a brief phase of being shocked, I decided I needed to work harder on gaining access to meetings and continued to try and build closer relationships with the municipal bureaucrats. Sometime later, it was about halfway through my time in A-Town, a World Bank delegation came to town as part of the review process for USMID. The delegation consisted of members of the World Bank office in Kampala whom I had been in touch with. I had also met Geraldine for an interview a few days prior and she had kept the consent form to read in detail before signing it.

84

3

Methodological Framework

I had talked to Geraldine on the phone and she told me she had brought the signed consent form to A-Town to give it to me. We agreed to meet before her meeting at the municipal offices and she told me she would give me a call in the morning to tell me where to meet her. When she called, I was already at the municipal offices, ‘hanging out’ in the MDF office. She said to meet her up front, outside of the municipal offices, and so I hurried to find my way there. The World Bank delegation of course did not enter without anyone noticing, and municipal bureaucrats began flocking to the entrance to greet the delegation members. Amidst that scene, Geraldine saw me, greeted me by name and with a handshake and handed me a folded piece of paper with the words “This is the document you required.” The municipal bureaucrats around us of course saw and heard this interaction but had no chance of knowing that she was simply handing me a signed consent form of the same kind they had been given when I had spoken to them. I felt the trust I had been trying to build up was crushed in one short moment. It came of no surprise when one of the bureaucrats later approached me to ask how I knew Geraldine and to express her surprise at discovering what she perceived as familiarity. (O16: meet-up with Geraldine to receive consent form, A-Town, March 2017)

My attempt to participate in the regular staff meetings of the local administrations, the Technical Planning Committee (TPC) meetings, met a similar fate. This inability to gain ‘access all areas’ is due to my being perceived as exactly what I was: a researcher, and as such, an observer rather than a participant in the field. This also became evident to me on several occasions when I was not invited to meetings or kept ‘in the loop’. On one occasion, shortly before I was due to leave the field, an interviewee had asked me to meet her at an event she was attending, and I found myself in a room filled with almost all the people I had interacted with throughout my fieldwork, including representatives from central government ministries and agencies, local governments, civil society organisations, academia and international organisations. Despite the clear relevance of this meeting to my research, not a single contact had mentioned it to me in our interactions. On several other occasions I had been told that a certain meeting would be interesting for me to observe and even that my interlocutor would wish for me to be able to attend the meeting (EI23: Ibrahim, MoLG, March 2017; EI60: Ronald, MoLHUD, April 2017). Oftentimes, the contact promised to invite me once the details were finalised. Alas, nothing ever came of these promises. Siegel (2017) recounts a similar experience from her own field work researching environmental politics in South America: “I was interested in observing a regional meeting of government officials; in principle these meetings were open to accredited civil society representatives, so I was hoping to gain access as well. Yet, on the two occasions when I was in the region at the time of a meeting, despite my repeated attempts to contact people involved in the organisation

3.3 Contemplating the Field: A Reflexive Journey

85

of the meeting, it was impossible for me to even find out the exact dates, never mind any information about how to get accredited” (Siegel, 2017: 150).

In a similar vein, I would argue, we need to reflect on what has in the literature been discussed as “lies” (Fujii, 2010) or “getting the official script” (Berckmoes, 2013; see also Thomson et al., 2013b). Despite conducting open, ethnographic interviews, in many instances during my fieldwork, I felt like I was being told an official narrative. When asking about interactions between different programme participants, for example, I quite often received an answer which portrayed the official wording of programme documents but not the lived experience of these interactions. Other interlocutors repeatedly referred to existing procedural rules when describing activities. These challenges were exemplified in an answer I received from B-Ville’s community development officer. When I asked him to tell me about the way the MDF works, he responded: “In fact, on Wednesday when they come, they will approve the new charter, they will sign it [and] we shall use [it] to elect new members. And … we’re supposed to elect new members this month. So when they come, they will sign that, they will approve that charter, then it’s the charter we shall use to elect new members” (EI49: CDO, B-Ville, April 2017).7

While I had expected some account of recent events, my interlocutor instead referred to future plans and how they would be shaped by the MDFs’ guidance document, the charter. This was troublesome to me because it was a personally frustrating experience and because this type of encounter is often ascribed to an inability of the researcher to establish trust. “The acknowledgement of lies is thus connected to allegations of lack of trust, both between researcher and informants and between researcher and his/her public: if there is a lie, there is no trust; if there is trust, there is no lie” (Berckmoes, 2013: 125). Moreover, these experiences need to be considered when interpreting the data. Indeed, I argue that lies, deception and official narratives can be used productively in research when exploring their possible meanings. In my view, an encounter with what we perceive as deception or the front stage of an organisation (Goffman, 1990) should not automatically be reduced to a lack of trust or immersion. Instead, it can help us interpret the interviewee’s personal, social and cultural meaning-making with respect to our research interest (Berckmoes, 2013; 7

CDO is the abbreviation for Community Development Officer. Throughout the thesis, the full position is always mentioned either in the sentences immediately before or after a quote. Moreover, the abbreviations for positions in the municipal administrations can be found in the list of abbreviations on p. xii-xiv.

86

3

Methodological Framework

Fujii, 2010). For local administrations in Uganda, for example, interactions with the World Bank, or more generally interactions in development interventions, can be seen as the front stage of the organisation. The front stage was therefore very dominant in my data, whereas I was only privy to the backstage in rare moments. These reflections point to a dimension of access which goes beyond the superficial establishment of contact and formal access and relates to what has been discussed as “building rapport” in anthropology. O’Reilly defines rapport as “reciprocal relationships based on mutual trust and understanding” (O’Reilly, 2009: 174). Jorgenson writes about a “need to develop a situation of ‘trust and cooperation’ between the researcher and the people in a research setting” (Jorgenson, 1989; cited in (DeWalt and DeWalt, 2011)). But how can we understand the dimension of rapport in the field? How can the researcher understand how she can establish or fail at establishing trustful relationships? Already in the late 1980s, Clifford discussed the dissolving of “the myth of ethnographic rapport” and recognised that the ethnographic encounter involves “elements of insincerity, hypocrisy, and self-deception” (Clifford, 1988: 80). Berckmoes draws on Norman (2009) to specify trust as multi-faceted, having a behavioural, emotional and cognitive dimension. In field research, behavioural and cognitive trust is commonly what is sought. “The cognitive dimension entails the conceptualisation of trust as an individual process based on rational discrimination between the trustworthy, distrusted and unknown… Field researchers usually work to ensure especially this last dimension, which is closely related to ethical concerns, like clarity about the research objectives, informed consent, and anonymity of the respondents. Sometimes, fieldworkers also pursue trust through the behavioural dimension, by, for instance, engaging in longterm fieldwork, spread over time, coming back to the same people, and participating in side activities that show involvement in the community” (Berckmoes, 2013: 132).

Reflecting on my own experience in the field, I argue that while these steps were important, it was indispensable to also take into account my own positionality, which I explore further in Section 3.3.2 (Positionality). Ascribed identities and the international bubble Researchers from the Global North who conduct research in the Global South on topics surrounding international aid interventions inevitably have to ask themselves how they want to relate to the international development community in their research location during the fieldwork and what implications this decision might have for their research. The lives of international expats in developing countries are, colloquially and in academic research, often described with the metaphor of a bubble (Fechter, 2007: 17, 63). Apthorpe uses the terms “aidland” and “bubbleland” (Apthorpe,

3.3 Contemplating the Field: A Reflexive Journey

87

2013). Eyben’s account of her experience as a member of the international community in Bolivia captures this bubble well (Eyben 2013). Rather than getting to know the country they work in, international expats prioritise “working and socializing with each other and with a handful of Bolivian consultants and government officials” (Eyben, 2013: 141). Unsurprisingly then, the bubble can be beneficial in terms of contacts and connections to people in power and to receive useful background information. However, it can also be a disadvantage because of the effects this has on how deeply the researcher can be immersed in the field and which identities are ascribed to her. A young, white female researcher in East Africa will not go unnoticed by the local communities she interacts with. Vorrath highlights how prominent she quickly was among the taxi drivers in the East African capital where she conducted her research and how the drivers seemed to exchange information about the white people they drove around (Vorrath, 2013: 63). Aside from the most obvious disadvantage that it is impossible to just observe a situation as the ‘fly on the wall’ or to make an interview seem like a conversation among old friends, being so visible as an outsider raises the question of how the researcher wants to position herself in the field. Vorrath saw two options for herself: “a rather inexperienced PhD student who is in dire need of some help in a strange environment or the tough and wellprepared manager of a mini-project with a good knowledge of the situation” (Vorrath, 2013: 65). However, several scholars have argued that ascribed identities are outside of the researcher’s control (Vorrath, 2013; Wilkinson, 2008). Depending on the interlocutor, I was seen as either of these two. When I was ascribed the identity of the inexperienced PhD student, I was at times confronted with seemingly endless monologues about Uganda’s political situation and about the programmes I was researching. At other times I, as a supposed manager from the international expat community, was asked for contacts to international organisations and for support in writing project proposals. Being associated with the ‘international bubble’ does, however, not only generate requests for contacts and support. It likely also conjures up a picture of the level of immersion the researcher is interested in (short-term mission, as is common in the international development community) and of what she wants (ask a few things but then tell you how to do things better than you were doing them before). I tried not to become too associated with the international bubble in Uganda. But, my success was limited, as I show in the following section on positionality.

88

3

Methodological Framework

3.3.2 Positionality Reflexivity and positionality, i.e. considering the role of the researcher in the research, has long been an important part of ethnographic research accounts (Burawoy, 1998; Clifford and Marcus, 1986; Geertz, 1973; Pachirat, 2013). Crawford et al. define positionality as a concern with “the researcher’s own position in terms of gender, class, race, age, sexuality, religion and so forth, and how these aspects of identity and social position (or status) may affect the research process in general, and data collection in particular, including relationships with research participants” (Crawford et al., 2017: 11). Reflexivity then means thinking about positionality. Crawford et al. posit that “[r]eflexivity enables researchers to question how their positionality and personal views may have affected or biased their research” (Crawford et al., 2017: 13). In positivist research such accounts would be seen as a shortcoming or an admission to failure (Schwartz-Shea and Yanow, 2012: 95) and might even be criticised as exercises in self-analysis. In interpretive research, on the contrary, positionality and reflexivity function as “a productive and necessary source of reflection and analysis” (Pachirat, 2013, position 2704; emphasis in the original).8 As Yanow and Schwartz-Shea emphasise, reflexivity is a methodological practice that openly addresses possible biases and that researchers use as “checks on their own sense-making” (Schwartz-Shea and Yanow, 2012: 100; emphasis in the original). Reflexivity extends beyond the researcher’s time in the field, remains relevant throughout the entire research process and needs to be written into the research account. Importantly, they position reflexivity as the interpretive counterpart to positivist research’s objectivity and a criterion of quality. “[R]eflexivity can serve to enhance the trustworthiness of the researcher’s knowledgegeneration processes even as its use might reveal research activities that challenge that trustworthiness. A reader may decide that what is revealed through such transparency weakens the knowledge being advanced—but its presence enables that judgment” (Schwartz-Shea and Yanow, 2012: 103).

Positionality and reflexivity pay tribute to the interpretivist methodological stance that a view from nowhere is not possible, and, therefore, the knowledge produced

8

Some of the cited literature was read in the Kindle edition. Not all Kindle editions provide page numbers, but rather give positions. In these cases, instead of naming the page where the citation stems from, the Kindle position is specified.

3.3 Contemplating the Field: A Reflexive Journey

89

in any research is situated (Rose, 1997; Schwartz-Shea and Yanow, 2012; Wilkinson, 2014). Our positionality affects what we learn as well as how we process and analyse what we learn, and reflexivity is how we can address this. “The only solution is for the researcher to know who she is, not only as someone who affects the research site in particular ways, but also as someone who characterizes it in partial and biased ways. This is less wrong than inevitable, and because of that, suggestions that one can be unbiased should be the most troubling. A good research ethic should allow researchers to discuss how their questions and preoccupations—as well as their personal characteristics and the context of their interactions—affected their research” (Ann Linn, 2000: 191, 194; cited in Soss, 2014: 175).

A closer look reveals that there is more to positionality than meets the eye; different dimensions need to be considered. Rose cautions against assuming the self as an autonomous entity set against all other autonomous entities that can be known. Rather, the researcher should reflect on her multiple selves (Rose, 1997). In this, we must not forget our theoretical positionality: “disciplinary background, training, and research interests can focus and inform our view of the ‘field’” (Kruckenberg et al., 2017: 227). Further, positionality is not a unidirectional process or undertaking. Because the researcher’s positionality not simply influences what she sees when she observes in the field but also how she conducts herself in the field and how she analyses what she has seen, all social relationships in the field are subject to positionalities and situatedness. Specifically, the researcher’s personal characteristics and life experiences also impact how she is perceived in the field, the access she is able to negotiate and the data that she will generate. Kruckenberg et al. point out that research relationships are co-created by our interlocutors. How we are perceived shapes ways in which we are being engaged with: “As ‘outsiders’ and ‘temporary visitors’, researchers can be a source of entertainment; they can come to be seen as a connection to ‘world society’, but they may also represent a potential source of resources” (Kruckenberg et al., 2017: 227) (see also Jourdan, 2013: 22). Shehata exemplifies that, among other characteristics, his education status and socio-economic background affected his research in the sense that they limited his ability to become fully immersed in the field. During his research in a factory, for example, he was not allowed to sweep the floors because he was perceived as being of a higher status than the regular workers (Shehata, 2014). It is important to note that the field’s perception of the researcher is not necessarily uniform. Related to the understanding of positionality in research relationships is the dynamic dimension of positionality: a researcher’s positionality is subject to change throughout the research, both over time and with location. Pachirat calls this notion of locational positionality

90

3

Methodological Framework

different “lines of sight”: “one’s location within horizontal and vertical divisions of the field influences what the researcher can see, hear—and eventually think” (Pachirat, 2013, position 2796). Multiple selves and relationships in the field Considering the concept of multiple selves, being a (relatively) young, white, well-educated female were the most relevant categories affecting my positionality throughout my research. Being white and well educated meant that I was never able to escape being the outsider. I was often seen as belonging to the international donor community or—worse—as an international consultant who travels to the field for a brief amount of time to extract information and then leaves. The international consultant is thus never more than a visitor, with the research participants playing hosts and telling the researcher what they think she wants to hear. Pachirat acknowledges that even though he chose “direct access” and worked on the kill floor of a slaughterhouse for several months, he would not be able to easily identify with most slaughterhouse workers. “I spoke fluent English. I had a valid U.S. driver’s license and social security card, giving me a large advantage over many of the thirty or so others who milled around nervously with me in the plant’s dingy employment trailer” (Pachirat, 2013, position 2777). Even Wacquant, who deeply immersed himself into a local box club, took up boxing himself and considered leaving academia for a career in boxing, was ultimately told by his coach that he had gathered enough information to write his book. The coach was not going to allow him to participate in another fight (Wacquant, 2003: 267). Being seen as an outsider also involved that my interlocutors had certain expectations towards me and my behaviour (Pachirat, 2013, position 2696). I was, for example, not expected to speak the local language. In A-Town, I attended the annual meeting of the MDF general assembly in which many local citizens were not conversant in English. Nonetheless, some of the English-speaking participants of this meeting requested other participants to speak in English throughout the meeting referring to my presence. The MDF president then took it upon herself to translate from English into the local language for the local participants rather than me having to organise a translator for myself. I was not expected to travel by communal transport but to have my own driver. That I did use communal transport was always an element of surprise at the beginning of a conversation. When conversing about accommodations, I was always recommended the expensive four or five-star hotels which short-term consultants paid by international organisations usually reside in during their brief visits to the field. And when my interlocutors were conversant in donor jargon, they expected me to be so, too. Subsequently, they refrained from explaining the meaning of various buzzwords and specialist terms they used. At the

3.3 Contemplating the Field: A Reflexive Journey

91

same time, I was expected to have connections to all kinds of German and international organisations and thus provide access to various sources of funding from the Global North. My being white, and all its connotations, intersected in complex ways with my being a woman. On the one hand, I was readily welcomed by my interlocutors and treated as a guest, on the other hand, I experienced being patronised in interviews. Vorrath’s (2013) description of how “on more than one occasion, I ended up with a lecture on the history of certain aspects of Burundian politics since my counterpart obviously assumed I needed it” (Vorrath, 2013: 65), resonates with my own research experience. Whether or not that had directly to do with my being a young female, I am not able to discern. However, it was clear throughout my field research that Morgan and Grugel’s statement rings true: “you cannot escape your gender, ever” (Morgan and Grugel, 2017: 130) (see also Krasznai Kovacs and Bose, 2014: 109; PereraMubarak, 2014: 210–212). It was only toward the end of my field research that someone pointed out to me how this might have to do with the fact that wearing pants was seen as inacceptable for women in Uganda. All the while, in my interactions with government representatives I had mostly worn a suit or what I considered rather formal work outfits. I had only brought one single skirt with me and wore it seldom. On the few occasions that I did wear it, it was most certainly commented on positively. One of the things that helped me gain some respect with my interlocutors and gave me an air of ‘insider-ness’ was having a local research partner (Morgan and Grugel, 2017: 132). As a consequence of my positionality, the power balance was sometimes tipped to my disadvantage during my interactions in the field. It is, nonetheless, important to recognise that irrespective of how much my interlocutors formed part of a powerful national or international elite, I of course always was and still am in a position where I can choose to highlight some stories and omit others, simply because after several months of fieldwork, I cannot write about every single story encountered in the field. “Whenever a researcher is writing an account, it is impractical and perhaps impossible to be sensitive to all voices. To compose a story, one must choose whose tale to tell. Some voice or viewpoint must set the parameters of the study. By what criteria will the choice be made? Whose perspective will provide the framework for understanding events? Whose understanding of reality will be privileged?” (Zirakzadeh, 2013, position 2229) (see also Siegel, 2017: 150)

Theoretical positionality Theoretical positionality enters into research designs even when the approach is an interpretive one. The scholarly community the researcher belongs to and her own

92

3

Methodological Framework

theoretical interests bring certain things into focus and divert the researcher’s attention from other things. Zirakzadeh, for example, acknowledges that he travelled to the field expecting to confirm existing theory: “I anticipated that my correlations would mostly match conventional wisdom” (Zirakzadeh, 2013, position 1926). In a similar manner, Wilkinson had originally travelled to the field with the expectation to find empirical material that she could “decant” into “the container of securitization theory”, an idea she quickly abandoned in her deskwork and textwork stage (Wilkinson, 2014: 390). My own research and disciplinary background as well as my personal and employment history has made me critical of development interventions. Due to my master’s degree in public administration and the focus of my Doctoral Research Training Group on organisational and administrative sociology, I looked at the participation of civil society in development programmes with a particular lens. I was not so much focused on the development outcomes that were to be achieved with this participation. Rather, I was interested in what could be learned about participation when considering distinctively organisational aspects of implementing participation, such as the challenges it posed to the local administrations, and how participatory mechanisms could be grasped as an organisational construct. Dynamic positionality When conducting an observational study, the researcher usually spends several months (if not years) in the field. Over time, but also with varying locations in the field, her positionality can shift and change (Kruckenberg et al., 2017: 230; Mosse and Kruckenberg, 2017: 197). These shifts usually “just happen”, as all relationships change over time (Dodworth, 2017: 216). Looking back at their field research, researchers often describe how they became more part of the field, how their presence in the field seemed to become more accepted or normalised, with positive effects on the trust the researcher received from actors in the field. However, Soss also reminds us that over time, the field seems less “unknown” and, therefore, the researcher might fail to realise something of importance: “As I became more comfortable with clients’ perspectives, I also developed blind spots; I stopped noticing some things at all and started seeing others as unremarkable. After my fieldwork ended, I was pleasantly surprised by some of the long-forgotten observations buried in my earliest journal entries and fieldnotes” (Soss, 2014: 171).9

But, as Dodworth notes, the shifts can also be the result of a deliberate choice: 9

Soss’s use of the term “clients” reflects the terminology used in his field of research: clients of state welfare agencies in the United States of America.

3.3 Contemplating the Field: A Reflexive Journey

93

“I would position myself as a savvy insider or neutral outsider. I legitimated myself in multiple ways: experienced NGO fieldworker or ignorant foreigner; high-level doctoral researcher or lowly ‘student’; streetwise traveller or vulnerable female; object of lust, animosity or both; friend and confidante or steely professional. There were elements of truth to all of these facets and I was complicit in all of them” (Dodworth, 2017: 215–216).

Pachirat highlights two other aspects of dynamic positionality: “My movement between and among different horizontal perspectives in the division of labor and different vertical levels in the hierarchies of power in the slaughterhouse profoundly structured what I learned” (Pachirat, 2013, position 2785). Throughout his fieldwork, Pachirat worked in three different positions in a slaughterhouse, which allowed him to access different perspectives. Each group Pachirat worked with had their own way of talking about the work of industrialised killing and of framing themselves and the other workers in relationship to that work. Over time, I achieved a greater knowledge of the field, and my relationships developed towards more trusting interactions. I also was able to experience and observe things that would have escaped my attention, had I spent less time ‘hanging out’. On one occasion in A-Town, for example, I was in the MDF office when the CDO rushed in and—in a very unfriendly manner—requested the MDF president to hurry to a meeting immediately. Similarly, I would not have been able to observe the extremely limited interaction between the MDF and the CDO in A-Town. And, I would not have shared various lunches with my interlocutors, visited their homes, heard about their families. In short, I built my interlocutors’ trust in me over time and developed friendly relationships. I did not, however, ever cease to be the researcher from the Global North. Conducting my research across the divisions of the field, i.e. with both central government ministries in the capital as well as in several local municipalities, afforded me different lines of sight, not only between these levels of government. In Kampala, there were clear differences between the central ministries regarding their perspectives on donors, the programmes and local governments. The municipalities I studied in detail sat at different ends of the country and they also had different standings in the politics of location: one municipality was located in the region where President Museveni comes from and from where most of the political elite of the country is recruited. Another municipality was located in a region that is said to be without much political influence in Uganda. In that second municipality, local bureaucrats always complained that they were being disadvantaged. The roads to their municipalities corroborated their claim: although the distance from Kampala was more or less the same for both, it took twice as long to reach the

94

3

Methodological Framework

latter municipality, and this was largely due to the dire state of the only road leading there.10 Thinking about positionality in the vertical divisions of the field means acknowledging that my trajectory as a researcher paralleled that of the colonial administrator as well as that of the contemporary international development expert, travelling from the centre of epistemic, financial and political power to the “periphery” in search for something “local”. In its most literal understanding, this denotes that as a holder of a passport and financial resources from the Global North, with an education received in the Global North and an English spoken with an Anglo-American accent, I travelled to Uganda to understand what “the reality” of international development programme implementation looked like “on the ground”. Reflecting on his experience as a humanitarian aid worker and later a PhD researcher in the Congo, Jourdan outlines how historical power relations produced the way he was perceived as a researcher in the field: “the way I was initially perceived was embedded essentially within two cultural repertoires, firstly the colonial past and secondly a fantastic and illusionary idea of modernity and the western world … I was really trapped in these perceptions that constricted my subjectivity” (Jourdan, 2013: 23). Being perceived as something akin to a donor helped in getting superficial access very easily. Even though I did not have any contacts in Uganda, I was easily able to establish a connection with a German foundation. Through this association, I managed to quickly get the mobile phone numbers of relevant and high-level bureaucrats both in national government and the international development community. Furthermore, almost every NGO and every government organisation was readily available for interviews and gave me ample time for these interviews. Consider this short vignette about my first brush with my own clout as a white university researcher: Only a few hours after telling the George about my research, in one of the intermissions during the event we were both attending, he pulled me aside and called his two contacts that he wanted me to meet, making sure they knew my name and that I would be calling them. He then passed me their mobile phone numbers. I called them to set up meetings and soon met with an important consultant for UN-HABITAT, the UN programme tasked with urban development, and a high-level political bureaucrat in the Ministry of Local Government. (O1: workshop on the potential of oil and gas revenues for inclusive development, German political foundation, November 2015)

10

I do not identify the municipalities with their pseudonym here so as not to harm their anonymisation.

3.3 Contemplating the Field: A Reflexive Journey

95

All Ugandan researchers I interacted with pointed out to me that they did not have such easy access to officials. There is a certain complicity between research on international interventions and the practice of international development, most clearly visible in the adoption of donor buzzwords and narratives to explain research and to formulate research questions. There is also a certain self-referentiality stemming from the focus on the international programming rather than looking from the local activities upwards. As such, my position in the vertical dimensions of power in the field is not one of attempting to provide ‘a view from below’ or eliciting the perspective of the subaltern and, hence, risks reproducing existing epistemic orders (see Section 3.3.3 for considerations on how to counter this risk). These reflections on my positionality do not end with this chapter on my research methodology and design. Rather, reflexivity featured prominently throughout the entire research process.

3.3.3 Ethics All research projects in Uganda need to be registered with and receive a research permit from the Uganda National Council for Science and Technology (UNCST). One criterion for receiving a research permit is a prior research ethics approval from an ethics commission in Uganda. Ugandan ethics commissions in turn require research ethics approval from the home universities of foreign researchers.11 These processes required me to spell out ethical concerns regarding my study in detail and thus prompted a reflexive process that has influenced the entire research project. In my view, there are three dimensions to consider. First, there is the concern about ethical conduct in research involving human participants. This is the main concern of ethics commissions and in applications for research permissions. It is a concern about vulnerable people, power relations and dependencies, about not exposing research participants to any danger and doing no harm. Basic research ethics principles are: respect for persons (voluntary participation, informed consent), beneficence (value to participants outweighs risk or harm to participants) and justice (respect of privacy, data protection and confidentiality) (Fujii, 2012). 11

These three separate application processes consumed more time than I had planned for. As a result, I received my final research permit only shortly before I left the field. The research permit and ethics approvals are shown in Annex V in the Electronic Supplementary Material.

96

3

Methodological Framework

Considering these principles stood at the centre of the two research ethics review processes in Potsdam and Uganda. In my applications, I described that to the best of my knowledge, participation in my research would have no more risk of harm than participants would experience in everyday life because of the focus on everyday practices and activities. Furthermore, if participants felt that the posed questions caused them discomfort in any way, they were free to not answer the question or to withdraw from the study at any point in time. Non-participation in the study was not expected to carry any risks. To eliminate unforeseen risks of non-participation, confidentiality of withdrawal was ensured. The selection of research participants was fair and equitable in the sense that participants were not excluded from the research based on culture, age, gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation or language. Since I expected that not all research participants were fluent in English, I took appropriate measures to ensure effective communication with the research participants by using interpreters whenever necessary. The interpreters were familiarised with the research itself and taught about research standards. Measures for ensuring informed consent included the handing out of information sheets about the research as well as consent forms. Prior to the collection of any information, research participants were informed about the project and asked for their expressed willingness and informed consent to participate. The informed consent included information about the type of questions that would be asked and topics that would be addressed as well as about the purpose of the interview or observation. It was made sure that participants were legally and mentally competent to give consent and were given enough information for an informed decision. Participation and consent were voluntary, and participants had the right to withdraw at any time. With respect to my observations, I ensured open communication about the research and provided the possibility to opt out of research participation. Due to the ethical concerns regarding the ability to ensure that individuals could freely choose to participate or opt out in a group setting, arising, for example, from potential power differentials between different meeting participants, an additional opportunity for retroactively opting out of the research was provided (see consent form in Annex III in the Electronic Supplementary Material). Measures for ensuring confidentiality and data protection in the project included the anonymisation of all data collected through interviews and observation in the form of interview transcripts, field notes, observation memos or diaries as well as in all steps of data analysis and in the written dissertation. Neither individual names nor other personally identifiable information are real names and designations but pseudonyms. To further minimise the risks to confidentiality, I stored the data securely on password protected electronic devices to which only I myself had access.

3.3 Contemplating the Field: A Reflexive Journey

97

However, as Fujii cautions, “these principles … do not always translate into ethical research” (Fujii, 2012: 718). Importantly, the notion of an ethical approval that considers all eventualities before going into the field proved unrealistic. Lunn notes, “[t]his procedural approach treats the consideration of ethics as a self-standing, one-time event, but the reality is that ethical challenges crop up throughout the research process and constantly need negotiation and renegotiation, flexibility, and sensitivity to local contexts” (Lunn, 2014: 4). Therefore, the second and important dimension to consider regarding research ethics is the realities of ethics in the field. In particular, it is important to not consider informed consent as given when getting back a signed consent form. Neither is confidentiality protected simply by anonymising participants and taking measures to ensure the encryption of data on computers and cloud servers. “Signed consent forms have little value if participants do not understand what they were consenting” (Fujii, 2012: 718). Since my research involved mainly interviews and observations with government officials and MDF members well versed in dealing with the international community, there were only few participants unfamiliar with informed consent procedures. Nonetheless, in some group meetings attended by members of the local community, I assume that despite my best efforts not every participant grasped the full extent of their consent. To conserve the confidentiality of my research participants, I use pseudonyms throughout my written work, for individuals as well as for local organisations and for locations. International organisations and their programmes as well as central government ministries are not anonymised. Despite the measures taken, it will be impossible to completely disguise who my research participants were. Fujii emphasises that at the very least the research participants will be able to identify themselves: “there was no way to obscure identities entirely—to the point where even local residents (should they read the book or have it read to them) would not be able to recognize themselves or others” (Fujii, 2012: 721; see also Perera-Mubarak, 2014: 212). In the field, however, I found the question of beneficence most difficult to answer. How sticky the issue can be, had become clear to me early on in my research as I tried to establish contact with the general secretariat of the International Network of the Urban Poor (INUP), the international NGO which focused on supporting national and local urban poor organisations across the developing world. Rather than being open to act as a line of communication to the local partner organisation in Uganda, INUP told me to contact them directly so they could check if they saw value in my work. It was made abundantly clear that the research relationships had to be of a reciprocal nature, and that I had to be willing to assist the organisations I was working with in any way they deemed relevant (PI1: staff, INUP, June 2015 (via skype)).

98

3

Methodological Framework

In my application to the Research Ethics Commission at my home university, I had planned for what I considered to be in line with good practice in research ethics (Boddy et al., 2017; Clark and Kingsolver, 2017; DeWalt and DeWalt, 2011): the research participants would not be paid but rather given the opportunity to reflect on personal and/or professional experiences with the topic of the study, given the opportunity to participate in discussions of draft research results and receive a copy of the published doctoral thesis. When applying for research ethics approval in Uganda, I was faced with a puzzled commission. Not compensating research participants in a tangible, material manner was seemingly unheard of. “You don’t even give them sodas?”, asked the secretary of the commission who sat down with me in February 2017 to go through the commission’s feedback. Reimbursing research participants for their participation in a study was seen as a normal element of any research project in Uganda, guided by a responsibility to safeguard poor and vulnerable populations from extractive research. Indeed, the question of how to give back to the research participants who supported your personal endeavour in a way that truly benefits them should be asked by every doctoral student engaged in field work. As Staddon puts it: “We get a certificate, some letters after our name, and a step up on the career ladder out of our doctoral research, but what about the people and communities involved in our fieldwork?” (Staddon, 2014: 249). In the face of poverty and everyday struggles, intangible ways of compensating research participants, such as being an engaged listener and providing opportunity for reflection, must inevitably seem like a bad deal for research participants (Jourdan, 2013: 19; Ogora, 2013: 36). And even if the research were linked directly to policy and change, there is a significant time lag between participating in the research and accruing such potential benefit (Ogora, 2013: 34). The idea of paying research participants or informants, however, sat uneasy with me. Paying research participants seemed to carry with it an air of buying opinions that are useful to the research or, at the very least, incentivising participants to say what they think the researcher wants to hear. Since the Hawthorne experiments nearly a century ago, the researcher’s influence on respondents’ answers has been a concern in social sciences (Schwartz-Shea and Yanow, 2012: 97; see also Stock and Watson, 2007).12 Considering that it is a researcher’s desire to produce reliable and trustworthy research accounts, paying research participants then seemed to contradict research ethics (Ogora, 2013: 37). 12

Although for interpretive research, Yanow and Schwartz-Shea even argue that “[w]ith prolonged observation, researchers can come to see participants and their words and acts in context, which will put ‘performing for the observer’ into perspective. … But more than that: … interpretive researchers are less likely to understand ‘performance’ as a problem than to see it as data” (Schwartz-Shea and Yanow, 2012: 110) (see also Schaffer, 2014: 193).

3.3 Contemplating the Field: A Reflexive Journey

99

Alas, the topic came up many times throughout my fieldwork experience, in the ethical review process as well as in interviews and observations, possibly as a result of the widespread practice of the international aid community (both NGOs and governmental donors) to “facilitate” the participation of citizens in their workshops and programmes (Ogora, 2013: 35) by paying for transportation costs and providing food and refreshments. Different researchers have found different ways of addressing this issue (Clark-Kazak, 2013; Jourdan, 2013; Ogora, 2013; Perera-Mubarak, 2014; Staddon, 2014; Vorrath, 2013). While Jourdan argues paying research participants money clearly sets the terms of exchange, Ogora sees it as a measure of last resort, one that he would only call upon when “worst came to worst”, when no other avenue of convincing research participants of the benefits of the research had brought success (Jourdan, 2013: 18–19; Ogora, 2013: 33–37). Clark-Kazak differentiates between outright paying research participants and facilitating their participation in the research, such as accommodating their transportation costs when they travelled for the research. She further opines that monetary contributions to collective initiatives after establishing oneself as a “serious researcher” is a way to give back to research participants (Clark-Kazak, 2013: 104). In a similar fashion, Ogora points out practical measures that can be taken to at least ‘do no harm’: “One of the things we did try was to schedule our research appointments at times when possible respondents would not be caught up in daily survival activities” (Ogora, 2013: 36). Vorrath suggests that offering to establish relevant contacts in her home country was one way of giving back without providing material benefits (Vorrath, 2013). I cite all these different approaches because I have drawn on most them throughout the research. I purchased A3-sized pictures of Ugandan birds that one of my interviewees was selling to earn his living. I paid for transportation costs, brought sodas to meetings and invited many of my research participants for lunch. I explained the German Higher Education system to interviewees and put them in touch with the local contact for the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) so they could inquire about scholarships. I set up contacts to German organisations in Uganda so that NGOs and central government ministries could explore whether they could partner up to have a training financed or apply for funding together. I offered to write blogs for websites, project proposals and research reports for specific questions posed to my material from research participants.13 The situational approach that Ogora depicts as a matter of pragmatism is in my eyes an inevitable but also very useful answer to the question of how our research can 13

These offers of putting my writing skills to their use were never taken up by my research participants.

100

3

Methodological Framework

best benefit research participants. My ethical discomfort and the challenges that I saw thus had to be negotiated from situation to situation. Lunn provides a good summary of the challenges of ethical issues in the field: “Ethical issues are rarely simple or straightforward enough to be dealt with by adhering to a set of procedures; rather they are complicated and sometimes conflictual. The researcher must face problems, negotiate positions, make careful judgements, and take difficult decisions, each of which is unique to its own particular context” (Lunn, 2014: 1).

Research participants differ in their needs. How the researcher can give back should, therefore, be adjusted accordingly. Furthermore, many of these ways of giving back must occur in the moment or else the moment has passed and the opportunity to give back has been lost. I found the third dimension of ethics to be connected to the perspective brought forward by proponents of postcolonial theories: to which extent can a research project such as mine, which seems to follow in the footsteps of colonial administrators and their successors from the field of international development, be carried out at all? Do I have the “right to research” (Appadurai, 2006; cited in Müller, 2016: 240)? Jourdan conveys his experience of the NGO world in the Congo as a “strong and grotesque hierarchy, echoing colonial times where the rhetoric of aid and development legitimised the privileges of white expatriates” (Jourdan, 2013: 13). How, then, is it possible to conduct ethically sound research of this world? Jourdan argues that the methods used must engage “in challenging this hierarchy and building more equal research relationships” (Jourdan, 2013: 13; see also Müller, 2016).14 By choosing an abductive research strategy and working reflexively in an interpretive design, I aimed to achieve exactly what Jourdan and Müller called for. Rather than testing a theoretical framework developed in the Global North, my entire project was focused on the meaning-making and conceptual understanding as well as the negotiation practices of my research 14

Clark-Kazak even considers whether scholars have a responsibility to intervene: “should I intervene? Anthropologist Scheper-Hughes (1990, 1995) argues that scholars do have a responsibility to intervene—whether it be to prevent mothers from killing their children, or to speak out on behalf of poor Brazilian communities. Initially, I did become involved in such circumstances, taking up some cases with officials in the refugee system, or with service providers. However, despite my best intentions, my actions had ambiguous ethical and methodological implications” (Clark-Kazak, 2013: 100). In her conclusion she draws on Lerum, who suggests using the emotional entanglements inevitably arising in the field to produce “critical knowledge, which is both self-reflexive and able to critique the power relations between people, institutions and culture” (Lerum, 2001: 481).

3.4 Data Analysis

101

participants. In addition, I tried to make explicit in every interaction that my intent was to learn from my interlocutors, to take them seriously and to elicit their perspective. Despite all flexibility and reflexivity, however, I believe it is ultimately impossible to achieve equal research relationships.

3.4

Data Analysis

My analysis of the empirical data was informed by analytical strategies for ethnographies as described by Breidenstein et al., which they group into the three main practices of coding, case analysis, as well as aggregation and generalisation (Breidenstein et al., 2015: 124, author’s translation). The approaches Breidenstein et al. outline are also at the core of Grounded Theory Methodology (GTM). This is the case for the general abductive process of analysis, the coding process which begins with gleaning themes and topics from the raw data as well as the focus on the reconstruction of the concepts and meaning-making of the research subjects. As Breidenstein et al. point out, analytical topics are constantly under construction, are “introduced, reformulated, reconfigured, extended, curtailed or discarded” (Breidenstein et al., 2015: 117, author’s translation), increasing in structure and complexity throughout the analytical process. At the same time, the analytical topics need what Breidenstein et al. call “dual relevance”: they should be grounded in the data and the apparent relevancies of the field and at the same time connected to the academic discourse (Breidenstein et al., 2015: 118, author’s translation). As a result, the researcher moves back and forth between the data and different theoretical approaches. The “heuristic of discovery”, therefore, remains important throughout the entire research process (Breidenstein et al., 2015: 119, author’s translation). Consequently, also in this thesis, the data generation, analysis and writing processes were to a certain extent intertwined (Soss, 2014: 170). Soss, for example, conceives of the in-depth interview as part of “an evolving dialogue between fieldwork and framework, mediated by concrete activities of transcription, memo writing, purposive reading of literatures, and the like. It entails simultaneous data collection and analysis, but it remains incomplete without more systematic analysis after exiting the field” (Soss, 2014: 171).

The analysis of data thus also rests on GTM’s scientific principles and methodological strategies, in particular in the constructivist perspective of Kathy Charmaz (Charmaz, 2014).

102

3

Methodological Framework

This section in the following elucidates the process of data analysis in three steps. It begins with the iterative coding process, in which I approached the data with the help of sensitising concepts, generated codes emerging from the data and then ordered these codes and developed categories. The section then presents the analysis of cases, which were events, interviews and documents that seemed particularly meaningful for understanding the empirical data. In order to analyse these cases, I often produced vignettes and discussed these in my interpretation group. The last stage of data analysis consisted in the identification of the thesis’ core topics, drawing strongly on the iterative process of abductive reasoning, i.e. the constant moving between literature and analysis of empirical material.

3.4.1 Coding Process “The world around us is messy, interconnected and often chaotic. Simultaneously there is also order, patterns and systems. The challenge is to coherently integrate these two facets of the social world in our research, rather than seeing them as a dichotomous pairing.” (Wilkinson, 2008: 60)

Throughout the analysis of empirical data, as Wilkinson emphasises here, the researcher is faced with the complexity of reality while at the same time searching for patterns which allow making sense of and attempting to provide a perspective which orders this complexity. The coding of data is the first important step in the attempt to gain distance from the field experience and to allow an analytical perspective on the data gathered. Referring to GTM coding developed by Glaser and Strauss, Breidenstein et al. define a code as “category, phrase or topic that is assigned to data sections” (Breidenstein et al., 2015: 124, author’s translation). Coding, to them, consists mainly of “repeatedly going through empirical material, sorting and annotating it” (Breidenstein et al., 2015: 125, author’s translation). The function of coding is thus to label data and find a language for what has remained implicit in it. They recommend a step-by-step process, beginning with a first sighting of all material to get back ‘into the field’ from the desk and ordering the material. A second reading then aims at “systematically coding” and thereby “analytically penetrating” the material, “breaking the perspective of observer” and “the chronological order of the material” (Breidenstein et al., 2015: 126, author’s translation). Charmaz calls it being critical with research participants, she cautions against becoming too immersed in their world views (Charmaz, 2014: 127).

3.4 Data Analysis

103

Open coding, or initial coding as Charmaz terms it, consists of going through the empirical material line by line and noting down categories, topics and ideas that are found in the data. The codes can be in vivo codes, that is to say they are terms used in the field, or they can be gleaned from the researcher’s academic field. Charmaz describes in vivo codes as a useful analytic point of departure, particularly when they refer to something that is expected to be known and thus not explained, as such terms usually capture implicit meanings: “In vivo codes are characteristic of social worlds and organizational settings. Organisations use a rich array of terms researchers can treat as in vivo codes. … At organizational or collective levels of analysis, in vivo codes reflect assumptions, actions, and imperatives that frame action. Studying these codes and exploring leads in them allows you to develop a deeper understanding of what is happening and what it means. Such codes anchor your analysis in your research participants’ worlds.” (Charmaz, 2014: 135, emphasis in the original).

Implicit meanings or things taken for granted played an important role in my research. An initial analysis of the data from the 2015 exploratory field research had shown that it was difficult to elicit information on everyday processes and practices. Interviewees tended to answer with phrases that adhered to donor programme documents when speaking about the dynamics of interaction in and with the MDFs. Some of the most interesting information, this analysis seemed to show, lay ‘in between the lines’ and in what was not said. I began the coding process for this thesis with a thorough coding of the data from the 2015 exploratory field research. This yielded new ideas and concepts for the second and third phase of field research in 2016 and 2017. Coding the 2015 data showed me, for example, that in Uganda, civil society is often equated with non-governmental organisations, signalling the importance of organisation. The coding also provided first indications about the nature of participation as a rationalized myth, as some data implied that participation exists more “on paper” than in practice. Furthermore, this initial analysis seemed to support arguments about the existence of great legal frameworks in Uganda that fail in their implementation. After my final return from the field in April 2017, I was faced with a large amount of empirical material and thus began working with the computer software NVivo to code and order this material. I first ran a word frequency query. This query brought to light that “community” was one of the words mentioned most often in the data. After beginning the detailed coding process, it became apparent that oftentimes when interviewees spoke of “community” or “communities”, they were implying different conceptualisations of “community”. I, therefore, began

104

3

Methodological Framework

to specify the codes as “problematic communities”, “organised communities”, “professional communities” and “community as stakeholder groups”, amongst others. Table 3.3 provides examples of definitions found for codes in the coding process and respectively coded excerpts from the data. Table 3.3 Coding Examples Code

Definition

Examples from the data

Organised communities

portraying an organised group of people advocating for their interests as pre-condition for participation

“Basically, the common task it to see how best we can ensure that the communities are organised. They should come together to see how they can participate in development initiatives through community-based organisations.”

Problematic communities

descriptions of communities as lacking something which is considered desirable or useful

“So we sensitise them on matters of waste management, matters of tree planting, why we need to plant trees and, if we have planted, maybe as council, how do we maintain them so that the communities do not again walk over them and destroy them.”

Professional communities

communities as partners for government or active participants in development programmes

“If there is anything, they are empowered to carry out some monitoring and report any wrong things in their communities of government.”

Source: Own empirical data and analysis

Throughout the coding process, the data is not paraphrased but rather, as Charmaz puts it, codes are constructed. This means that even the initial codes already include the researcher’s perspective on the data: “the empirical world does not appear to us in some natural state apart from human experience. Instead we know the empirical world through language and the actions we take toward it” (Charmaz, 2014: 114). As a consequence, the researcher defines “what is happening in

3.4 Data Analysis

105

the data” (Charmaz, 2014: 113). Breidenstein et al. point out that even the empirical material gathered only represents a small portion of what occurred in the field (Breidenstein et al., 2015: 115–116). A single passage in the data can therefore also be associated with several different codes (Breidenstein et al., 2015: 127). The coding process which Breidenstein et al. suggest differs from GTM in one aspect: while Breidenstein et al. recommend coding the empirical material in full at this initial stage, GTM does not attempt to code all material but rather begins the coding process before all data has been generated. Initial coding of first interviews or other material is therefore followed by what Charmaz calls focused coding: “Focused coding means using the most significant and/or frequent earlier codes to sift through and analyse large amounts of data” (Charmaz, 2014: 138). The coding process for this thesis was also done in two steps. Given the large amount of empirical material from 2016 and 2017 (see Section 3.2.2, Fieldwork), I began with coding the empirical material from A-Town, central government and international organisations. The empirical material from B-Ville and C-City were coded through a focused coding process at a later stage. The choice to begin coding with the empirical material from A-Town rather than B-Ville and C-City reflects the quality of material gathered and the ‘thickness’ of the corresponding data (see Section 3.2.2, Fieldwork). In the early stage of analysis, the aim is to produce a “surplus” of codes (Breidenstein et al., 2015: 128, author’s translation) rather than already trying to establish a coding system. Producing an excess of ideas allows the researcher to try out different possible avenues for the analysis. Breidenstein et al. argue that the aim is to cautiously get close to the data, to generate analytical ideas and even provoke new questions, which again can lead to new codes (Breidenstein et al., 2015: 129). Coding for the large variety of different roles attributed to the MDFs, for example, led me to ask why this broad array of different interpretations of the forums existed and made me notice the contested or at least unclear nature of the forums. Over the course of the analysis, my quest for “understanding this animal of the forum” (EI60: Ronald, MoLHUD, April 2017) ultimately led me to the theoretical perspectives of participation as a rationalized myth and MDFs as the partial organization of civil society. Early codes, Breidenstein et al. argue, often have a random character rather than being precise; they are temporary “assistants” in the process of data analysis (Breidenstein et al., 2015: 129, author’s translation). Charmaz also emphasises that “[i]nitial codes are provisional, comparative, and grounded in the data” (Charmaz, 2014: 117). In line with GTM as well as the focus on implementation practices, I coded with a focus on action, “invoking a language of action” and “coding with gerunds”, as Charmaz calls it (Charmaz, 2014: 121). Drawing on sensitising

106

3

Methodological Framework

concepts helped to kick-start the coding process (see Section 3.1, An Interpretive Research Design). Specifically, I focused on situations, interactions and meaning-making, i.e. the sensitising concepts drawn from the methodological approach. Furthermore, I looked out for ideas about and conceptualisations as well as models of participation that would bring to light the different responses to participation which were in my theoretical focus. The coding process furthermore involved looking for tacit assumptions and explicating implicit actions and meanings (Charmaz, 2014: 125). As Soss points out, what is taken for granted by research participants will hardly be articulated in interviews. Rather, it “require[s] interrogating the gaps and silences in clients’ accounts, the inconsistencies between narratives and declarations, and the unstated major premises of an assortment of incomplete syllogisms” (Soss, 2014: 167). The open coding process resulted in a large number of codes. Therefore, in a second step, I revisited the coded material and grouped similar codes into categories. This enabled me to compare data points, to identify similarities and differences between them and to discover patterns in the data (Breidenstein et al., 2015: 135–136). Throughout these steps of ordering and working on categories, as Breidenstein et al. suggest, I “renamed, merged and subdivided” codes (Breidenstein et al., 2015: 136, author’s translation). This process generated new questions and theoretical hunches. Breidenstein et al. see this as an intermediate step between data and the future topics of the dissertation text. As mentioned above, Charmaz describes a similar process of ordering initially generated codes and deciding which of them “make the most analytic sense” (Charmaz, 2014: 138) in the GTM data analysis process, specifically before moving from initial coding to focused coding. “Focused coding is a significant step in organizing how you treat data and manage your emerging analysis. By attending to your initial codes and making decisions about focused codes, you trim away the excess” (Charmaz, 2014: 141). As in the process of ordering codes presented by Breidenstein et al., focused coding requires an assessment of initial codes from an analytical perspective and elevating some to “promising tentative categories” (Charmaz, 2014: 140). Charmaz even argues that focused coding “can give you the skeleton of your analysis” (Charmaz, 2014: 141). The material initially coded as “problematic communities”, “organised communities” and “community as stakeholder groups”, for example, was subsumed under the category “conceptualising community”. Throughout the analysis, this category was specified to “conceptualising civil society” and ultimately led to the empirical chapter on partial organization through membership (see Chapter 5, Organising Civil Society by Building Membership). In a similar way, initial codes

3.4 Data Analysis

107

for the MDFs as monitors of municipal administrations and as supporting relocation processes were assigned to the category “MDF as”, which subsumed different conceptualisations of the MDFs and consequently provided part of the empirical basis for the chapter on processing the myth of participation (see Chapter 4, Responding to the Myth of Participation through Interpretation and Decoupling). A useful step in the ordering of codes can also be the analytical reading of code lists that Breidenstein et al. suggest. In practice, this analytical reading was an important means for me to continuously maintain an overview of the coded data and the developing codes. I also discussed part of the code list in a colloquium at the University of Potsdam and the interpretation group, which provided me with additional perspectives on the coding and analysis. Throughout my coding process, but especially during the ordering process, another useful practice was memo writing. Charmaz delineates this as a technique in constructivist GTM, but it is generally common in ethnographic and interpretive research. Memos can be focused on individual codes and categories, reflecting in more detail on the meaning of a code or category, or draw links between codes and categories. The logic of memos, as Charmaz points out, is: “write to learn” (Charmaz, 2014: 181). Charmaz emphasises that the topics of memos usually develop in the writing process. Rather than providing a fixed analytical perspective, memos are intended to advance the analytical process by raising new questions or pointing out new strategies for the analysis. Thus, some of the memos I produced in the data analysis process reflected on individual interviews that had proven either difficult to code or particularly puzzling in an interpretation group session. Other memos focused on specific codes, such as the memo “rule-based participation vs organised participation”, which reflected on the overlap between the material coded with these two codes and potential links to other, similar codes.

3.4.2 Case Analysis Moving from coding into case analysis goes hand in hand with a change in the analytical perspective. Instead of systematically coding all empirical material, I thence focused on the identification of details from the empirical material which were typical for the social phenomena, situations or cases that I was interested in. The focus, therefore, was on finding examples which are representative of more generalisable interpretations. As Breidenstein et al. note, “the general only exists in form of the specific” (Breidenstein et al., 2015: 139, author’s translation). Cases, according to Breidenstein et al., can be

108

3

Methodological Framework

“situations or events, activities or persons, interviews or descriptions, accounts of spatial or technical settings as well as interesting documents. … Cases … form at the interface between elements present in the empirical data (such as events, interactions, …, persons, groups, …) and the researcher’s analytical interests” (Breidenstein et al., 2015: 139, author’s translation).

These cases are then subjected to a detailed analysis and eventually linked with other elements of analysis and theoretical insights. Breidenstein et al. specify five criteria for selecting potential cases: data quality (a case description is particularly rich and nuanced); the range of possible cases (a case enables contrasting with other cases or data); relevance in the field (the case is portrayed as particularly important by field participants); the case is a typical case (the case is characterised by frequent and common occurrence); the case irritates, is unusual, unexpected for the researcher (Breidenstein et al., 2015: 140–142). I often chose to analyse interactions or events, which were puzzling or surprising to me and thus could be classed as irritating cases. This pertains to, for example, the inspection of trading licenses in A-Town presented at the beginning of the introduction to this thesis (Chapter 1) and the doctoring of meeting minutes in A-Town described in Section 6.2.2 (Meetings: Listening to People’s Needs?). The selection criteria of data quality and the range of possible cases also played an important role in my case analyses. As mentioned in Section 3.2.2 (Fieldwork), the data generated in A-Town was richer than the data from B-Ville and C-City. Case analyses, therefore, often began with data from A-Town. My analyses of meetings and interactions between the MDFs and municipal bureaucrats cover the range of different experiences I observed in the field. Case analysis can be done with code lists already ordered and categorised. Alternatively, it can be done with individual interview excerpts or situational descriptions (Breidenstein et al., 2015: 140). Breidenstein et al. differentiate between three types of case analysis: events and their meanings, interactions and actors who are at the centre of a social practice (Breidenstein et al., 2015: 142–156). A case analysis focused on individual events tries to elucidate their relevance for the research and to which extent they represent normal and routine practices in the field. Analyses of interactions seek to reconstruct the “immanent logic of processes” or sequences, trying to explain the rules of everyday interactions (Breidenstein et al., 2015: 146, author’s translation). A case analysis which concentrates on actors understands them not as individuals but as “characters in the game of a social practice” and sees events and processes as attributable to actors (Breidenstein et al., 2015: 152, author’s translation). The analysis of actors

3.4 Data Analysis

109

therefore aims at an identification of patterns within the social or situational context that the research is focused on. In practice, my case analyses were focused on different events and interactions of the type described in the previous paragraph. I used mainly vignettes to conduct case analysis. Such vignettes were, for example, produced for all observed meetings, for a selection of interviews which seemed particularly puzzling or important as well as for informal interactions and encounters of and with field sites which I found noteworthy or surprising. Throughout the coding process and case analysis, a regular interpretation group was a cornerstone of my work. It was useful in the sense that Reichertz describes: interpretation groups are important means of “quality improvement” in interpretive social research, whose validity is per se called into question as it is always historically and socially contingent (Reichertz, 2016: 72, author’s translation). Interpretation groups carry the analysis beyond the limitations and restrictions of the individual researcher by calling in additional researchers, enabling an interpretation of the data from multiple perspectives (Reichertz, 2016: 73). The interpretation group, furthermore, encouraged a critical reflection on my own interpretation of the data. It also provided a kind of a laboratory in which to experiment with different sequence lengths and approaches of analysis to the different types of empirical data generated in the field. For example, the interpretation group was a useful site for what Breidenstein et al. call “organising surprises” (Breidenstein et al., 2015: 121, author’s translation), which is an attempt to alienate the researcher from the data in order to allow new perspectives by confronting other researchers with one’s own hypotheses and putting them to the test by analysing a selection of the empirical data (Breidenstein et al., 2015: 123). Albeit fluctuating slightly in membership and intensity over time, my interpretation group consisted of four female researchers, including myself. Our backgrounds were diverse, ranging from political science and sociology, geography and sinology to social work. Our main bond lay in the methodological approaches we took to our respective dissertations: we either considered ourselves interpretive researchers, conducted participant observation in organisations of varying types or coded data from the bottom up. There were further synergies between my own research and the research of the other members of the group. Two of them conducted research on the international aid system and focused on the role of civil society organisations in this complex environment. One member researched practices of urban planning, another participatory organisations. We met roughly once a week for two to three hours over the course of 22 months, from May 2017 to February 2019 to discuss either empirical material or draft thesis chapters of one of the members. Usually, the member presenting material had

110

3

Methodological Framework

found the interpretation of that particular data point especially challenging. By bringing it to the group, she sought to widen her own perspective on interpretation or receive feedback on a written analysis. Our knowledge about and competence in processes of interpretation without doubt benefited greatly from this regular interaction, allowing a more layered understanding of our own data and the research process overall. As Riemann sets forth, dialogues and discussions in interpretation groups tend to lead to more differentiated and consolidated analytical abstractions, comparisons and theoretical considerations (Riemann, 2011: 413, cited in Reichertz, 2016: 75). Indeed, the engagement and interaction in and of the interpretation group greatly supported my process of analysis and writing. In practice, this resulted, for example, in uncovering my own assumptions and understanding how they influenced my interpretation of the empirical material or in discussing my dynamic positionality in a specific interaction. Furthermore, many analytical ideas in this thesis either originated in or were refined in the interpretation group. The idea, for example, that the different conceptualisations of citizens were all different perspectives on the desired organisation of civil society, was generated through discussion in the interpretation group. This idea is the foundation for the empirical analysis in Chapter 5 (Organising Civil Society by Building Membership).

3.4.3 Core Topics Afterwards, in order to identify the main topics in the empirical data, or the core categories, as GTM calls it, I grouped previous analyses into overarching thematic packages. As Breidenstein et al. emphasise, at the beginning of ethnographic research, the researcher asks “what is going on here?” while towards the end of data analysis, she asks “what is the common theme in all these details?” (Breidenstein et al., 2015: 156–157, author’s translation). Breidenstein et al. suggest two strategies to identify these core topics: looking for questions and problems or working with metaphors. After a brief venture into metaphors, I identified the core topics in this thesis by finding questions and problems. As Howard Becker phrased it, “[t]he data I have here are the answer to a question. What question could I possibly be asking to which what I have written down in my notes is a reasonable answer?” (Becker, 1998, p. 121, cited in Breidenstein et al., 2015: 159). In Breidenstein et al.’s words, it is the search for the “analytical core” of the research (Breidenstein et al., 2015: 157). A strategy described by Breidenstein et al. that proved fruitful in my research was the writing of a short

3.4 Data Analysis

111

overview of the results of the analytical process (Breidenstein et al., 2015: 158). By structuring and ordering the results and connecting them to existing research, and by asking which insights might be interesting or relevant to certain bodies of literature, I was forced to explain my own research in a concise manner. A first draft of this overview brought to the fore that the notion of urban development interventions as a field of organisations was a useful perspective to grasp the different organisations and other collective actors that seemed relevant in the empirical data. It, furthermore, emphasised the notion of participation as a norm in international development interventions, or, as it is understood in sociological neo-institutionalism and in this thesis, a rationalized myth. The overview then ordered different practices of participation observed in the data according to the local, national and international level of government, suggesting that conflicting institutional logics might be underlying the different practices. This temporarily led me back to the literature on institutional logics. In an abductive research process (see Section 3.1 on the overall research design), any step in this analytical framework can lead the researcher back to revisiting the literature. From the first, exploratory phase of field research in 2015 onwards, theoretical work was an important part of the analysis of my data. Through the theoretical work, I refocused my hypotheses from institutional logics and hybridity (Campbell, 2004; Cleaver, 2001a, 2012; Friedland and Alford, 1991; Rusca et al., 2015) towards the translation of organisational templates (Behrends et al., 2014; Czarniawska and Sevón, 2005a; Czarniawska-Joerges and Sevón, 1996; Rottenburg, 1996). The iterative search for and discovery of analytical themes remained important throughout the data analysis phase, particularly because the empirical material contested notions of translation and brought in the notion of participation as a rationalized myth. As described above, the analyses pointed in numerous different theoretical directions. For the identification of the thesis’ core topics, theoretical work was imperative. The core topics emerged ‘in conversation’ with theoretical approaches and were not purely the result of data analysis. As Breidenstein et al. point out, the core topics have to be linked back to scientific discourses, theoretical work is thus inevitable. Charmaz notes that “theoretical concepts serve as interpretive frames” and “subsume lesser categories with ease and by comparison hold more significance, account for more data, and often make crucial processes more evident” (Charmaz, 2014: 248). This is an active process; the steps of analysis do not automatically lead to the discovery of the one and only appropriate theoretical concept. Rather, as Charmaz points out, as researchers “we make a series of decisions about these categories after having compared them with other categories and the data. Our actions shape the analytic process. Rather than discovering order

112

3

Methodological Framework

within the data, we create an explication, organization, and presentation of the data” (Charmaz, 2014: 248, emphasis in the original). Charmaz speaks about raising categories to theoretical concepts (Charmaz, 2014: 247). After writing the overview of empirical results, therefore, I began an intensive phase of literature review and theoretical work, combined with writing up draft theoretical frameworks for the thesis, testing out different analytical avenues and theoretical approaches. Theorising in ethnographic and interpretive research, Charmaz points out, aims to understand the studied phenomenon in abstract terms and to “offer an imaginative theoretical interpretation that makes sense of the studied phenomenon” (Charmaz, 2014: 231), that imbues the data with meaning. At the same time, like the data generation process set out in Section 3.2, theorising is not independent of the researcher. Instead, the researcher’s perspective and particularly her disciplinary anchoring naturally influence the pathways taken in the process of theorising. Charmaz emphasises that the researcher’s choice of raising categories to theoretical concepts is linked to “theoretical reach, theoretical centrality, incisiveness, generic power, and relation to other categories” (Charmaz, 2014: 247). As mentioned above, I first considered institutional logics as a theoretical framework for the empirical data. However, this approach did not capture the organisational level well enough and did not help in understanding the organisation of citizens and formalisation of their interactions that was prevalent across different levels of government. In the end, it was in a workshop with Nils Brunsson that I identified partial organization as an appropriate theoretical concept to understand the empirical data and identify the core topics for the thesis.

4

Responding to the Myth of Participation through Interpretation and Decoupling

Participation is a rationalized myth in development. It cannot realistically be opposed by any organisation in the field but needs to be addressed in order to achieve or maintain legitimacy in the organisational environment (see Chapter 2, Theoretical Framework). This is no different for the World Bank or the Cities Alliance, the two donors this thesis is focused on. Neither the World Bank, nor the Cities Alliance could realistically announce the abandonment of participation in their projects and programmes. In Transforming the Settlements of the Urban Poor (TSUPU) and Uganda Support to Municipal Infrastructure Development (USMID), the two urban development programmes analysed here, the rationalized myth of participation was embodied by the Municipal Development Forums (MDFs). Through these programmes, this myth also became relevant for central government ministries and local administrations in Uganda. In TSUPU, the establishment of MDFs was an important programme activity; in USMID, the existence of functioning forums was a conditionality for the disbursement of funds. The Ministry of Land, Housing and Urban Development (MoLHUD) and the municipal governments could therefore not selectively refuse to implement MDFs as long as they were interested in receiving the donor funds connected to TSUPU and USMID. At the same time, as delineated in Chapters 1 (Introduction) and 2 (Theoretical Framework), participation itself is not a clear-cut concept or blueprint for action. Rather, it is a general principle, a norm even, in the field of development interventions for which a large variety of typologies exists and which is fraught with tensions and contradictions inherent in both its concept and its implementation. Because participation as a concept can be used in many disparate ways, it can be assigned different meanings in practice. For the myth of participation to be put into practice, organisations need to interpret it. In the case of TSUPU

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2021 E. M. Schindler, Structuring People, Sozialwissenschaftliche Zugänge zu Afrika, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-35903-4_4

113

114

4

Responding to the Myth of Participation …

and USMID, the organisations involved came to different conclusions and the meaning they attributed to participation changed over time. This chapter depicts how different organisations in the field of international development dealt with the myth of participation, drawing on MDFs as a case study. It analyses how the MDFs as participatory mechanisms were integrated into two programmes for urban development and how Uganda’s local administrations processed the myth of participation which came along in the form of Municipal Development Forums. Both TSUPU and USMID nominally employed MDFs as participatory mechanisms. The structures prescribed for them in programme documents and other reports do not differ between the two development interventions. However, a closer look at the two programmes’ conceptualisation of the forums in practice shows a remarkable distinction: a reformulation of the purpose and objectives associated with the MDFs seems to have taken place when TSUPU ended and USMID began. This chapter analyses the different perspectives on the myth of participation exhibited in the two programmes. It furthermore shows how, when the World Bank ‘took on’ the MDFs in their infrastructure development programme, the objectives of the forums were adapted to fit the World Bank’s interpretation of the myth. Notably, the forums were moved away from ideas of empowerment, i.e. the facilitation of their involvement in political and administrative decision-making processes, and towards the build-up of citizens’ capacity to monitor local programme implementation and hold municipal administrations accountable. This shift from an empowerment of citizens to their involvement as watchdogs allowed the donor to assert control over local administrations through participation. In light of this, it is of little surprise that for Uganda’s local administrations, participation was largely a donor-driven concept that they had to comply with in order to receive funding. As the subsequent analysis reveals, they dealt with the myth of participation by decoupling the forums from their organisational core. The intermediate conclusion for this chapter highlights how these different interpretations fit with existing organisational scripts and values of the Cities Alliance, the World Bank and local administrations.

4.1

Cities Alliance: Participation as Empowerment

“We identified, of course, the need to have the various stakeholders participate in the planning process. And we feel this was a process of empowerment. … So, the process of empowerment necessitated forming Municipal Development Forums. These Municipal Development Forums … were platforms for effective engagement of stakeholders in the planning process.”

4.1 Cities Alliance: Participation as Empowerment

115

(EI17: Nathanael, MoLHUD, February 2017)

Nathanael, who was a bureaucrat in the MoLHUD and at the same time functioned as the Cities Alliance’s representative in Uganda, here showed that the Cities Alliance’s TSUPU programme interpreted the myth of participation as the empowerment of disadvantaged populations in selected urban areas. It seemed natural to him that a need for stakeholder participation in planning was identified: “of course” the need existed. As a rationalized myth, the need for participation in the framework of TSUPU’s activities was not questioned and did not need a justification. Nathanael further equated participation in planning with empowerment. He portrayed the MDFs as a necessary tool to achieve this empowerment or participation in planning. More specifically, he deemed them necessary for the engagement to be “effective”. Although he did not directly define the signification of “effective”, in both interviews, when he spoke about effective participation of the “communities”, he referenced discussing issues which affected people’s lives (EI17: Nathanael, MoLHUD, February 2017), meeting people’s needs, and making people feel like they are partners, like they have ownership of the process. This applied to “even the poor, the urban poor, the slum dwellers”, as he pointed out (EI12: Nathanael, MoLHUD, February 2017). In strategic and programmatic documents in the field of international development, buzzwords such as participation and empowerment often remain undefined, and TSUPU’s programme document was no exception to this rule. However, the programme document does allow for an interpretation of the understanding of empowerment underlying the programme. The document set the promotion of community empowerment and participation as one of TSUPU’s guiding principles and specified that: “To recognise that for the urban poor to effectively engage with urban planning processes that affect their lives it is important that such communities are actively mobilised and empowered to participate in a meaningful way. Such processes should recognise the complexity of urban communities and institutionalise a platform for dialogue that will ensure that each group that makes up the community profile is given influential voice.” (Cities Alliance, 2010: 8)

In this understanding, meaningful participation could not transpire without empowerment. In order to engage citizens in a way that led them to realise their rights, they first needed to be mobilised and enabled. Engagement was supposed to be “meaningful”, i.e. participation that was not tokenistic but was able to democratise planning processes on the municipal level by giving communities an “influential voice”. Participatory approaches aimed at empowerment commonly

116

4

Responding to the Myth of Participation …

expect the participation to enable marginalised parts of a population to voice their concerns, participate in decision-making processes and shape their own futures. Dill defines empowerment as “increasing individuals’ capacity to exercise agency in relation to development efforts” (Dill, 2009: 719). This often goes hand in hand with measures building awareness, self-esteem and capacity. Cornwall and Brock, for example, indicate that empowerment emphasises “building personal and collective power in the struggle for a more just and equitable world” (Cornwall and Brock, 2005: 1046) as well as “enabling poor people to have voice and choice” (Cornwall and Brock, 2005: 1055). Cornwall also describes empowerment as helping “marginalized or oppressed people to recognize and exercise their agency” (Cornwall, 2004: 77). Participation is thus seen as being more than the engagement in a development programme. It is considered a political process which aims to transform existing power structures: “There remains a strong sense in the literature on participatory development that the proper objective of participation is to ensure the ‘transformation’ of existing development practice and, more radically, the social relations, institutional practices and capacity gaps which cause social exclusion” (Hickey and Mohan, 2004c: 13).

A transformation of “institutional practices” and power relations would encompass poor or disadvantaged populations having what Arnstein called “genuine bargaining influence” in the framework of partnerships with governmental authorities (Arnstein, 1969: 221–222). Nederveen Pieterse speaks of “radically [turning] around” the idea of participation, “so that governments, international institutions or NGOs would be considered as participating in people’s local development” (Nederveen Pieterse, 2010: 99). From a more general perspective, empowerment would also aim at changing institutionalised structural inequalities in societies, e.g. through changes in property rights and legislation (Cleaver, 1999: 599) (see also Cleaver, 2001b; Cooke and Kothari, 2001b; Hickey and Mohan, 2004b; Holland et al., 2004; Mohan and Stokke, 2000). The TSUPU programme worked on the basis of the “practices for change” that the International Network of the Urban Poor used in their work in informal settlements. “[A] Learning-by-Doing Approach, which emphasizes the belief that practice, experimentation, and participation are the best vehicles for learning in communities of the urban poor, constitutes the most efficient and effective strategy for promoting active and engaged citizenship” (D9: Learning-by-Doing Approach for Participation (Toolkit), Hand-in-Hand, 2013: 7; see also D18: Our Practices for Change, INUP, n.d.). This approach specifically positioned itself against learning in workshops and training seminars, which is common in the

4.1 Cities Alliance: Participation as Empowerment

117

field of development interventions. Instead, it supported activities such as community savings schemes as well as enumeration and mapping activities, where informal settlements were surveyed and mapped by members of the community in order to produce information and data about the areas they live in and for which there often is no understanding of and official data about the locality, its population and facilities.1 Through these activities, the Learning-by-Doing approach purported, the urban poor were empowered because they acquired new capabilities and pooled their resources to gain more financial capacities. Through the production of data about informal settlements, they furthermore had something to offer to municipal planners: information which did not exist in official records but was needed to prepare adequate municipal development plans. From this point of view, participation in municipal planning processes, as in the MDFs, led to empowerment. The programme document then specified how empowerment was put into practice. The first objective of TSUPU was focused on counterbalancing the marginalisation of “urban poor communities” and building their civic capacities: “At least 50,000 slum dwellers living within the five selected municipalities actively engage in both securing their rights and honouring their responsibilities through improved urban governance and formalisation” (Cities Alliance, 2010: 19). Programme activities to support this objective comprised the establishment and institutionalisation of MDFs in order to provide formalised representation for the “urban poor communities”, the registration and survey of households and small businesses in slum settlements, financial empowerment through the formation of local community savings groups as well as participatory action research into issues that affect urban poor communities, specifically access to land and security of tenure. These activities were seen as important elements on the way to becoming active citizens who take fate into their own hands and are recognised as important stakeholders by the local governments. Empowerment in TSUPU thus denoted an involvement in decision-making that went beyond being consulted about a predetermined list of potential projects. Rather, citizens were to identify projects themselves and then be actively involved in the projects’ implementation (Cities Alliance, 2020). MDFs were mandated to discuss all issues of urban development, set priorities and agree on common actions. The projects that resulted from the MDFs’ engagement were mainly focused on building basic infrastructure, such as sanitation units, water points and 1

The Learning-by-Doing Toolkit specified that the following types of data were collected in enumeration exercises: physical shelter characteristics, land tenure arrangements, occupant information, commercial spaces, household income and expenditures, and available services (D9: Learning-by-Doing Approach for Participation (Toolkit), Hand-in-Hand, 2013: 8).

118

4

Responding to the Myth of Participation …

drainages. They also included the construction of a training centre where engaged citizens would produce building materials for low-cost housing and could receive technical training in construction skills for when they wanted to construct their own houses. The role of citizens in project implementation in the framework of TSUPU was also significant: TSUPU’s projects were set up as the co-production of public services, where the municipal government was expected to provide financial support, technical advice, training and, in some cases, land to construct the projects on. Local citizens were involved in the realisation of projects mainly through the provision of labour to build whatever was being constructed. One interviewee gave the example of a sanitation project: “Someone can contribute land, someone else can contribute labour, these are in-kind contributions usually. The community provides cheap labour or materials. The government gives money, technical advice …” (PI11: Alex, MoLHUD, November 2015). Twentyfive percent of the construction costs for a communal sanitation facility in one of Uganda’s municipalities, for example, were financed by contributions of local citizens in the form of both financial contributions and labour. A further 25% were financed by the municipal administration through the provision of land and technical assistance. The remaining 50% were financed through the funds provided in the framework of the development intervention, which in this case was given out in the form of a subsidised loan (Bachmeyer and Shermbrucker, 2014: 11). What TSUPU attempted to establish, therefore, was the type of participation Arnstein calls partnership, i.e. “share[d] planning and decision-making responsibilities through such structures as joint policy boards, planning committees and mechanisms for resolving impasses” (Arnstein, 1969: 221). Pretty termed this “interactive participation”: “people participate in joint analysis, development of action plans and formation or strengthening of local institutions” (Pretty, 1995: 1252). It should be noted, however, that this understanding of participation as the empowerment of urban poor communities did not necessarily lead to sustainable change in power relations. In fact, empowerment as understood in TSUPU has been criticised as an individualisation and depoliticisation of the idea of empowerment, where “[p]articipation and empowerment are treated as independent of the structures of oppression” and are reduced to “individual economic gain and access to resources, … leaving the status quo unchallenged” (Miraftab, 2004b: 242). In A-Town, for example, a water point that was built in the context of TSUPU was only in use for a short period before the municipal administration sold the land the water point was constructed on to a property developer. The developer then demolished the water point to construct a commercial building. In TSUPU’s programme logic, the MDFs played an important role in achieving the goal of empowerment. They were understood as those structures that

4.2 World Bank: Participation as a Tool for Monitoring …

119

enabled empowerment because they were thought to formalise the interaction between “organised urban poor, local government, service providers, private sector and other stakeholders” and to institutionalise regular meetings (Cities Alliance, 2010: 20). However, by the time the programme ended in 2014, the MDFs had not been institutionalised.2 Instead, they were integrated into another donor-funded urban development programme: Uganda Support for Municipal Infrastructure Development (USMID). As mentioned, USMID was developed by the World Bank in cooperation with the Ugandan government. Hence, the World Bank’s interpretation of participation had a major effect on how the MDFs were continued. The next section thus reconstructs the World Bank’s understanding of participation as it manifested in the integration of MDFs in USMID.

4.2

World Bank: Participation as a Tool for Monitoring and Accountability

“The World Bank is 100% committed to getting the P in TAP3 implemented, and therefore you have a whole citizen engagement framework at the institutional level, World Bank [and] we’re trying to develop one in line with our CPF [Country Partnership Framework] … So what I’m trying to say is that the country office, here, we do appreciate the role of the MDF, however, it’s not [about] using MDF as the only mechanism, but just drawing lessons how the different [mechanisms] have worked. And put them … in a standard framework. But in terms of just promoting the MDF as a mechanism, [that] is difficult. So, we’re committed to citizen engagement and we draw lessons from different [mechanisms].” (EI59: Carine, WB Uganda, April 2017)

When we discussed my assessment of the MDFs, Carine, a senior officer in the area of governance in Uganda’s World Bank country office, was adamant about the World Bank’s commitment to participation while at the same time making clear that the MDFs were not the only way the World Bank was engaged in participation. She emphasised that not only did the World Bank have a citizen engagement framework in place for the entire organisation, but the Uganda country office was also developing its own guideline. By pointing this out, Carine ensured that even if my research results were to find that the World Bank was not committed to the MDFs as a participation mechanism, it was made clear 2

The question of institutionalisation is discussed further in Section 6.3. TAP stands for transparency, accountability and participation, all of which are goals in USMID. In the field of development, these three are often seen as important elements of good governance. A more detailed discussion of TAP follows in Section 4.2.1.

3

120

4

Responding to the Myth of Participation …

that the World Bank was committed to the concept of participation overall and thereby abided by the rationalized myth that participation has become in the field of development. An analysis of USMID’s programme appraisal document and numerous interviews with WB representatives and their counterparts in the national and local administration allow for a closer look at this commitment to participation and an analysis of how participation is interpreted in the World Bank in general and in USMID in particular. This section in the following describes the departure from TSUPU’s conceptualisation of participation as empowerment and shows that in the framework of USMID, participation served the purpose of monitoring the local administration (Section 4.2.1). It then illustrates the different types of monitoring carried out by the MDFs in practice (Section 4.2.2) before demonstrating that the forums served another role: that of a mediator between the local administration and the community (Section 4.2.3). The section ends with an analysis of this understanding of participation as functional participation.

4.2.1 Understanding Participation as a Tool for Monitoring Researcher Economic planner B-Ville

Researcher Economic planner B-Ville

OK, and now they have been carried into USMID, these forums? They also participate but their involvement within USMID is limited. It’s not like the other one4 where the projects were theirs. But they also participate, even in the monitoring of implementation. Sometimes we call them, they go and see what takes place there. Are they involved in decision-making on the projects under USMID? No. But they were informed, at least they are aware that this project is going to take place but it’s not them to decide.

(EI50: EP, B-Ville, April 2017)

The understanding of participation as empowerment and ownership, and of the MDFs as an element to achieve this, was not carried over from TSUPU to USMID. As the economic planner in B-Ville pointed out, the scope of forum 4

With “the other one”, B-Ville’s economic planner is referring to TSUPU.

4.2 World Bank: Participation as a Tool for Monitoring …

121

participation in USMID was limited: MDFs were informed about projects and involved in monitoring activities. They could also comment on the prioritisation of projects to be implemented but were not actively engaged in decision-making in the USMID projects (EI50: EP, B-Ville, April 2017). Rather, as Geraldine from the World Bank noted, “the MDFs are also invited. We do this to find out what the people feel on the ground” (PI24: Geraldine, WB Uganda, November 2015). With respect to the definition of and decision on projects within USMID programme, this shows that the forums were consulted but not involved in active decision-making. The forums’ rather minor role in USMID can also be deduced from the fact that at the time of writing in May 2020, none of the 19 publicly available USMID implementation status and results reports mentioned the forums, community participation or civil society engagement in any way. Moreover, the environmental and impact assessment report for USMID found the involvement of citizens to be limited, pointing out that the “USMID Program did not include participatory selection of sub-projects, nor any explicit pro-poor planning or consideration of vulnerable groups” (World Bank, 2012c: 55). It, furthermore, stated that “Uganda’s typically top-down approach to service delivery and vertical accountability from service providers to development partners and national level government through reports and audits does not effectively engage civil society, including communities. Therefore there are typically limited opportunities for civil society and end-users to systematically comment on municipal plans and their resultant services” (World Bank, 2012c: 46).

Compared to TSUPU, the MDF’s relevance in the phase of planning individual projects decreased with the transition to USMID. In the implementation phase of USMID’s projects, however, the forums were given an important task. USMID’s programme appraisal document5 defined the role of the forums as monitoring and overseeing the municipal governments. On

5

The World Bank’s project cycle consists of six stages: identification, preparation, appraisal, negotiation/approval, implementation and evaluation. The Project or Programme Appraisal Document is prepared after negotiation and review of the project design and is the document submitted to the World Bank’s Board of Executive Directors for approval. In the case of the USMID programme, no changes were made to the Programme Appraisal Document in the approval process and the document was published as the official programme document. It detailed the programme’s rationale and context, described scope, objectives and activities of the programme as well as implementation arrangements, monitoring and evaluation and the results of various risks assessments (World Bank, 2013b, 2019c).

122

4

Responding to the Myth of Participation …

a total of ten pages which mentioned the forums6 and in six different parts of the document, the forums were referred to with the term “monitoring” six times, “oversight” one time, “scrutinize” two times. They were referred to as part of “Transparency, Accountability and Participation” six times and as a mitigation measure for (or rather against) fraud and corruption three times. It was further mentioned three times that governmental actors, especially municipal administrations, were to disseminate documents to the forums or submit and discuss reports with them. Consider the following quote from the programme document: “The chief purpose of the MFs7 is to enhance governance through increasing bottomup transparency, accountability, and participation in key urban development and management activities … These fora meet in plenary on a regular basis to scrutinize and inform municipal decisionmaking on issues like the annual municipal plans and major investment activities, development funding and the municipal budget, and to monitor infrastructure project implementation progress … Under the Program, the MFs will play a central role in enhancing local transparency, accountability, and participation thereby strengthening governance and mitigating risk in areas such as fraud and corruption.” (World Bank, 2013b: 42)

Let us subject this quote to a more detailed analysis. Transparency, accountability, and participation (TAP)—or rather the achievement thereof—were goals of the intervention. Indeed, this quote stems from a segment of the “Detailed Program Description” that is itself called “Transparency, Accountability and Participation” (World Bank, 2013b: 42). The MDFs seem to have played a role in achieving these goals. TAP—or “The TAP” as one of my interlocutors from the World Bank’s Uganda Country Office termed it (EI59: Carine, WB Uganda, April 2017)—is seemingly a triumvirate of buzzwords belonging together. In the language of donors, participation is often used conjointly with other development buzzwords. “As ways of worldmaking, policies combine buzzwords into what Laclau calls ‘chains of equivalence’: strings of words that work together to evoke a particular set of meanings … In recent years the chains of equivalence into which participation, poverty reduction and empowerment have been brought have included a range of other buzzwords—partnership, accountability, governance, ownership, transparency and so on” (Cornwall and Brock, 2005: 1047). 6

These figures refer only to the 54 pages of continuous text in the programme document. In the lists of indicators for the results framework and monitoring which begin on p. 55 of the document, the forums are again mentioned several times (World Bank, 2013b). 7 USMID’s programme appraisal document does not speak of Municipal Development Forums but rather of Municipal Forums. The abbreviation used is thus MF instead of MDF.

4.2 World Bank: Participation as a Tool for Monitoring …

123

The frequent reference to TAP by Carine, a senior officer who was concerned with participation across different interventions in the World Bank’s Uganda country office, and in the USMID programme document indicates that transparency, accountability and participation are such a “chain of equivalence”. The three terms are also named as important tools to improve the “demand side” of good governance in the World Bank’s Governance and Anti-Corruption Strategy, and, hence, “are critical to ensuring that development is socially and politically sustainable” (World Bank, 2012a: 31–32). The “demand side” refers, inter alia, to the capacity of civil society to interact with the government and hold it accountable (World Bank, 2012a: 17). Also beyond the realm of the World Bank, the joint use of the three terms is widespread in the field of development. The Transparency & Accountability Initiative, a multi-donor platform formed in 2010, for example, calls TAP a “field of practice” (Transparency & Accountability Initiative, n.d.: 2). The TAP Network, a coalition of Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) which advocated for and currently monitors the implementation of one of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) even carries Transparency, Accountability and Participation in its name (Transparency, Accountability, and Participation (TAP) Network, 2019). In USMID, as the above quote illustrates, the achievement of transparency, accountability and participation were expected to strengthen governance and lower the risk of fraud and corruption. Fraud and corruption were identified in the programme appraisal document as a “major risk” for USMID, particularly with respect to local governments, where collusion and bribery in the procurement process were seen as common (World Bank, 2013b: 29). In order to achieve transparency, accountability and participation, municipal forums were to receive reports from the municipal governments and discuss these reports, thereby monitoring (here called “scrutinizing”) governmental activities and also providing the government with information—presumably about the will of the local citizens. Although the quote does not specify that the MDFs represent the will of local citizens, this can be deduced from the use of the phrase “bottom-up”, which in the field of development commonly denotes a focus on the perspectives of non-state actors, or, more generally, the participants of participation (Hickey and King, 2016: 1226; White, 1996: 7). Throughout above quote from the programme document, the forums are portrayed as an important instrument in the implementation of the intervention “on the ground”, i.e. in the municipalities. While the municipal governments received funds from the World Bank to implement USMID, they were also ascribed tendencies towards fraud and corruption. The forum was, on the contrary, associated with the ability to mitigate these tendencies, to question the plans municipal governments make and to supervise

124

4

Responding to the Myth of Participation …

the orderly implementation of these plans. USMID’s 2012 Technical Assessment Report quite poignantly ascribed MDFs the role of “monitoring for value for money” (World Bank, 2012d: 60). This is in stark contrast to the description of MDFs’ role in TSUPU. Indeed, rather than enabling citizens to engage in shaping the development of the municipalities they live in, under USMID the forums suddenly had a role that was focused on the adherence to standards and rules of the World Bank and its intervention.

4.2.2 Different Types of Monitoring through the MDFs In practice, monitoring took on a multitude of forms, from the exposure of corruption in the context of official meetings and performance assessment exercises to the oversight of contractors involved in the construction of roads funded by USMID. An important issue of contention between the municipal government and the forum in B-Ville’s MDF meeting in spring 2017, for example, was the prioritisation of roads that had been constructed with the funding from USMID. Specifically, the forum members were dissatisfied with one of the roads that had been worked on which they considered irrelevant for the economic development of B-Ville. This topic was recorded in the meeting minutes, which would later be subject to the World Bank’s performance assessment. Furthermore, after the meeting, the MDF executive committee requested to discuss the matter with the town clerk in order to voice the concern and thus hold the municipal government accountable (O25: interaction between the MDF executive committee and the TC to solve complaints from MDF meeting, B-Ville, April 2017). As the World Bank’s Carine put it in her discussion of this exact interaction: the MDF were “doing their job” (EI59: Carine, WB Uganda, April 2017). In A-Town, monitoring was a much more experiential activity, as the following fieldnote shows: I accompany the MDF president of A-Town to check up on a production of large bricks that are to serve as a cover for the drainages on A-Town’s main street. This is a USMID project and the MDF president tells me that the people working in the brick production are subcontractors. She mentions that the project was supposed to be completed within one year but is now in its third year. The problem, she claims, was that the municipality had not released funds to pay the contractors until a week ago – shortly before the World Bank’s yearly USMID assessment – the municipality finally released some “little money”, some funds to the contractors. She also mentions that the municipal engineer has in the past asked the contractors for money in order to authorise their payments. The MDF president points out “there is so much…”. She does not finish the sentence

4.2 World Bank: Participation as a Tool for Monitoring …

125

and instead complains that this monitoring of contractors and subcontractors in the implementation of USMID construction projects is usually the task of the municipal engineer who is, however, almost always absent and most of the work is done by the MDF. (O14: site visit to municipal TSUPU and USMID projects with MDF president, A-Town, March 2017)

Monitoring, this vignette from A-Town shows, could be a very hands-on task, consisting of physically checking up on the implementation of individual elements of USMID’s projects. However, as the comments and complaints by A-Town’s MDF president show, in the process of such an activity, the forum could uncover fraud, corruption and absenteeism by municipal bureaucrats. In this case, the MDF president implied that the municipal engineer asked contractors to pay bribes before she was willing to authorise the release of funds intended for their own payment. But did the forum relay such information back to the World Bank or was it able to otherwise hold the municipal administration to account? The issue of fraud and corruption by municipal bureaucrats in the implementation of A-Town’s USMID projects came up again a few days after my monitoring visit with the MDF president. In the performance assessment meeting with the World Bank, the forum members brought up observed cases of municipal bureaucrats failing to meet their duties. The meeting was later described to me as “hot” by MDF Member Bryan, meaning there were many issues to discuss and the discussions got heated (O18: report of MDF member Bryan about municipal bureaucrats’ meeting with WB about USMID assessment, A-Town, March 2017).8 These observations indicate that the MDFs seemed to fulfil the purpose that the World Bank attributed to them: MDFs were merely consulted in decision-making processes and therefore could not effectively change the planned pathways of the interventions. They were, however, involved enough in the implementation to effectively monitor local administrations and report back to the donor. Geraldine, who was part of the team entrusted with the implementation of USMID, echoed this perspective in our conversation: “And the MDFs became very important for monitoring … The MDFs can even challenge municipal technical people. I used to get even reports directly from these guys. They tell me ‘we don’t agree with this thing. What do you think?’” (EI27: Geraldine, WB Uganda, March 2017). While speaking, Geraldine showed me messages and pictures sent in a WhatsApp group called “MDF A-Town”, of which she was a member and 8

Unsurprisingly, I was not allowed to participate in the meeting and therefore have to rely on the forum members’ accounts of it.

126

4

Responding to the Myth of Participation …

seemed to be in frequent exchange with. Geraldine’s comment and her inclusion in the MDF WhatsApp group show that the MDFs’ involvement in monitoring went beyond that of scrutinising municipal plans and their implementation in official reports and meetings. Standing in direct contact with the World Bank’s Uganda office through a WhatsApp group equalled the MDF of A-Town having an informal line of communication with the organisation that, ultimately, was in charge of approving financial disbursements to the municipal government. This example from A-Town indicates how the role of the forums as watchdogs of the municipal administration was strengthened and the forums were imbued with a form of power. In a conversation I had with A-Town’s MDF president, she spoke about scrutinising municipal bureaucrats’ implementation practices and referred to Geraldine’s superior as “a friend of ours” (EI 32: Florence, MDF president, A-Town, March 2017). Positioning the forums as watchdogs over the municipal administration represents a clear departure from the understanding of participation in TSUPU, where the MDFs were set up as a partnership between the community and the local authorities. Confidence between partners was a critical success factor for these partnerships, according to the TSUPU programme document (Cities Alliance, 2010: 43). It is reasonable to assume that the strengthening of forums as monitors of municipal administrations in USMID contravened the chances of such a bond of confidence and trust forming between the forums and the municipal administration. This is not to say, however, that there were no cases in which the MDFs collaborated closely with the municipal governments. When it came to conflict resolution with the wider community, the MDFs were even instrumentalised by the local governments, as the following section demonstrates.

4.2.3 The MDFs as Mediator In USMID’s implementation practice, the role of the forums extended to a further task beyond monitoring: the mediation of compensation issues. This was not delineated in official programme documents9 and thus can be interpreted as a practice that emerged throughout the implementation process: in the framework of USMID, MDFs were being called upon by municipal governments to avoid conflicts with “the community”. This issue was brought up in many interviews 9

Even the Environmental and Social Assessment, which covered issues with land acquisition across three pages and had five pages of suggestions on how to strengthen systems, did not refer to the potential involvement of MDFs here (World Bank, 2012b, 2012c).

4.2 World Bank: Participation as a Tool for Monitoring …

127

with representatives of municipal governments, the MoLHUD, the World Bank and even the forums themselves. Derrick, who was responsible for the adherence to social and environmental standards in USMID at the time of research, for example, pointed out that the MDFs participated “in ensuring that projects are implemented without encumbrances” and “help to resolve people issues, conflicts, through the project implementation” (EI62: Derrick, MoLHUD, April 2017). Asked about common conflicts or issues arising in the implementation of the projects, my interlocutors explained that often the infrastructure projects affected people’s lives because they made resettlement necessary. Mostly, it was argued, this occurred because people had “encroached”, conveying that they had constructed houses or shops without permission on land that was a road reserve. The MDFs were then utilised to speak to the people affected—project-affected persons or PAPs as they are called in donor jargon—and to work out a solution. B-Ville’s community development officer, for example, called attention to the support of the forums in the interaction with PAPs in the framework of USMID: “They helped us to talk to them, [the] PAPs, project-affected persons” (EI49: CDO, B-Ville, April 2017). This perspective was reiterated by the president of C-City’s MDF: “Some had encroached on the public road, you have to engage them to move peacefully, so that’s the purpose of the public dialogues. It did well and one of the things that [CCity] has, is that once you engage people, they understand, ‘Okay I encroached on a public land, what are my rights? I don’t have [rights], so give me time to move peacefully’ and that’s why we have very rare cases of compensation” (EI42: MDF president, C-City, March 2017).

He argued that through public dialogues, the MDF informed those citizens who had “encroached on the public road” that they needed to resettle. In his experience, this information was met with understanding by the people affected who, upon being made aware of their missteps, readily and “peacefully” cleared the space. The forums thus served as an insurance that local citizens would not frustrate the implementation of USMID’s infrastructure projects through resistance. Like the MDF president of C-City, Nathanael from MoLHUD, too, pointed out that the forums helped convince community members to accept resettlement without compensation: “You know they also played a key role, especially in mobilising those people who were affected by the designs. You know, there were some people who had kiosks, for example. They had kiosks within the road reserve … Some of them maybe had planted trees within the road reserve. So under normal circumstance, if you are going to displace

128

4

Responding to the Myth of Participation …

[people] or to repossess some of those areas, these people have the right to claim some compensation. Now the MDFs played a key role in trying to contact the people within some of their areas and convince them to relocate without necessarily having to demand for compensation. The [MDFs] said, “look, this development is ours. It is coming to improve our city, so why should we complain?” So a good number of them actually moved away without necessarily having to claim compensation” (EI17: Nathanael, MoLHUD, February 2017).

MoLHUD’s Nathanael defined the “encroachment” as people having set up kiosks or planted trees in the road reserve. He explained that the MDFs were instrumental in convincing these citizens to relocate without compensation by making the argument that the road would bring improvement to the municipality, which in the cases he spoke about seems to have been accepted as good for all citizens. The World Bank’s Environmental and Social Impact Assessment Report for USMID made note of this practice and labelled it a shortcoming in the existing systems of land acquisition in place in Ugandan municipalities. The report illustrated that “[f]or reviewed Municipal projects that have involved land acquisition, some of the consulted Municipal Councils have in the past ignored, convinced, or forcefully displaced Project affected peoples (PAPs) without compensation or livelihood assistance depending on the circumstances … Meetings are organized where PAPs are informed about proposed projects and thereafter convinced to give part of their land or asked to move or settle somewhere else without compensation (particularly in the case of customary ownership)” (World Bank, 2012c: 44).

The report acknowledged the occurrence of incidences where PAPs did not receive compensation and were actively discouraged from seeking compensation in Ugandan municipalities in the past. My interlocutors from the World Bank, however, were either unaware or failed to mention the continuance of this problematic practice in the framework of USMID in at least one case, namely that of C-City, as indicated by C-City’s MDF president above. Instead, Geraldine from the World Bank portrayed the forums as mediators between the “community” and the administration: “when there are safeguard issues, compensation issues, people are affected, these [the MDF members] are the people who go to the communities … The community listens to them” (EI27: Geraldine, WB Uganda, March 2017). In the literature, this has been discussed as development organisations’ blindness to their own implication in a situation. Chatterjee speaks of the interveners’ “necessary self-deception” as to their own involvement (Chatterjee, 1993: 207; cited in Mitchell, 1995: 126) and Li points out that “[d]evelopment interventions … pay very little attention to the power relations implicit in their

4.2 World Bank: Participation as a Tool for Monitoring …

129

own self-positioning” (Li, 2007: 275). Mitchell argues that “international development has a special need to overlook this internal involvement in the places and problems it analyses, and present itself instead as an external intelligence that stands outside the objects it describes” (Mitchell, 1995: 126). Entrusting the MDFs with these important roles of monitoring and mediation bears resemblance to what has been described as brokerage in the development literature (Bierschenk et al., 2002; Lewis and Mosse, 2006a). Bierschenk et al. understand local development brokers as “the social actors implanted in a local arena (in whose politics they are directly or indirectly involved)” and who are supposed to “represent the local populations, express its [sic] ‘needs’ to the structures in charge of aid and to external financiers” (Bierschenk et al., 2002: 4). Mediators and brokers are often in a precarious position. Merry highlights that they are often met with suspicion in both “worlds” that they move in and can be made responsible for failures by both sides (Merry, 2006: 43). Lewis and Mosse draw attention to their intermediary position in the hierarchies within the field of development, where they are subordinate in some and dominant in other contexts—vis-à-vis donors and beneficiaries for example (Lewis and Mosse, 2006c: 22). As mediators or brokers, the MDFs were caught between two stools in various constellations. With their ascribed task of monitoring and holding to account municipal administrations, they were caught between the international community and central government, as represented by the World Bank and the MoLHUD as well as Hand-in-Hand and the International Network of the Urban Poor on the one hand, and the local government on the other hand. As mediators in compensation cases they were caught between “the community” on one side and the local government on the other. This ‘sandwich position’ naturally carried the potential for the MDF to become involved in conflicts and politics. In B-Ville, for example, the MDF was perceived by some citizens as an ally of the municipal administration rather than a community representative. When one of the members of B-Ville’s MDF executive showed me one of the projects completed in the framework of TSUPU, a group of citizens approached us and confronted the MDF executive member. They told her that they thought the forum had been corrupted by the “council officials and technical people”, which stands for local politicians and municipal bureaucrats, respectively. There have also been instances where the MDFs have been involved in politics, either because MDF members ran for a political office or because incumbent politicians influenced the forum to their own political benefit. In A-Town, some leaders on the ward level felt threatened by the forum and mobilised citizens against the MDF president (see Section 1.4.2 to see where the ward level is located in the system of local government). She pointed out to me that “the leaders, they never understood this program, but

130

4

Responding to the Myth of Participation …

they were looking at me as a threat, as someone who could take their positions [when] trying to develop my career in the future” and that they “mobilise[d] all the entire members of the ward” against her (EI 32: Florence, MDF president, A-Town, March 2017). Despite the existence of these conflicts, the World Bank as well as all other governmental organisations involved in TSUPU and USMID strongly positioned the MDFs as non-political entities and framed involvement in any kind of local politics as problematic (see Section 5.2 for a more detailed analysis of this issue).

4.2.4 MDFs as Functional Participation Overall, the data presented here shows that in the transfer from TSUPU to USMID, the meaning attached to MDFs was transformed. Rather than focusing on empowerment through participation, the forums became an element of governance and served to ensure transparency and accountability through participation. In USMID, the members of the MDFs were not considered actors with their own interests, who were empowered to voice their own concerns and participate in local decision-making processes. Instead, they were taught how their local administration was supposed to function from the perspective of the donor and received the task to scrutinise and inform municipal decision-making. The community and its representatives in the MDFs were given the role of a watchdog. These changes illustrate that the rationalized myth of participation was interpreted differently in TSUPU and USMID. On a more general level, they furthermore elucidate that the myth needs to be interpreted and that organisations can react in a nuanced way to environmental expectations. In international development, the role of the MDF as seen under USMID is often termed functional participation. This form of participation is based on the assumption that the inclusion of opinions of people previously excluded from decision-making processes makes development interventions and government programmes more effective and efficient since it will make them more relevant to people’s needs and, therefore, more sustainable. In the field of development, functional participation is commonly associated with the World Bank, not least because this perspective lies at the heart of the World Bank’s citizen engagement activities and frameworks (World Bank, 2014). Critics of this form of participation warn that it risks becoming tokenistic and ignoring power imbalances, as can be seen in the case of MDFs. Pretty (1995) defines functional participation as

4.2 World Bank: Participation as a Tool for Monitoring …

131

“[p]articipation seen by external agencies as a means to achieve project goals, especially reduced costs. People may participate by forming groups to meet predetermined objectives related to the project. Such involvement may be interactive and involve shared decision-making but tends to arise only after major decisions have already been made by external agents. At worst, local people may still only be co-opted to serve external goals” (Pretty, 1995: 1252).

In Arnstein’s typology, this type of participation would be deemed tokenism. On the ladder of participation, it could more specifically be placed on the rung of “placation”. At this level of citizen participation, Arnstein argues, “a few handpicked ‘worthy’ poor” are allowed to participate, with their roles often being limited to providing advice, acting as a watchdog and “rubber stamp[ing]” existing plans (Arnstein, 1969: 220–221). Similarly, Hickey and Mohan criticise “a tendency for certain agents of participatory development to treat participation as a technical method of project work rather than as a political methodology of empowerment” (Hickey and Mohan, 2004c: 11) (see also Cleaver, 2001b). Henkel and Stirrat criticise that in participatory development interventions, people are not empowered to fulfil a specific function but rather to be “elements in the great project of ’the modern’: as citizens of the institutions of the modern state; as consumers in the increasingly global market; as responsible patients in the health system; as rational farmers increasing GNP [Gross National Product]; as participants in the labour market, and so on” (Henkel and Stirrat, 2001: 182). Mosse even argues that the tendency to technocratise or functionalise participation results in vertical disaggregation: the upwards delegation of decision-making and the downwards delegation of responsibility (Mosse, 2013: 3–5). While these critical perspectives focus on divergent interests, organisational research argues primarily with organisational necessities and mechanisms. From an organisational perspective, the pronounced change that the understanding of participation (in the form of MDFs) underwent with the transition from TSUPU to USMID, can be understood as an expression of differing interpretations of the rationalized myth of participation. For both the Cities Alliance and the World Bank, participation is a rationalized myth, it forms part of a generalised expectation of how development interventions are to be set up. This section has shown how in USMID, the MDFs were reframed according to the scripts and understandings of participation used by the World Bank. Originally formed as part of an empowerment process for the urban poor in five Ugandan municipalities in TSUPU, the MDFs were under USMID positioned as governance mechanisms which monitor and scrutinise the implementation of programme activities by municipal governments.

132

4.3

4

Responding to the Myth of Participation …

Local Administrations: Participation as a Donor Conditionality

The MDFs were by far not the first encounter of Ugandan local administrations with the myth of participation. Besides countless development interventions focused on participation, in the early 2000s a system of bottom-up planning was instituted on all levels of local government in Uganda. It consists of the aggregation of priorities from the lowest level of local government upwards. Every year, a participatory plan is produced at the village level, setting priorities for economic and physical development. The villages’ lists of priorities cascade up to the parish, which aggregates the village lists. This is then again cascaded to the next level of local government. Aggregation continues until the list of priorities reaches the district level. The upper three levels of local government also hold participatory budgeting conferences (see Section 1.4.2 for a description of Uganda’s administrative system). “The planning and budgeting cycle under the decentralisation policy is supposed to be bottom-up. From the village level upwards, a wish list is created and then depending on the budget or the resource envelope, the municipality will plan accordingly, using that wish list” (PI27: Raymond, MoLHUD, November 2015; also mentioned in PI8: Dominic, MoLG, November 2015; PI22: Kenneth, MoLHUD, November 2015). However, this system cannot necessarily be characterised as genuine participation. Government officials contemptuously called the list of priorities derived from participatory planning processes a “wish list” and, ultimately, the government takes the decisions about resource allocation based on available resources and their own assessment of the municipality’s needs (EI49: CDO, B-Ville, April 2017; EI37: EP, A-Town, March 2017). As a result of the elaborate and cumbersome process of bottom-up planning, which coexists with extremely limited resources of the municipalities, participation fatigue was common amongst local bureaucrats. Raymond, the MDF coordinator in MoLHUD has described the MDFs as advancement on the existing bottom-up planning system: “But in this process [the bottom-up planning process] there is no real feedback built into the process. The forums fix that gap” (PI27: Raymond, MoLHUD, November 2015). Nonetheless, on the side of the municipal bureaucrats, a more disenchanted and detached perspective on participation seemed to prevail. This became obvious when they spoke about their interaction with the MDFs: “You know there are minimum conditions and there are performance measures, so we have to meet these parameters in order to access the grant from the World Bank. So we have to make sure that we are … checking ourselves. Because even the communities,

4.3 Local Administrations: Participation as a Donor Conditionality

133

the MDF, we work with them. So the Bank is actually assessing us to see whether we have done the right thing in the community. So, we are checking ourselves to see whether we have met the parameters that will help us access the grant, the money” (EI28: EO, A-Town, March 2017).

A-Town’s environment officer pointed out that the conditions and performance parameters the municipal administration had to consider in order to receive funding in the framework of the donor programme also involved cooperation with the Municipal Development Forum. How important this donor funding was in the municipality or for the municipal administration might also be gleaned from the fact that this quote actually constituted the environment officer’s answer to my request to speak about his job and a typical day in it. Other municipal bureaucrats similarly portrayed the forums as a donor-imposed conditionality, important for them mainly due to its linkage to funding. A-Town’s economic planner, for example, referred to the MDFs as something that was expected if the municipal administration wanted to participate in TSUPU. “Now, the beginning point is how were they organised to come up to the MDF level? One is: We had a directive from the ministry that the municipal [government] is expected to have a Municipal Development Forum if you are to access funding via TSUPU programming” (EI37: EP, A-Town, March 2017).

He spoke about this amidst a conversation about the different stakeholder groups which were or were not represented in A-Town’s MDF. Later on, he added that the forum represented those stakeholder groups who were themselves interested in being represented and were organised enough to send representatives to the MDF’s constitutive meeting (“how were they organised to come up to the MDF level”). The municipal administration did not ensure a representation of certain groups. A-Town’s deputy town clerk, when asked about the interfaces between the forum and the municipal administration, emphasised that the MDF was a funding conditionality. “The Municipal Development Forum is a recent, can I say, innovation that came about not a result of legal changes, but it is just a conditionality to external funding. But our legal framework does not provide for it. … Now the municipal forum was brought as a result of the conditionality of external funding by saying we must have people through whom the community will voice their concerns directly and therefore ensuring that the citizen quorum directly participates in the development and planning issues of the municipality” (EI36: DTC, A-Town, March 2017).

134

4

Responding to the Myth of Participation …

He also referred to the fact that the forums were not a mechanism of participation that was prescribed by any Ugandan legal framework. This issue was further mentioned by B-Ville’s economic planner. When asked about the future of the forums in B-Ville after the end of USMID, he called the forums “a condition of the funders”: “They’re not covered by law, it was just a condition of the funders of the programme that we should have them” (EI50: EP, B-Ville, April 2017). The question of the forums’ legal status is discussed at length in Section 6.3 (Narratives of the MDFs’ Prospective Formalisation in Legal Frameworks). As far as the MDFs’ future was concerned, B-Ville’s economic planer argued that the MDFs’ status as a donor conditionality would result in them ending with the end of donor funding, since the local governments would “decide to do away with it” (EI50: EP, B-Ville, April 2017) (see also Section 6.3). C-City’s town clerk was not as critical as the other municipal administrators. He did, however, point out that the MDF was part of the municipal administration’s “arrangement with the World Bank” in USMID when I asked him his opinion of the forum as an instrument for participation. “MDF is embedded into our arrangement with the World Bank, USMID, I must say it is in the project document [that] we’re supposed to operate with MDF” (EI43: TC, C-City, March 2017). He spoke about it matter-of-factly: the municipal administration engaged the MDF because that was part of the contractual framework they had signed with the donor. Despite saying that he valued their input, C-City’s town clerk later pointed out that “some” municipal bureaucrats did not appreciate or support the MDF. Established as part of the Cities Alliance programme TSUPU, local bureaucrats saw MDFs as something that was externally imposed, a condition to comply with if they wanted to receive donor funding. This was the case in both A-Town and B-Ville, where the MDF was established under TSUPU as well as in C-City, where the MDF as a participation mechanism was introduced in the framework of USMID. This perception of the forums detached them from the municipal administrations’ regular activities. Thus, the municipal administrations tended to limit their interaction with the MDFs to those areas and activities which were later assessed by the donor. As described in Section 6.2 (Formalisation of the MDFs’ Interactions with Municipal Bureaucrats), the forums were often invited to participate in meetings and voice the community’s concerns or provide an insight into the community’s priorities regarding government projects. However, their integration never went beyond the limits of TSUPU and USMID. In the case of activities in the area of municipal planning and development, for example, the forums were involved in the prioritisation or decision-making for USMID’s road projects but not in other projects the municipal administration was planning or

4.3 Local Administrations: Participation as a Donor Conditionality

135

implementing. Evidently, the municipalities did not see the MDFs as a useful resource for government in general. This detachment also finds expression in the municipal administrations’ reactions to the request of providing the MDFs with an office. The MoLHUD requested the municipal administrations to provide the office during the implementation of the TSUPU programme (EI60: Ronald, MoLHUD, April 2017; EI64: Nathanael, MoLHUD, April 2017). Ronald from the MoLHUD even named having an office as an important element of proving that the MDF is “serious”, i.e. that it can be taken seriously as a partner. If the forums did not have an office, he argued, “they’re operating in space”, meaning they had nowhere to conduct their business from (EI60: Ronald, MoLHUD, April 2017). In municipalities where the forum had its own office in the town hall, one could expect the degree of integration into the municipal administration and formalisation to be high. After all, having an office provided the citizens with an address. With an office, the forum had a space where all activities could be centred. Documents could be stored there, small meetings of the executive committee could be held in the office, citizens would know where their supposed representative was located. Most importantly for the integration of the MDF into council activities could have been, however, the mere physical proximity to municipal bureaucrats that came with an office. This proximity could have resulted in short and informal communication channels which would have allowed the MDF to know what was going on in the municipal administration and to lobby for its own involvement as much as possible. From the perspective of the municipal administration, the MDF office could have provided an easily accessible point of contact as well as a straightforward way to know ‘what the community was up to’. In A-Town, however, the MDF office seemingly did not reflect a valued partnership between the forum and the municipal administration, as the following vignette illustrates: I arrive at A-Town’s municipal offices bright and early to meet A-Town’s MDF president Florence. In the entrance area, a large sign provides an overview of the different offices here. I notice that on the bottom right, the sign is imprinted with USMID’s programme name and number. Later, I would observe that almost every newer piece of office furniture in A-Town’s municipal offices had been financed by USMID. The sign lists a total of 36 rooms, including the lavatories and something called the “gallery”. However, I cannot seem to find an MDF office anywhere. Instead, I ask the person behind the desk in the entrance area. He tells me to walk towards the municipal hall, down the stairs, out to the right and back into another hallway. This pathway leads me to a part of the municipal offices quite distant from where all the local bureaucrats

136

4

Responding to the Myth of Participation …

have their offices. From the sign, I deduce that this must be where the Sergeant at Arms is located. It strikes me as strange that – being so recent – the sign was not updated to include the MDF office. Surely, the municipal administration does not have a Sergeant at Arms anymore, does it? When I follow the directions, it turns out that the MDF office is located in the most far-flung corner of the municipal offices, a dark corridor with only a dim light. This office really is at the very end of the most remote part of A-Town’s municipal hall. The only other offices located here are the Inspector of Schools and the “Cold Chain” room. I do not even know what that is and tell myself that I need to ask someone about it. I also ask myself what it says about the value of community participation in this municipality that the office seems to be ‘exiled’. On the other hand, having an office is probably more than many communities can dream of. The door to the MDF office is closed. I peer through the window in the door but cannot see anyone inside. Instead, I notice that above the window there are signs of a past fire. I look around and observe the office. It is small, three desks and much paper are cramped into it. Seven chairs are in this office, two computer monitors and keyboards, one desktop computer and one laptop. And also what seems to be an old oven? A piece of cloth tied to two nails serves as a curtain. The paint is coming off the walls. The light on the ceiling, attached to some sort of pipe, has broken out of its anchoring and is dangling from the ceiling. (O7: search for the MDF office, A-Town, March 2017)

My quest to locate the MDF’s office in A-Town’s municipal offices tells a story about the standing the MDF had in the municipal administration. As the vignette showed, the forum indeed did have an office in the administration. However, this formal integration stood in stark contrast to the practical disregard the municipal administration seemed to have for the forum. The MDF office in A-Town was not shown on the official overview of offices in the municipal administration. It was located in a far-away corner of the municipal offices and was in a rather dilapidated state, particularly when compared to the newly equipped offices of the municipal bureaucrats, who had received new office furniture through USMID. There were clear limitations, it seems, to the level of integration and acknowledgement the municipal government was willing to allow. While the forum was given an office, it was comparatively shabby and placed at the margins of the municipal offices. Throughout my field research in A-Town, it also became apparent that the local bureaucrats did not ever go to the MDF office but rather ordered the forum members to come to their offices by calling them on their phone. In the one instance I witnessed in which the community development officer was forced to come to the MDF office (because he could not reach the MDF president by phone), he was visibly annoyed and angered. In this specific situation, A-Town’s deputy town clerk was looking for the MDF president and had sent the CDO to

4.3 Local Administrations: Participation as a Donor Conditionality

137

find her. Unable to reach the MDF president by mobile phone, the CDO barged into the MDF office and, without a greeting, yelled “TC wants you, MDF!”. His tone resembled that of a commander yelling at his troops. In the ensuing conversation, the CDO emphasised that the deputy town clerk “wants you right away!” and accused the MDF president of turning her phone off when she was supposed to be available to the municipal administration (O17: angered interaction between CDO and MDF president, A-Town, March 2017). In B-Ville and C-City, the MDFs did not have an office at all. In B-Ville, the mayor emphasised that the municipality did not have the funds to provide offices to the MDF: “They want to demand a lot which the municipalities cannot afford. Like for example they want offices … So we said, that [demand] will bring problems because the councils will not approve their payments. So … we left it for the ministry [of Lands, Housing and Urban Development] to see whether if they can … do that, then fine. But for the [local] council we said no. … If the ministry can say please, the MDFs should be given this [office] from their treasury, not from the council“ (EI51: mayor, B-Ville, April 2017).

The municipal government in B-Ville, as the mayor explained, refuted the MoLHUD’s request to provide an office for the MDF because it did not see itself in the position to finance such an undertaking. Instead, it returned the request to the MoLHUD, which the mayor said would have to decide whether it provided the financial means for an MDF office. By throwing the ball back into the MoLHUD’s court and passing on the responsibility, the municipal government showed that it did not really see the MDF as a local construct. Rather, as was described above, it conceived of the MDF as something externally imposed. The municipal government reacted by detaching from the forums. How can these reactions of the municipal administrations to the MDFs as an instrument of participation be interpreted? Its status and standing in the municipal administration seem to be precarious. This resembles what Arnstein called nonparticipation in her ladder of participation. The ladder’s bottom rung, manipulation, sets forth that people participate in “rubberstamp advisory committees … for the express purpose of ‘educating’ them or engineering their support” (Arnstein, 1969: 218). In Pretty’s typology, the forums would fall somewhere between manipulative participation, where participation is “simply a pretence”, passive participation, which consists in “people … being told what has been decided” and participation by consultation, i.e. “by answering questions” (Pretty, 1995: 1252). From the perspective of organisational sociology, these reactions to

138

4

Responding to the Myth of Participation …

the myth of participation can be understood as decoupling. Through the symbolic adoption of the structures associated with the myth of participation and at the same time protecting the core of the organisation from this influence, the municipal administrations decouple the forums from their own activities, thereby counteracting what the concept of participation represents. This becomes evident in both the framing of forums as a donor conditionality and the reaction of BVille’s mayor to the request for an office. It is furthermore clearly visible in the marginalisation of the MDF office in A-Town: the office was not included in the official overview of municipal offices, implying that it was not seen as part of the municipal infrastructure. The office itself remained dilapidated amidst a plethora of renovated offices with new office furniture.

4.4

Intermediate Conclusion

On the surface, both TSUPU and USMID programmes included similar elements, namely investments in local infrastructure, capacity building of local governments and the participation of local communities. USMID, however, followed the logic of an infrastructure investment programme while TSUPU had been focused on the development of people in the sense of empowerment. The analysis has shown that this led to a reframing of the MDFs in USMID when compared to TSUPU. USMID did not perceive the forums as instruments to achieve empowerment and ownership of urban poor populations in the development of their cities. Rather, the World Bank saw the MDFs’ role as one of monitoring and oversight of the municipal administrations’ implementation of USMID-funded projects. The forums were furthermore utilised to mediate with local citizens in compensation cases. The forums were thus seen as fulfilling specific functions for the donor as well as the municipal administration. The different framing of MDFs in TSUPU and USMID matches existing organisational principles and guidelines on participation that can be found in the two organisations running the respective programme, i.e. the Cities Alliance and the World Bank. For the Cities Alliance, participation lies at the core of the network’s identity. Launched in 1999 as a multi-donor partnership, the Cities Alliance initially had two key priorities: the mobilisation of resources for slum upgrading programmes and the facilitation of “participatory processes by which local stakeholders design City Development Strategies that define their vision for their city, analyze its economic prospects, and identify priorities for action and investment follow-up” (Cities Alliance, 1999: 12). Local stakeholders include (urban poor) communities and local governments as well as community-based

4.4 Intermediate Conclusion

139

organisations, NGOs and the private sector. Today, these “partnerships between local and national government, slum dwellers, private foundations, the private sector, NGOs, knowledge institutions and other partners” are part of the Cities Alliance’s vision as articulated in its charter (Cities Alliance, 2016, Article 8). Amongst the core principles of the Cities Alliance’s country programmes (with TSUPU being one of them) is the “institutionalisation of dialogue between citizens and both local and national government, building on local knowledge and global good practice” (Cities Alliance, 2019b). This is supposed to lead to “systemic change and impacts at scale”, i.e. to ensure that power relations truly shift. As Arnstein highlights, in the framework of true partnerships, “power is in fact redistributed through negotiation between citizens and powerholders. They agree to share planning and decision-making responsibilities” (Arnstein, 1969). These Cities Alliance documents convey an understanding of participation as empowerment, i.e. citizens are able to actively engage with governments, to identify and prioritise areas for development in their cities and are involved in implementation. With the promotion of community empowerment and participation as one of its guiding principles, TSUPU’s programme document was therefore consistent with the Cities Alliance’s guidelines for participation in general and its country programmes in particular. The World Bank boasts a long history of participation, which has led to the development of several frameworks and guidelines for participation over time. In 1996, the World Bank developed its “participation sourcebook”, something akin to a handbook for its own project managers. The sourcebook defines participation, shares experiences from different countries across the world and provides advice for participatory practice (World Bank, 1996). The World Bank’s 2004 World Development Report is focused on citizen involvement in service delivery (World Bank, 2003). The World Bank’s current general framework for citizen engagement is focused on mainstreaming participation into all World Bank’s interventions (World Bank, 2014). Similar to the functionality linked to participation in the USMID programme, the general framework is based on the assumption that citizen engagement “can help governments achieve improved development results” (World Bank, 2014: 2). It lists a multitude of approaches and mechanisms for citizen engagement, among them “collaboration in decision-making” and “citizen-led monitoring and evaluation or oversight” (World Bank, 2014: 24). The framework furthermore specifies that “involving citizens in monitoring service delivery, revenues, budget execution, procurement, contract awards, and reform policies can increase transparency, improve efficiency of service delivery or budget execution, and reduce opportunities for corruption” (World Bank, 2014: 42). These programmatic documents and frameworks for participation show that

140

4

Responding to the Myth of Participation …

the World Bank has something similar to a template prescribing how participation is to be done in the organisation. This template is focused on the role of participation for purposes of monitoring. From an organisational perspective, the pronounced change in the understanding of participation (in the form of the MDFs) that came with the transition from TSUPU to USMID demonstrates that the Cities Alliance and the World Bank worked with different interpretations of the rationalized myth of participation. Since the empirical research is not an internal study of the Cities Alliance and the World Bank as organisations, it is not possible at this point to ascertain further the organisational responses to the myth of participation. This is, however, possible for local administrations in Uganda. As described in the theoretical framework in Chapter 2, a common response to institutional pressures is decoupling. Organisations often implement institutional expectations ceremonially but decouple the resulting structures from their core organisational tasks. As Hasse and Krücken point out, by presenting an opportunity for organisations to distance themselves from institutional expectations, decoupling also offers a certain degree of freedom for organisations to react to institutional expectations (Hasse and Krücken, 2005: 67). The empirical analysis of local administrations in this chapter has shown that local bureaucrats indeed processed the myth of participation by decoupling the MDFs from the administration’s regular activities. They accentuated that the forums were externally imposed and accepted primarily due to their linkage with donor funding but did not form part of the municipal administration’s usual tasks. Another way of achieving decoupling was through the marginalisation of the MDF office. Requested by the central government to provide the forums with an office, one municipal administration reacted by kicking the ball back into the field of the MoLHUD, citing financial reasons for not providing an office. Another administration provided an office but made sure this was located as far away from the regular offices in the municipal offices as possible. This response to MDFs can be seen as an example of means-ends decoupling, as outlined by Bromley and Powell (see Section 2.4). The structures for participation were implemented, the MDFs were ‘up and running’. However, they were marginalised in such a way that their ability to participate in municipal planning activities and to be an active representative of the local citizenry opposite the municipal bureaucrats was impeded significantly. The findings presented in this chapter show that, in general, institutional environmental expectations such as rationalized myths need to be “actively processed” (Hasse and Krücken, 2005: 71, author’s translation) and that, in the case of participation, this was done in accordance with existing organisational policies. The World Bank, which Kühl has called a “vanguard organization” (Kühl, 2009: 559)

4.4 Intermediate Conclusion

141

and one of the two “most influential international organizations of development co-operation” (Kühl, 2009: 565), is in such a prominent position in the field of development that it can in addition be expected to shape which interpretations of participation are legitimate in the field. As Kühl has shown for the case of the capacity development concept, “nearly all development assistance organizations will quickly follow what a vanguard organization like the World Bank does” (Kühl, 2009: 559). In his analysis, he illustrated how other organisations in the field felt the need to follow what they perceived as a “change of paradigm” (Kühl, 2009: 565) in the way development interventions were approached by the World Bank and the United Nations Development Programme, the other highly influential organisation in the field. These points raise the question whether additional theoretical frameworks could be useful for understanding the different interpretations of participation in TSUPU and USMID. It is old news in institutional research that organisational responses to environmental pressures are heterogenous. As Greenwood et al. note, “there has been general acceptance that organizations are not ‘passive receptors of legitimate ideas’” (Greenwood et al., 2017: 4). Wooten and Hoffman point out that “the interaction between firm and field [is] not unidirectional nor [is] it free from interpretation and filtering processes” (Wooten and Hoffman, 2017: 61, emphasis in the original). Research has shown that organisations are able to respond to institutional pressures strategically (Oliver, 1991) and in accordance with their own interest (Greenwood and Hinings, 1996). Bansal and Penner looked at the use of recycled newsprint among four newspaper publishers in the United States of America and found that individual interpretations mattered in producing differences in organisational responses (Bansal and Penner, 2002). Dutton and Dukerich found that an organisation’s identity “constrain[s], mold[s], and fuel[s] interpretations” of issues (Dutton and Dukerich, 1991: 550). Similarly, the institutional work perspective analyses how individual and collective actors shape institutions. Thereby, this approach brings organisational agency into institutional research. As Hampel et al. note: “[t]he questions at the heart of the institutional work perspective focus on understanding how, why and when actors work to shape sets of institutions, the factors that affect their ability to do so, and the experience of these efforts for those involved” (Hampel et al., 2017: 558). An approach that has focused on the translation and editing of ideas in processes of diffusion and adoption is that of translation (Czarniawska and Sevón, 2005a; Czarniawska-Joerges and Sevón, 1996; Rottenburg, 1996; Wedlin and Sahlin, 2017). Wedlin and Sahlin describe translation as understanding ideas not as diffused but as “actively transferred and translated in a context of other

142

4

Responding to the Myth of Participation …

ideas, actors, traditions and institutions” (Wedlin and Sahlin, 2017: 103). As a consequence, they point out, ideas are changed, varied, and stratified. From an organisational perspective, a field-level study of the evolution of participation into a rationalized myth would therefore make for an insightful expansion of the analysis in this thesis. Such research could focus on the role of the World Bank in shaping the myth of participation in historical perspective, drawing on the theoretical perspectives of institutional work or translation. The potential value of these additional approaches for the analysis of the empirical case presented in this thesis is reviewed in more detail in the discussion section in Chapter 7.

5

Organising Civil Society by Building Membership

There is no participation without participants. This holds true for all organisations involved in the implementation of participatory mechanisms such as the Municipal Development Forum (MDF), from the World Bank to the municipal administration. In the framework of such development interventions, a civil society that can participate is a community that can be a counterpart to the local government and administration. It represents a partner for the organisations implementing the intervention. But what does such a community look like? This chapter disentangles conceptualisations of the civil society—frequently denoted “community”1 in the field. It demonstrates how competing conceptualisations of civil society made participation challenging for municipal administrators. In the field, civil society was at the same time conceptualised as a resource for the implementation of development projects and as problematic and in need of transformation. This chapter further shows how bureaucracies dealt with the uncertainties and complexities associated with participation by creating a subset of the civil society (representatives) and ensuring that the right people formed part of this subset. Henkel and Stirrat would call this an attempt “to reshape the personhood of the participants” (Henkel and Stirrat, 2001: 182). In other words, this chapter demonstrates that the Municipal Development Forums (MDFs) can be

1

In this thesis, the MDFs are understood as the partial organization of civil society, with the term civil society referring to organised and non-organised non-state and non-market actors in a country (see Chapter 1) (see also Cornwall et al., 2011: 9; Eberlei, 2014: 6). In the field of development interventions, and thus also in this case study, actors often speak of “community” rather than “citizens” or “civil society”. “Community” is in this thesis interpreted as referring to the citizens of a specific locality, namely the urban centres where TSUPU’s and USMID’s development interventions were implemented. The terms “civil society”, “community” and “citizens” are used interchangeably throughout this chapter. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2021 E. M. Schindler, Structuring People, Sozialwissenschaftliche Zugänge zu Afrika, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-35903-4_5

143

144

5

Organising Civil Society by Building Membership

understood as instances of partial organization, where civil society was organised by creating a specific and definitive membership.

5.1

Citizens as Partners and Objects of Transformation

The concept of participatory development suggests that governments should see citizens as partners. In the case of the MDFs, citizens provided information about potential projects for the improvement of their own locality and monitored the implementation of these projects through governments and contractors. The TSUPU programme document, for example, stated that “the municipality is the key partner of the community in the pursuit of public community partnerships” (Cities Alliance, 2010: 15) and that MDFs were “the fundamental building block towards good governance and the creation of on-going public community partnerships” (Cities Alliance, 2010: 20). Indeed, “public community partnerships” were named as an outcome of MDF establishment in TSUPU’s logframe2 (Cities Alliance, 2010: 27). USMID’s documents did not explicitly speak about partnership, but the role of MDFs was defined in such a way that they became important actors in the municipal government (see Chapter 4, Responding to the Myth of Participation through Interpretation and Decoupling). A senior official for urban administration in the Ministry of Local Government (MoLG) pointed out that the MDF “are working with the government, in partnership” (EI23: Ibrahim, MoLG, March 2017). MDF members had also internalised this perspective: “So the MDF is … we are different stakeholders, partnering with government” (EI35: Bryan, MDF member, A-Town, March 2017). Municipal bureaucrats, however, did not perceive of the MDF in that way. As a matter of fact, in 19 interviews and uncounted informal interactions with municipal bureaucrats, the terms “partner” or “partnership” were never once mentioned. As the analysis in Section 4.3 (Local Administrations: Participation as a Donor Conditionality) has shown, for the municipal administrations, the forums were primarily a donor conditionality. At the same time, participatory interventions often frame citizens as a problem for the implementation of development projects and programmes. Spies showed

2

The logframe is a common project management element in the planning and formulation of development interventions. It specifies the project logic, linking means and ends through a logical chain. The logframe is usually presented as a matrix of rows and columns specifying, for example, project goals, outputs, activities and inputs in the rows and indicators of achievement, means of verification and assumptions in the columns. Project goals are often connected to national and/or international development objectives.

5.1 Citizens as Partners and Objects of Transformation

145

that “local social orders or cultural concepts and practices are often seen as complicating development projects or affecting their implementation” (Spies, 2009: 66, author’s translation). Li found that in the early 1990s, development interventions began to make civil society a “community of concern” (Li, 2013: 61). It was portrayed as deficient, as “a thing to be designed and promoted, … a project accomplished by training and capacity building” (Li, 2013: 61; see also Rossi, 2006). This leaves the municipal administrations with the ambivalent task of involving a community which is deemed deficient or even problematic. Unsurprisingly then, when speaking with municipal bureaucrats, the local community was mainly described in terms of what it ideally should have been but was not.3 It seems that from the perspective of municipal bureaucrats, there was a problem with the local community, it was lacking something which was considered desirable or useful. Municipal bureaucrats characterised citizens as not enlightened4 , as not being able to speak English, as disrespectful of government projects. In a nutshell, communities were in need of transformation. This “problem” with communities had two dimensions: knowledge and behaviour. From the perspective of municipal bureaucrats, communities had a lack of knowledge. In several interviews, they were presented as in need of education or sensitisation in order to understand the importance of government projects and their own role in the municipality. In A-Town, for example, the community development officer saw communities as uneducated and, therefore, unable to understand what was required of them when they participated in project implementation activities. “So it is basically … to see how best they [the community] can understand it in a simpler way because these are communities, some of them are enlightened, some of them have not gone to school, some of them … do not speak English but they are seen to be very, very active and we need to see how we can involve them” (EI25: CDO, A-Town, March 2017).

Speaking about his own role in the municipal administration, the community development officer pointed out that government activities needed to be conveyed in “a simpler way” so that communities could understand, despite a lack of education or inability to speak English, the official language used in government 3

Of course, municipal administrators also speak about who belongs to the community. Predominantly, they speak about stakeholder groups, which is donor jargon and shows the dominance of donor concepts even in the language of municipal bureaucrats. 4 Depicting citizens as not “enlightened” is reminiscent of early colonial conceptualisations of non-European peoples as cannibals, uncivilised, unreasonable, akin in their behaviour to wild animals (see Hall, 1994) and thus represents a striking use of colonialist terminology by this municipal bureaucrat.

146

5

Organising Civil Society by Building Membership

documents. This simplification was necessary because the communities were “active”, meaning they were interested in the developments of their municipality and wanted to be involved in it. The environment officer of A-Town implied that the communities did not know how to adequately behave in quotidian situations such as the disposal of waste. “So now my kind of work as an environment officer … is to sensitise to communities around the municipality on all matters concerning environment and such matters include things like issues of solid waste management, how are the communities supposed to manage their waste? Because sometimes the communities think that managing waste is the responsibility of the municipality not knowing that it is the responsibility of an individual. The person who generated the waste is supposed to manage it, although as council we come in to collect it and dispose of it to an appropriate place” (EI28: EO, A-Town, March 2017).

According to him, the citizens of A-Town expected the municipal government to take care of all waste in public spaces. The environment officer, however, called upon the community to assemble the waste in the “appropriate place”, i.e. a collection spot where the municipal waste collectors pass by regularly. The community’s deviant behaviour resulted in negative effects on A-Town, in this case, it was the environment that was affected by unmanaged waste. Beyond this alleged ignorance about government activities, A-Town’s deputy town clerk even portrayed communities as being unaware of their own needs: “MDF can be able to help us enhance the participation at the bottom levels so they help us to enhance so that people will be able to understand that they have a need” (EI36: DTC, A-Town, March 2017). In these statements, municipal bureaucrats constructed people with deficiencies, without any own knowledge, without even a perspective on their own needs. This presumed lack of knowledge led municipal bureaucrats to articulate a behavioural expectation of non-compliance with rules and regulations. The community did not behave in accordance with the law and was even said to actively destroy government projects. “So we sensitise them on matters of waste management, matters of tree planting, why we need to plant trees and if we have planted [trees], as council how do we maintain them, so that the communities do not again walk over them and destroy them” (EI28: EO, A-Town, March 2017). “Actually, … most people who come from slum areas are drug addicts, drunkards, so in most cases, most of them are very vocal, most of them, actually there are few calm people in the slums” (EI34: PP, A-Town, March 2017).

5.1 Citizens as Partners and Objects of Transformation

147

Both A-Town’s environment officer and its physical planner demonstrated a disdain for “communities” and people living in slum areas, respectively. While the physical planner dismissed them as addicts, thereby implying that it was impossible to respectfully and fruitfully engage with them, the environment officer expected that citizens would not recognise the benefits of the municipal government planting trees and instead destroy them. His expectation stemmed from experience: several research participants in A-Town mentioned that public toilets which the government had constructed in a poor area of town were demolished by citizens who disagreed with the governmental intervention. A-Town’s assistant engineer found even more drastic words to express that the local community was expected to behave destructively with respect to government projects: “Okay, now like an example we opened a road recently, that was last year in [ward in A-Town], and the road had challenges. People had their structures on the roadside, and we had to go first of all to peg, we went with the planner for pegging. And after, planner told me, I have finished my part so you can go and open the road, engineer fuelled the wheel loader and the grader, and we went. But … if you go there with equipment yourself, they can even stone you” (EI38: AE, A-Town, March 2017).

The assistant engineer described that in the framework of a road construction, citizens who “had their structures on the roadside”, i.e. who had built houses and businesses along the road, were forced to relocate. Because the planner pegged the road, i.e. she had marked the land designated for road construction and had thus made clear that citizens were indeed encroaching on a road reserve, the communities understood, and the engineer was able to later tar and grade the road. However, he claimed that had the municipal employees shown up to level the road without the planner’s pegging, citizens would have resorted to stoning them. Overall, these municipal bureaucrats expected the local community to be unruly during meetings, to destroy government projects and even be violent in the face of governmental projects such as the construction of a road which citizens might be opposed to. They portrayed citizens as unreasonable or even irrational adults and delegitimised their role as active participants in projects and activities of the municipal administration. Pretty has identified this as a common dilemma for administrations: “[a] dilemma for many authorities is they both need and fear people’s participation. They need people’s agreements and support, but they fear that this wider involvement is less controllable, less precise and so likely to slow down planning processes” (Pretty, 1995: 1252). This paradox can be seen as analogous to a basic contradiction of international development aid: donors see recipient governments

148

5

Organising Civil Society by Building Membership

as partners while at the same time viewing them as in need of reform. In his ethnography of the World Bank, Lie speaks of two conflicting logics that define development cooperation: “on the one hand the liberal agenda of empowering aid recipients to make their own decisions; on the other hand, the donors’ need to exert control and promote their own policies“ (Lie, 2015: 4). How then, did municipal bureaucrats deal with the paradox of having to involve the local community as a partner in aid interventions while at the same time perceiving it as so highly deficient? After all, even participation with a highly regarded set of participants challenges an administration because it requires the organisation to open up to non-members, potentially endangering organisational boundaries and making organisational processes less predictable. Municipal bureaucrats, I argue in the following, needed to first produce communities that they were able to work with before participatory mechanisms could be implemented. They needed to be sensitised and educated about proper behaviour, and they had to be organised in accordance with preconceived notions of who belonged to the community and who could be expected to behave properly in the eyes of municipal bureaucrats. In other words, municipal bureaucrats found “the right people for participation”.5

5.2

Creating Members: The Right People for Participation

“[O]rganizational membership is not something that merely emerges in complex and implicit social processes. People in organizations decide who is to be a member.” (Ahrne and Brunsson, 2019b: 9)

For the organisations in the field, defining the participants of a participatory intervention in a certain way or delineating the group so that it became a tangible actor was an important way to deal with the paradoxes of participation. As Gruffydd Jones argues in her analysis of the international urban agenda for African cities, international development’s emphasis on multi-stakeholder partnerships and participation “requires redefining the public in terms of a community which is organised and active, taking responsibility for its own provisioning in the most efficient and appropriate manner” (Gruffydd Jones, 2009: 61–62). As set out in the theoretical framework in Chapter 2, development interventions are 5

Right and wrong are not clear-cut containers into which citizens can be sorted. There are inconsistencies and contradictions in the ways municipal administrators conceptualise communities.

5.2 Creating Members: The Right People for Participation

149

ultimately subjected to common project planning procedures. Knowing which different groups of people—“stakeholders” as it is called in the field’s language— belong to a local community helps to extrapolate what kind of needs they might have. It also allows the involved organisations to determine project achievements and indicators for monitoring and evaluation, something that aid organisations commonly need to determine before projects and programmes are even approved (Kühl, 1998: 54). Kühl explains that the structuring of civil society can either take on the form of encouraging the structuration of existing groups, through the “creation of functions and structures” (e.g. electing an “executive” structure with “president, vice president, treasurer and general secretary”; “deriving a charter and internal procedural regulations”) or by doing the same in a newly created group (Kühl, 1998: 58–59, author’s translation). Newly created groups, Kühl points out, are often integrated into “a whole network of projects” so that they continue to exist or have a “motivation to continue to exist” (Kühl, 1998: 60, author’s translation). Similarly, Ahrne and Brunsson argue that partial organization via the membership criterion can build on existing relationships but can also occur without previous relationships (Ahrne and Brunsson, 2019b: 24). They argue that the latter type of organising “is more difficult because it must be combined with attempts to make the decisions not only known, but also relevant for the target group—who should at least consider the organizers’ decisions when making their own decisions” (Ahrne and Brunsson, 2019b: 24). In the case of MDFs, the partial organization of citizens through the creation of a membership was threefold: first, the involved international network had predetermined what it called a “community profile” (Cities Alliance, 2010). The suggested list of important stakeholder groups then found its way into formal documentation on and of the forums and also into the narratives of national and local bureaucrats, as well as the MDFs themselves. Second, the organisations in the field drew strongly on existing groups and relationships in their attempt to create a membership. Third, the bureaucrats in international organisations, the national Ministry of Lands, Housing and Urban Development (MoLHUD) and municipal administrations expressed behavioural expectations towards the members of the MDFs. The following sections describe all three elements of creating a membership and show how they were elementary in the partial organization of civil society.

150

5

Organising Civil Society by Building Membership

5.2.1 A Preconceived Notion of Who Belongs to the Community An analysis of programme documents shows that both for the Cities Alliance and the World Bank, the MDFs were to represent the voice of what they called “the community”. Both organisations also had a preconceived notion of who belonged to this “community”. To be fair: the view of community as consisting of different groups of people is a departure from the early days of participation, when “the community” was often perceived as an undifferentiated, homogenous group of people (Cooke and Kothari, 2001a: 6; see also Guijt and Shah, 1998; Williams, 2004: 92). Nonetheless, what critics have called the “myth of community” continues to dominate many participatory interventions. Given that communities are often fraught with local power contestations (Korf, 2006), the “myth of community” has often been criticised as unrealistic romanticism, and it indeed has found to be detrimental to the inclusion of vulnerable groups (Cornwall, 2006). Cornwall explains that it is a complicated balance between the pragmatism necessary in the implementation of participatory interventions and the legitimacy of those participating as representatives of a wider community: “One frequently used mechanism for inclusion is the identification of predetermined categories of ‘stakeholders’ whose views are taken to represent others of their kind” (Cornwall, 2008: 277). TSUPU’s programme document, for example, spoke of a “community profile”, which “would typically be based on gender, age and ability criteria amongst others” (Cities Alliance, 2010: 8) and was “inclusive of women, youth, disabled, and other vulnerable groups” (Cities Alliance, 2010: 7). USMID’s programme document did not define “community” or “civil society” at all but rather mentioned bringing together different “stakeholders” in the MDFs: “MFs have representation from local stakeholders including the private sector, NGOs, faith based organizations, CBOs, settlement level representatives as well as council officials, service providers and politicians” (World Bank, 2013b: 22).6 This concept of “relevant stakeholders” was taken up in the draft MDF charter, which “define[d] roles and responsibilities and institutional structure and relations” (World Bank, 2013b: 42) and served as a template for the MDF charters in all municipalities. Indeed, the purpose of the forum was “to bring together all stakeholders in the urban sector … and discuss the crucial challenges associated urbanization [sic]” of a given municipality (D7: The Charter for Municipal Development 6

As mentioned in Section 4.2.1 (Understanding Participation as a Tool for Monitoring), USMID’s programme document abbreviates the forums as “MF” instead of “MDF”.

5.2 Creating Members: The Right People for Participation

151

Forums—Draft, MoLHUD, 2012, Preamble). In two articles, the charter defined specifically who was meant by the term “stakeholder”. The most elaborate list of stakeholders was spelled out in the article about the executive committee. The article specified that the executive committee was to consist of representatives of stakeholders and lists the government, private sector, development partners, CBOs, NGOs, academia, individuals, media, professionals and religious leaders (D7: The Charter for Municipal Development Forums—Draft, MoLHUD, 2012, Article 7, Paragraph B). The article describing the general assembly also listed these stakeholders which were to be represented therein. However, the list of stakeholders for the general assembly did not include media, professionals and religious leaders. Such an elaborated list of so-called stakeholders is quite striking considering that the aim of the MDF was to bring together all different citizens to participate in the development of their municipality. As Cleaver criticises, “the question of how such generalized categories of people might exercise agency is generally sidestepped” (Cleaver, 2001b: 38). In addition, the means-ends relationship between involvement of these stakeholders and community representation in governmental decision-making was often formulated in a rather fuzzy manner. It, furthermore, seems unlikely that donor organisations or central government ministries such as the MoLHUD would be able to identify who the relevant stakeholders in each of the municipalities are, or even that any generic list of stakeholder groups could adequately capture the circumstances in the different municipalities implementing the MDFs. Asked how the different stakeholder groups were identified, Nathanael from the MoLHUD explained that during the launch of the municipal development forums, the actual stakeholders would be present in each of the municipalities and would elect their representatives. “And during the launch of the municipal development forums the various members [of different stakeholder groups] present at that meeting would all endorse [representatives] … It was important to identify especially when they are forming the [MDF] executive committee [that] each [stakeholder group] would be represented by a certain number of what? Representatives. Ranging from the private sector, civil society, the communities, the media, the youths, the women, and all the other interest groups” (EI17: Nathanael, MoLHUD, February 2017).

Implicitly, Nathanael here made the point that all possible groups of stakeholders, the “different constituencies”, were present at the meeting to launch the MDFs and would select representatives for the forums’ executive committee there. Upon my request, he later specified that in the bid to identify stakeholders, the local administration was the main contact:

152

5

Organising Civil Society by Building Membership

“No, initially of course we invited the town clerks, we invited the community development officers, who were the focal point officers for the TSUPU Programme. Yeah, so we invited those ones …, we guide them through the kind of meetings about these forums. Then, from there, they would go down and begin preparing and invite, and hold all the stakeholder meetings” (EI17: Nathanael, MoLHUD, February 2017).

The town clerk and community development officer in each municipality were tasked with “going down”, which circumscribes holding meetings for local citizens to come together in order to inform them about the TSUPU programme and to invite relevant stakeholders to the launch of the MDFs that Nathanael was talking about earlier. The preconceived notion of stakeholders is evident in the lists of potential groups foreseen to participate in the MDFs, both in the programme documents of TSUPU and USMID (Cities Alliance, 2010; World Bank, 2013b) and in the draft MDF charter (D7: The Charter for Municipal Development Forums—Draft, MoLHUD, 2012). It dominated the narratives of national and municipal bureaucrats and also of the forums themselves. Just like the draft MDF charter, A-Town’s economic planner listed the private sector, academia and representatives of religious organisations as stakeholders in the MDFs: “MDF as a forum has cross-cutting representatives of almost all the communities of A-Town, you get it? You find there the business community represented, the private sector, the academia. We find there the religious people, they are represented, so it is a big forum” (EI37: EP, A-Town, March 2017).

B-Ville’s community development officer also referred to the business community, academia and churches when listing who was represented in the forums. In addition, he mentioned NGOs, CBOs, and several categories: “MDF, they represent like NGOs, CBOs, slum dwellers, academia, business community, youth, elderly, people with disabilities, churches, in fact … we consider protestants, catholic and then Muslims, the three. Who else is remaining? I think those are the ones” (EI49: CDO, B-Ville, April 2017).

As we see, he further listed youth, the elderly and people with disabilities. These three are categorised as “marginalised groups” in the Ugandan constitution (Republic of Uganda, 1995, Article 32) and were mentioned as MDF stakeholders in other interviews, too. Bryan, an active member in A-Town’s MDF, for example, named women as stakeholders. Like youth, the elderly and people with

5.2 Creating Members: The Right People for Participation

153

disabilities, women, too, are classed as a marginalised group in the Ugandan constitution (Republic of Uganda, 1995, Article 32). “[When] the MDFs were established, … the first question was, ‘who are the key stakeholders?’. We had to sit down and look in A-Town municipality [at] the diversity of the stakeholders. And we had now to come up with the list where … slum dwellers is one of them, the youth is one of them, the women, the individuals, business community, media, professionals, NGO” (EI35: Bryan, MDF member, A-Town, March 2017).

Just like B-Ville’s community development officer, Bryan mentioned slum dwellers as stakeholders. He reiterated the MDF charter when listing individuals, the business community, media, professionals and NGOs as stakeholders of the forum. Over time, the lists of stakeholder groups suggested in the charters became almost like a checklist to ensure the forum included those groups of people that had been envisioned from the start. The preconceived notion of the local community, it seems, influenced who was seen as a relevant stakeholder for the forums and, therefore, who could participate. When the list of stakeholder groups suggested in the draft charter was altered, it resulted in an even narrower definition of who was perceived to be a valued participant in the forums. In its 2017 revision of the charter, B-Ville’s municipal administration further specified the stakeholder groups already listed in the draft charter. Rather than listing only “the government” as a stakeholder, it noted “division chairpersons” and “technical officers”. “Religious leaders” were specified as “Church of Uganda”, “Catholics”, “Muslims” and “Pentecostal”. The new charter furthermore added slum dwellers representatives, women, youth, council representatives, division forum chairpersons and people with disabilities to the list of stakeholders. Alongside this specification of stakeholder groups, B-Ville’s revised charter limited the possible size of the MDF’s general assembly to 100 stakeholder representatives and added numerical restrictions for each stakeholder group, e.g. it allowed for five representatives of each of the four listed religious groups.

5.2.2 Building on Existing Groups and Relationships Defining who belonged to a community, in the language of international development, meant determining which stakeholder groups were to participate in the MDF. That was, however, only the first step in organising citizens into members.

154

5

Organising Civil Society by Building Membership

In a second step, these pre-identified stakeholder groups needed to be mobilised to actually participate in the forums. Mobilisation was the term commonly used in the field for the act of organising a local community. In order to do so, the organisations in the field drew on existing groups and relationships. “The support NGO, which was Hand-in-Hand [was] mobilising the urban poor, the ones who are living in slums. So they mobilised them into federations. So the kind of model which was adopted is based on the model of the International Network of the Urban Poor” (EI17: Nathanael, MoLHUD, February 2017).

In the framework of TSUPU, the entire mobilisation process was done by Handin-Hand, a small national NGO which was founded in 2006 with the aim of supporting to the National Organisation of the Urban Poor in administrative and financial matters. The National Organisation of the Urban Poor was an umbrella organisation for Urban Poor Savings Groups in Uganda and advocated for organising slum dwellers into savings groups as a form of empowerment. This set-up is what Nathanael referred to as the “model of the International Network of the Urban Poor”. The International Network of the Urban Poor (INUP) understood itself as an international network of community-based organisations that provided support to self-organised urban poor people on a local and national level in towns and cities in 32 countries across Africa, Asia and Latin America. Both INUP and Hand-in-Hand in this sense understood themselves as service providers to urban poor populations. Instead of driving their own agenda, the organisations represented the interests and agendas of these populations. The other pre-identified “stakeholder groups” were expected to already rely on organised structures or groups, such as business associations. Asked about the mobilisation of citizens for the MDFs, Nathanael from the MoLHUD described that existing “interest groups” would select their representatives for the forums: “[I]n some places … it would really be a big function: mobilise the slum dwellers, mobilise the various groups and then [have] a brass band to move around town in a procession, showing people that we are going to establish this forum and then we could end up holding either a public rally where you have various interest groups attended [sic] and then the leaders would give speeches. And at the end of the day, each of the various stakeholders would be asked to go and nominate the people who should be representing them on the Municipal Development Forum. … So all the various interest groups would be represented” (EI17: Nathanael, MoLHUD, February 2017).

5.2 Creating Members: The Right People for Participation

155

Rather than mobilising citizens, Nathanael called it “mobilising groups”, or more specifically, interest groups. In another interview, he listed different types of interest groups that could be represented in the MDFs: “Each of the members were representing a specific constituency, like those were representing traders, those were representing transporters, those were representing cultural institutions and so forth” (EI64: Nathanael, MoLHUD, April 2017).

Nathanael named traders, transporters and cultural institutions, i.e. groups organised by profession or cultural heritage.7 On a different occasion, he talked about market vendors, NGOs, the media, women, youths and the disabled as interest groups (EI17: Nathanael, MoLHUD, February 2017). He further mentioned that, before selecting their MDF representatives, the various interest groups’ leaders would give speeches, in the sense of a campaign or application speech. This can be best understood when considering the importance of community-based organisations (CBOs) in the organising of civil society in Uganda. Every Ugandan municipality has a so-called community development officer (CDO) who is—as per the job description—responsible for the coordination of “all communitybased services in the Municipality and community participation in development programmes and projects” (Ministry of Public Service, 2011: 304). The community development officer of A-Town portrayed his role as that of an organiser of communities: “Basically, the common task is to see how best we can ensure that the communities are organised. They should come together to see how they can participate in development initiatives through community-based organisations. … Basically, awareness is our key platform in as far as encouraging them how best they can understand how best to get support if they are together. So, we see how we can carry out awareness and sensitisation on a number of programmes and … to see how best they can come together and also empower themselves so that they advocate as one voice through government and other institutions. So basically, we are supposed to create alliance with them to tell them what they want to know, to tell them the beauty of coming together, to have some group dynamics and how you are supposed to work, you are supposed to commit yourself” (EI25: CDO, A-Town, March 2017).

From the perspective of municipal bureaucrats, citizens should organise themselves into groups and register as community-based organisations. In fact, in 7

The classifications ‘cultural groups’ or ‘cultural institutions’ refer to the different kingdoms, chiefdoms and ethnic groups that make up the Ugandan territory and which continue to play an important role in shaping the identity and values of Ugandan citizens.

156

5

Organising Civil Society by Building Membership

order to apply for government support programmes in the area of community development, groups of citizens had to be formalised in registered communitybased organisations. Indeed, the level of formalisation of civil society groups into organisations in Uganda was high. Even the smallest savings groups had to register as a CBO and establish an internal structure. Watkins et al. point out that this process is common across sub-Saharan Africa: “African communities have traditions of village mutual assistance, which NGOs try to convert into formal community-based organizations, home-based care groups, or orphan care groups” (Watkins et al., 2012: 304). Bryan, who functioned as youth representative in A-Town’s MDF, paraphrased working with existing groups as “going through the channels”: “I go through the channels. You know in Uganda we have channels. For example, the youth leadership at their councils, they have their leaders. So if I have issues, I go through the, maybe the youth councillor, the youth chairman of that division, I get back to the ward, they also have up to LC1 level they have their leaders, so you engage them and say I have an issue maybe we have issues to talk, so can you please inform the relevant youth? There are also youth groups. You go also through the youth groups. … That is how we normally do. Then the business community also they have their channels, to follow, they have the market vendors, they have the market associations, they have the market leadership, they also go through that way. Slum dwellers, they also go through like I said” (EI35: Bryan, MDF member, A-Town, March 2017).

By building on the existing infrastructure of savings groups, their support organisations and community-based organisations as well as on the relationships these groups and organisations had formed with bureaucrats on different levels in Uganda’s government, the partial organization of citizens into groups was much easier than if it had started ‘from scratch’ (see also Ahrne and Brunsson, 2019b: 24).

5.2.3 Understanding the System: Behavioural Expectations and Professional Requirements Expectations regarding the behaviour of MDF members and preferences with respect to their previous professional experiences completed the transformation of an undefined community into a viable partner of government through the framing and shaping of MDF participants, i.e. through the partial organization of citizens into members. MDFs were seen to aggregate disparate voices of the local community and provide information about issues that should be addressed from the

5.2 Creating Members: The Right People for Participation

157

community’s perspective. However, there were limitations regarding the degree of involvement that was expected from the MDF. Geraldine from the World Bank, for example, described being “very controversial” as an issue of MDFs. “And then some of the MDFs have issues, for example, in [municipality]8 , the MDF would always bring so many complaints, was very controversial and the mayor would get very, very angry. But now they elected someone new as MDF leadership” (EI27: Geraldine, WB Uganda, March 2017).

Tabling too many issues put the government off. Despite being formally delineated as representatives of the community, it seems the MDFs were not expected to pursue their own interests or were at least not supposed to “complain” too much. From the perspective of the World Bank and municipal governments, an overly critical forum was less functional, it did not fit neatly into the ‘organised and useful’ category anymore, it could not be used as a resource. Similarly, being too bold and assertive was contrary to the behavioural expectations. Raymond from the MoLHUD emphasised that the forums could at times be “too pushy”: “You may find that [an MDF] is very active in meetings and following up through, but they’re too strong in pushing local government, like the technical leaders. … they’re too pushy, … they go very fast, they don’t understand government systems. Sometimes they say, ‘Could we have our own independent bank account?’, yet that is not the idea. They have to use the existing accounting systems. … So they’re learning on issues of how government, local government systems operate in terms of planning and budgeting” (EI41: Raymond, MoLHUD, March 2017).

The forums, Raymond found, were quick to demand things from local governments and did not always understand that bureaucrats had to work within planning and budgeting cycles and had limited discretionary spending powers. MoLHUD’s Derrick framed this alleged failure to understand government systems as “bringing the friction”: “So that is something that we are looking at, how do we get that done? The capacity. … And you know, maybe that is what is bringing the friction, that when these people see many things, they get overwhelmed and excited (laughs). … I think these people are still, they’re not with the maturity to look at reports from government” (EI62: Derrick, MoLHUD, April 2017). 8

[Municipality] is used where the interviewee named a specific municipality that should remain anonymous but was not amongst the three municipalities where field research was carried out, wherefore no pseudonym was established.

158

5

Organising Civil Society by Building Membership

He had experienced the forums as “overwhelmed” with the involvement in governmental activities. This led him to assume that citizens, whom he spoke of as “these people”, were not “mature” enough to be a partner for local governments and in development interventions. A second dimension of behavioural expectations was that MDFs should not perceive of themselves or act as political entities. This was so for two reasons. First, it was seen as problematic when MDF members showed political ambitions, i.e. decided to run for a political office, because they would then contest incumbent politicians rather than working with them for the sake of municipal development. Second, an incumbent politician was not supposed to have influence in an MDF and use this influence for her political ambitions. Rather, the forums were intended to neutrally—almost technocratically—represent the voice of the people. If the forums developed political ambitions, they were seen to wrongfully invade the sphere of politics. World Bank officer Geraldine cautioned that if the forums got too political, they were perceived as a threat by politicians. “The worst threat, to me, is if they are aspiring to be politicians. They should remain neutral to politics. … political ambitions will kill the will of the municipality to cooperate, because then the MDFs are considered a threat” (EI27: Geraldine, WB Uganda, March 2017).

Once they were perceived as a threat, the municipal administration would not involve the forums in planning and decision-making anymore, Geraldine pointed out. C-City’s mayor echoed this perspective, indicating that in several other municipalities, the political ambitions of MDF members had led to tensions. “Personally, I’ve managed my relationship with the MDF here, but the reports from some of my friends in other municipalities [are that] people with political ambitions are part of the MDF, and it is bringing a lot of tension and friction between the sitting mayors and politicians and the MDF members who have aspirations for elective offices” (EI45: mayor, C-City, March 2017).

C-City’s town clerk similarly mentioned that conflicts arose when the forums interfered in politics, but also acknowledged that an interest in politics might be “a human part of individuals”. “MDF is non-political, they’re not supposed to be engaged in politics. But you know there’s a humans [sic] part of individuals so some of the MDF members had interest in politics, they interfered in the political activities. That’s where conflicts have arisen.

5.2 Creating Members: The Right People for Participation

159

That’s where conflicts have arisen, basically that’s the issue” (EI43: TC, C-City, March 2017).

Grace from the National Planning Authority gave an indication as to what these political ambitions could look like: forum members contested for political office, therefore leaving local politicians under the impression that the MDF members had come to replace them. “[W]e found there were political issues in the background there, I think those who were elected in the forum at one time contested in offices with those who are already in the offices. So those in the offices thought the forum was now generating a new force to fight them” (EI16: Grace, NPA, February 2017).

Developing political ambitions could furthermore mean that forum members perceived the MDF itself as a political entity and began to show behaviour that was known to be typical for politicians in Uganda: the extension of term limits and permanence in office. A-Town’s economic planner, for example, expressed his disapproval over the MDF’s request to extend the MDF Executive Committee’s term limits beyond what was stipulated in the charter. “Now the only challenge I noticed about [the MDF] is that they are bringing in politics. The politics is coming in on issues of trying to negotiate the charter, to talk about term limits. That while [the charter] is providing for three years, then they should be given another chance to stay in the office; the argument is they started the forum, they must reap the fruits of that engagement, like that. So to me I call it political” (EI37: EP, A-Town, March 2017).

He noted that the charter provided for term limits of three years for the MDF executive committee and argued that those who desired another term in office could stand for office again. He dismissed the MDF’s argument, that three years were just enough to build a positive relationship with the municipal administration and that it needed a longer term to “reap the fruits of that engagement”, as political ambition. As World Bank officer Carine described, the limitation of terms of office for the MDF executive committee was closely related to the second reason why the bureaucrats on all levels were so adamant about the forums being non-political: the MDFs were not supposed to fall under the control of municipal politicians, i.e. of being corrupted into supporting politicians’ goals instead of representing community interests.

160

5

Organising Civil Society by Building Membership

“If you let them stay for four years, just because you want them to get aligned and closer to the political leadership and their legitimacy stops being questioned, there is a very, very big chance in my humble opinion that 75% of them will be captured. And they’ll be used by the existing politicians in their aspirations for the following term” (EI59: Carine, WB Uganda, April 2017).

Term limits served as a measure to avoid capture and co-optation of the Municipal Development Forums. Carine also called it “getting comfortable”. MoLHUD’s Derrick spoke about “getting swallowed up” (EI62: Derrick, MoLHUD, April 2017). MoLHUD’s urban development officer Ronald gave an example of what this capture could look like: some forums had readily agreed to include politicians as relevant community stakeholders in the MDF charter. “[W]e discourage the MDFs, we tell them they’re non-political. We don’t want them to turn into platforms of politics. So at the review of their charter, I find they had provided for politicians in the charter …, they put even politicians. The process was manipulated” (EI60: Ronald, MoLHUD, April 2017).

Overall, the political system was seen as corrupt and self-serving by many of my interview partners. This disdain for “everything politics” and its effects on the MDFs was reflected in interviews across all levels of government, the World Bank, the MoLHUD as well as the municipal administrations. This discussion of MDFs as non-political entities closely resembles what Li defines as “rendering society technical”, i.e. representing the domain of intervention “as an intelligible field with specifiable limits and particular characteristics” (Rose, 1999, cited in Li, 2007: 7) and identifying issues that can be solved with the instruments that donors hold readily available (Li, 2007, 2013). She analyses an intervention in Indonesia that was focused on what the World Bank called “government through community”. Her study demonstrates that communities had to be rendered technical through investigation, mapping, classification, documentation and interpretation in order for the identified problems to fit the solutions the World Bank could offer. Similarly, Charton finds that externally induced education reforms in Cameroon, aimed at improving the quality of the country’s education system, were turned into normative, hierarchical, and administrative exercises by bureaucrats, who were able to reap individual benefits. Donors, on the other hand, or their agendas drove a reform overload in the Cameroonian education sector. Education was represented as a “technical problem that could be solved with an appropriate set of reforms and tools” (Charton, 2014). Wong analyses the “depolitisation” (Wong, 2017: 116) of gender mainstreaming in development interventions. In his study of a community-based disaster

5.2 Creating Members: The Right People for Participation

161

management project in Cambodia, Wong argues that depolitisation occurred during the implementation of development interventions through a change in how gender mainstreaming was understood by the main actors involved (Wong, 2017). Erkkilä and Piironen discuss depoliticisation through what they call “numerical objectification of social phenomena” in good governance indicators, specifically the World Bank’s Worldwide Governance Indicators and the OECD’s “Government at a Glance” (Erkkilä and Piironen, 2014: 344). White argues that participation overall can result in the depoliticisation of development interventions, of movements or of whole topics in development (White, 1996). Ferguson even diagnosed the entire field of development interventions as an “anti-politics machine” (Ferguson, 1994). Overall, the bureaucrats’ portrayals of problematic forums show us that members of MDFs were expected to learn how to speak the language of the administration and to understand how the administration works. This, ultimately, implies that the MDF members should have also known their own place within the system and to which extent they were allowed to get involved, i.e. where the boundaries to their involvement lay. In the eyes of most municipal, national and international bureaucrats, this was best achieved by a preferable composition of the MDF members, i.e. by recruiting mainly people into the forums who had an academic education and previous professional experience in either the Ugandan administration or an international organisation. Indeed, former municipal bureaucrats, politicians, and people with working experience in international organisations were often among the members of MDFs. In all municipalities I studied in detail, A-Town, B-Ville and C-City, the MDF members that I met satisfied these requirements. I interacted with people who had studied at universities in Europe and ran successful businesses in Uganda. I spoke to retired procurement officers and school administrators as well as heads of local NGO networks and former local councillors. The interview partners attributed the fact that MDF presidents were doing a good job to them being retired employees of an international development bank (EI27: Geraldine, WB Uganda, March 2017) or “an engineer by profession” (EI41: Raymond, MoLHUD, March 2017). I heard that forums were successful because their membership consisted of “people in NGOs, academia, very active guys in consultancy, retired civil servants, you can see that kind of calibre” (EI40: William, MoLHUD, March 2017). Others pointed out that the MDF in C-City was “blessed that it has old civil servants, retired civil servants” who will “provide useful comments”, who are “people of maturity, of reputation, who understand the system” (EI62: Derrick, MoLHUD, April 2017). Even the president of C-City’s MDF himself named the fact that the composition of the forum was “elite” (EI42:

162

5

Organising Civil Society by Building Membership

MDF president, C-City, March 2017) as an important factor in the success of the forum’s partnership with the local administration: “we are strong, we decided to pick quality to come at the executive. People who can afford time, they are not looking for jobs, they are not looking to be paid, but they have a good heart for the community. So that’s the difference I think between [C-City] and other MDF[s]” (EI42: MDF president, C-City, March 2017). The 2017 revision of BVille’s MDF charter reflected this perspective by introducing specifications for the MDF’s executive committee with respect to the expected qualifications and even character traits. The MDF president and vice president were to be “a person of integrity” and hold “minimum qualifications of a diploma or equivalent, a developer and with knowledge of urban development/management”. Similarly, the MDF’s secretary “shall also be of a diploma holder or its equivalent” (D17: The Charter for B-Ville Municipal Development Forum, B-Ville Municipal Council and MDF, 2017, Article 7, Paragraph B). These specifications excluded a large part of B-Ville’s population from taking up these voluntary positions in the MDF’s executive committee and were likely to benefit the well-educated middle and upper class. Being a slum dweller, on the other hand, was associated with being a problematic counterpart (EI42: MDF president, C-City, March 2017; EI34: PP, A-Town, March 2017; EI41: Raymond, MoLHUD, March 2017; EI40: William, MoLHUD, March 2017). An official from the MoLHUD argued that those forums where slum dwellers were very active “have not built that capacity to engage the authorities, … their participation is passive. Even if you go there now, they don’t have any initiative they have done, they are only lamenting” (EI40: William, MoLHUD, March 2017). B-Ville’s community development officer pointed out that “the people who were elected on MDF, they’re not of that calibre, that’s where we have a challenge … They’re mainly with slum dwellers background, who don’t have capacity to plan and develop for this town” (EI49: CDO, B-Ville, April 2017). One avenue for achieving a better understanding of the government system when the first choice—an elite MDF membership—was not possible, was what the field called “sensitisation”. Sensitisation was often used in the sense of creating awareness or educating citizens. B-Ville’s town clerk, for example, used the term “sensitising” as synonym or paraphrase of “capacity building”, “training” and “informing”: “So they went through the process of capacity building, training them, informing them on what to do, sensitising them on what to do. So by the time I was in A-Town, they

5.2 Creating Members: The Right People for Participation

163

were already aware, they had manuals of what is expected of them. So they were quite knowledgeable on what they’re supposed to do” (EI54: TC, B-Ville, April 2017).9

Against the backdrop of problematic citizens, multiple municipal bureaucrats described their own role in the interaction with communities as that of an educator. B-Ville’s town clerk explained that the MDF had to be sensitised in order to understand what was expected of them. The environment officer in A-Town characterised his role as that of teaching communities, of training and sensitising them with the aim to teach individuals how to obey rules. “We do sensitisations, … sensitising the communities. We have projects that are being implemented within the municipality like a road project and maybe we have a contractor on site. So these contractors are required to have what we call environment and social management plans which must be adhered to during the processes of implementing the projects. So actually we must teach the communities and we sensitise them about what the contractor is supposed to do in terms of environment management. Like, for instance, when you are making a road, if it is a dry season, you generate dust. So the community should know that the contractor is supposed to water the road to reduce the dust. So we sensitise them with the projects but we also monitor projects that are being implemented within the municipality” (EI28: EO, A-Town, March 2017).

Rather than seeing the forums as representatives of concerns which citizens deemed really relevant to their lives, municipal bureaucrats assumed that the MDFs needed to be educated about the areas where they could and should be active. While B-Ville’s town clerk spoke, rather generally, about the MDF being provided with “manuals of what is expected of them”, A-Town’s environment officer specified involving the communities in a road construction project by teaching them how to monitor the contractor’s activities in terms of environmental management. And indeed, sensitisation is often linked primarily to channelling the interests of the government and its programmes into a community interest. In her study of a desertification project in Niger, for example, Rossi finds sensitisation to consist of a set of practices. According to Rossi, these practices “aimed at making project beneficiaries willing to accept change” and encouraged them “to express their problems in conformity with prevailing development discourses” (Rossi, 2006: 27–28). Evidentially, the organisations involved in TSUPU and USMID had clear understandings as to who was a useful participant in the MDFs and who was not. 9

In this quote, the town clerk of B-Ville spoke about the MDF in A-Town, where she had previously held the position of town clerk. Throughout the interview, she spoke of her experiences in both municipalities.

164

5

Organising Civil Society by Building Membership

Robins et al. portray this as quite common in the context of development interventions. They state that “engagement in state-provided spaces requires knowledge of the codes and tools of official discourse that are not easily transferable … those who have not yet been trained to meet the demands of disciplined engagement may be regarded as incoherent and unruly” (Robins et al., 2008: 1082). Far from being open to the participation of “all stakeholders” (D7: The Charter for Municipal Development Forums—Draft, MoLHUD, 2012), bureaucrats in the field projected their expectation in terms of what type of person would be an agreeable partner and worthy of the membership of MDFs. The partial organization of citizens into members turned communities into actors in the participation game. With experience in this game, previously unruly communities became professional communities who were conversant in donor jargon, took responsibility for their own development, provided voluntary unpaid labour, were a-political but ideally, nonetheless, had experience in government.

5.3

Intermediate Conclusion

Citizens perceived as unruly, unpredictable, erratic individuals in need of education were to a certain extent disqualified from being viable participants in the MDFs. This was achieved through the pre-definition of stakeholders for the MDFs, through the MDFs’ reliance on existing groups and through the formulation of expectations with respect to participants’ professional backgrounds. The MDFs became a knowledgeable and useful participant, a functional actor in the field of organisations that comprised the municipality as well as the development intervention. Defining participants in terms of who was and who was not a good participant can be understood as the partial organization of citizens through the creation of membership. The MDFs kept membership lists which took note of a member’s role or position in the forums as well as their contact details. As Ahrne and Brunsson indicate, “[m]embers are not anonymous. They are usually asked to provide a name, address, e-mail address, and telephone number, thereby facilitating further contact” (Ahrne and Brunsson, 2019b: 9). B-Ville’s 2010 charter illustrated how registration and membership of the MDFs was to be handled from the perspective of the MoLHUD, which provided the template for the charter (see Section 6.1, Formalisation of the MDFs’ Structures and Processes). The charter specified that “members shall be registered with [B-Ville] MDF after pledging in writing to abide by this charter and act in good faith and to the best of their ability in the application of the policies and procedures established by this charter”

5.3 Intermediate Conclusion

165

(D1: The Charter for B-Ville Municipal Development Forum, B-Ville Municipal Council and MDF, 2010, Article 8, Paragraph 1). New members seeking to join the MDF had to submit a written application to the MDF secretariat, which would be reviewed by the MDF’s executive committee and was subject to approval by the MDF council. Response to the membership application was to be given in writing and, in case of approval, a membership certificate was supposed to be issued to the new member (D1: The Charter for B-Ville Municipal Development Forum, B-Ville Municipal Council and MDF, 2010, Article 8, Paragraph 2). What are the benefits of organising citizens into members? From the perspective of the involved organisations this made perfect sense: professional communities were seen to better understand both the functioning of governmental and bureaucratic processes and the development needs of the municipality. They could thus be better partners for the administration, making their participation functional. Through organisation and selection criteria for participants, the MDFs became a resource for all bureaucratic organisations involved. For the World Bank and the MoLHUD, the forums took on the task of monitoring the municipal administration, which was seemingly always suspected to be corrupt (see Section 4.2.1, Understanding Participation as a Tool for Monitoring and Section 4.2.2, Different Types of Monitoring through the MDFs). For the municipal governments, the MDFs were used as a mouthpiece to and from the wider community and to avoid conflicts with the community affected by infrastructure developments (see Section 4.2.3, The MDFs as Mediator). What seems to have been lost to a certain extent in the process of organising is the perspective of participation as an articulation of community interests and an understanding of how local power structures can influence a construct such as the MDFs. “Too often, the use of categories to distinguish between different segments of ‘the community’ leads outside agencies to treat these categories as unproblematic and bounded units. Those who are put into these categories—‘the poor’, ‘women’—may not see themselves in these terms at all. They may identify with the interests of their kin, their partners, their patrons, those with whom they worship and so on. Their lives are not so easily partitioned up into neat little boxes. They may not have any particular sense of themselves as the kinds of subjects that development agencies represent them as” (Cornwall, 2008: 277).

As Cornwall states, both individual lives and community structures are more complicated than stakeholder concepts and categories make us believe. Wagner argues that an uncritical perspective on local communities hides “economic and social

166

5

Organising Civil Society by Building Membership

power structures” that could be of “eminent importance” in development interventions (Wagner, 2016: 12, author’s translation). By ignoring these issues, the organisation of citizens into members thus also reflected the interpretation of participation not as empowerment but rather as a functional element of development interventions. From the theoretical perspective of partial organization, the organisation of citizens into functional members in a development intervention constituted a decision about the type of relationship the organisations involved in TSUPU and USMID wanted to have with local citizens in the municipalities where the programmes were implemented. According to Ahrne and Brunsson, the elements constituting organisation are “ways of creating and maintaining relationships” (Ahrne and Brunsson, 2019b: 8). Membership “provides a more distinct and less floating categorization of affiliation than do other forms [of relationship]” (Ahrne and Brunsson, 2019b: 9). In other words: organisations can specify their relationship with their members in a clear and definite way. By creating membership also outside formal organisations, organisations gain certainty in dealing with their organisational environments. In the case of the MDFs, the organisations involved in their implementation decided which type of relationship with citizens they deemed appropriate: one that was functional rather than being conflictual or political. This also confirms that the partial organization of citizens into members constitutes, as Ahrne and Brunsson write, “an attempt to create a specific order” (Ahrne and Brunsson, 2019b). At this point it is necessary to consider a key difference between the neo-institutionalist perspective on participation taken in Chapter 4 (Responding to the Myth of Participation through Interpretation and Decoupling) and the analysis of MDFs as instances of partial organization in this and the following Chapter 6 (Organising Civil Society by Setting Rules). Conceptualising participation as a rationalized myth means understanding it as an institution, i.e. a taken-for-granted element and collectively shared frame in the field of international development (see Sections 2.2 and 2.4 in the theoretical framework). By drawing on the concept of partial organization to understand how organisations responded to the myth of participation in the form of MDFs, I introduce an approach that strictly differentiates institution and organisation. Ahrne and Brunsson distinguish between institutions as “emergent social orders, which merely happen rather than being decided” (Ahrne and Brunsson, 2011: 90), and organisation as their opposite, namely a decided order or “the result of the intervention of individuals or formal organizations which can and do make decisions not only about their own, but also about the behaviour and distinctions of others” (Ahrne and Brunsson, 2011). The empirical analysis presented here, however, shows that

5.3 Intermediate Conclusion

167

institutions and organisation might well be connected: in the case of participation and the MDFs, the partial organization of citizens constituted a response of the formal organisations in the field to a field-level institution. In other words, there can be interaction between the different types of social order Ahrne and Brunsson distinguish. Partial organization is also an alternative perspective on the agency of organisations in the face of institutions that was tentatively discussed in the intermediate conclusion to Chapter 4 (Responding to the Myth of Participation through Interpretation and Decoupling). These theoretical aspects are discussed further in the intermediate conclusion to Chapter 6 (Organising Civil Society by Setting Rules) and in the discussion of this thesis’ contribution in Section 7.2.

6

Organising Civil Society by Setting Rules

“What we have done is just to put the people in form of a structure.” (EI41: Raymond, MoLHUD, March 2017)

The partial organization of citizens into Municipal Development Forums (MDFs) was not only built on the criterion of membership. This chapter demonstrates that the organisation also included the means of participation: how participation could be done in the MDFs was closely encircled by rules which were set out in the MDF charter and implicit rules, or routines, that were enacted in everyday practices of interaction between local bureaucrats and the forums. Rules, as Ahrne and Brunsson specify, are “decisions about how people are expected to behave: when they shall meet, what they shall do, how they shall do things together, and the goals they are expected to achieve” (Ahrne and Brunsson, 2019b: 11). Often, rules exist in written form (Ahrne and Brunsson, 2019b: 11). However, as Section 6.2 shows, routines functioned as rules when they established how MDF members were expected to interact with local bureaucrats. Rules embedded the MDF into the organisational logic of the development intervention and the bureaucratic logic of local administrations. There were three main channels through which this happened. First, the MDFs, their structures and processes were formalised on paper. A charter that was developed in the Ministry of Lands, Housing and Urban Development (MoLHUD) prescribed in detail the organisational structure, election procedures and tasks of the forums. This charter “governed” the MDFs. After all, partners of bureaucracies needed a contact person and formal structures that the bureaucracy could interact with (see Chapter 2, Theoretical Framework). Second, in the municipal administrations, communication and interaction with and spaces of MDFs were subjected to administrative routines by way

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2021 E. M. Schindler, Structuring People, Sozialwissenschaftliche Zugänge zu Afrika, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-35903-4_6

169

170

6

Organising Civil Society by Setting Rules

of everyday practices: communication was formalised in official letters and interaction in official meetings. Third, there was a narrative around the need for an institutionalisation of the MDFs, which, ultimately, was a narrative about further or future rules for the forums. Partially organising citizens by setting rules protected the organisational boundaries of local administrations. Bureaucrats maintained control over which elements of their work the MDFs could be a part of. As in the case of membership, the partial organization of citizens by rules was not conducive to the development of a vibrantly participating community but rather produced a participation bureaucracy in which participation was restricted to clearly delineated arenas of interaction. As is shown in Section 6.2, this setting of rules did, however, not preclude the development of informal practices but rather appeared to enable them.

6.1

Formalisation of the MDFs’ Structures and Processes

“If we were to do an assessment as a ministry, we would tag the assessment on the expectations of the MDFs. We have the charter and the charter stipulates what the MDFs are supposed to do.” (EI60: Ronald, MoLHUD, April 2017)

On paper, the MDFs were highly formalised. All forums were established on the basis of a charter which set out in detail the organisational structure, election procedures and tasks of the forums. As Ronald from the MoLHUD emphasised, the charter detailed what was expected of the forums and served as the basis of assessment for the ministry. While TSUPU’s programme document did not mention the charter, USMID’s programme document framed the charter as a prescription for the forums: “MFs are established under a Charter that defines roles and responsibilities and institutional structure and relations” (World Bank, 2013b: 42). The programme document described that each forum had an executive committee and specified which members this committee was constituted of as well as the frequency with which this forum was expected to meet. USMID’s programme document even went beyond the prescriptions of the MDF charter and aimed to establish a project management team to monitor the implementation of major projects. “The team records project progress and reports on this back to the Forum” (World Bank, 2013b: 42). The World Bank seemed to have a rather clear idea of how the forum should best be organised and of the tasks it was expected to perform.

6.1 Formalisation of the MDFs’ Structures and Processes

171

According to the MoLHUD officer responsible for TSUPU, the draft charter was developed during TSUPU as an instrument to endow the forums with legitimacy (EI17: Nathanael, MoLHUD, February 2017). It seems that unless the forum could convey that it was based on an elaborate organisational form, it would not have been recognised as legitimate by the administrative organisations it was supposed to interact with. In other interviews, the charter was portrayed as the setting up of a governance structure for the forums in all municipalities (EI41: Raymond, MoLHUD, March 2017; EI60: Ronald, MoLHUD, April 2017). The draft MDF charter was developed in the MoLHUD by the officers working on issues of urban development. “I drafted a charter which was discussed by the technical team, they made their input, we circulated it to the various stakeholders who also made their input and finally it was approved. So we adopted it as a charter for the municipal development forums” (EI17: Nathanael, MoLHUD, February 2017).

Nathanael here recounted a process of coordination between himself, his team in the area of urban development and the so-called “development partners” involved in the programme, such as the World Bank, other central government ministries and potentially also the participating NGOs. How could these actors at the centre of government and international development claim to know how best to organise a civil society forum in various municipalities in Uganda? Nathanael emphasised that the charter was but a draft, intended for adaptation by the stakeholders in the municipalities: “[T]he charter provided the guidement, but it all depended to them in terms of identifying the specific interest groups … So the most important thing was to empower them and saying, ‘Well, we provided the guideline but it is up to you to … determine who should be represented in the forum’” (EI17: Nathanael, MoLHUD, February 2017).

In theory, the charter was to serve only as a suggestion for the internal organisation of the forums. The organisations involved in the implementation of TSUPU and USMID recognised that it was impossible for the MoLHUD or any other actor in central government, international organisations, or NGOs to decide who the important stakeholders in a municipality were. They thus appreciated the importance of local knowledge and an adaptation to local needs. However, this did not materialise in practice. A comparison of the draft charter with the actual charters from A-Town (2013) and B-Ville (2010/2017) shows that the charters mainly reproduced the draft prepared by the MoLHUD. Neither of the two charters were adapted to the local context, and even some of the spelling and grammar mistakes

172

6

Organising Civil Society by Setting Rules

from the MoLHUD template were replicated. Only few adaptations were made in the two local charters. In A-Town, the constitution of the executive committee differed from the draft charter’s suggestion in that members of the government were to form part of the executive committee, something that was criticised as evidence of co-optation by a member of the MoLHUD (EI60: Ronald, MoLHUD, April 2017). The forum in B-Ville created adjustments in its revision of their charter in 2016/2017. Similarly to A-Town, the main adjustments made in B-Ville were focused on the definition of the municipality’s relevant stakeholder groups as well as specifications for the MDF’s executive committee with respect to the expected qualifications and even character traits (see Chapter 5 for a detailed analysis of these changes). Overall, however, rather than being seen as a guidance document, the charter was treated as a rulebook by the organisations involved in the implementation of TSUPU and USMID. They saw the charter as devised to structure and organise the MDFs and their interactions in and with the municipal administrations. Specifically, the charter provided a detailed prescription of the MDFs’ organisational structure and decision-making processes as well as an extensive (seemingly overwhelming) catalogue of tasks, both of which are in the following analysed in more detail. Organisational structure and decision-making processes Under Article 7, the charter prescribed the organisation of the MDF. The forums were to consist of several organs, namely, the general assembly (council), the executive committee (to be constituted by the stakeholders) and thematic working groups (composed by the executive committee), the MDF secretariat as well as local urban fora. The general assembly was to be the “supreme authority of MDF” (D7: The Charter for Municipal Development Forums—Draft, MoLHUD, 2012). It was to meet once a year to discuss all issues relevant to the development of the municipality. Decisions were to be taken by simple majority “of at least a third of the members present at a meeting” (D7: The Charter for Municipal Development Forums—Draft, MoLHUD, 2012). The executive committee was foreseen as the executive organ of the MDF, the “governing body” (D7: The Charter for Municipal Development Forums—Draft, MoLHUD, 2012) with three mandatory posts, namely president, vice president and secretary as well as 15 executive committee members who were to represent the identified stakeholder groups. The executive committee was to meet at least quarterly, its term of office was limited to two years, with the eligibility for re-election for one term. The executive committee was further supposed to form “Thematic Technical working Groups [sic]” (D7: The Charter for Municipal Development Forums—Draft, MoLHUD, 2012). The executive committee was to take decisions by simple majority of the members present at a meeting. The secretariat

6.1 Formalisation of the MDFs’ Structures and Processes

173

was to be hosted by the municipal council, which in practice usually resulted in the community development officer functioning as the secretary. Besides common secretarial tasks such as maintaining documentation and registers, the roles of the MDF secretariat were listed as the implementation of executive committee decisions, the coordination of executive committee activities and thematic working groups as well as “act[ing] as linkage between the members and development partners” (D7: The Charter for Municipal Development Forums—Draft, MoLHUD, 2012). As far as the charter is concerned, the MDF appears as highly formalised and characterised by a rather elaborate structure. Indeed, the structures and procedures outlined in the charter documents are reminiscent of what is prescribed for nonprofit associations in Germany, so called eingetragene Vereine. When organised in accordance with the charter, therefore, the forums started to resemble formal organisations in the sense that they were given formal structures and decisionmaking processes. In line with Ahrne and Brunsson’s concept of partial organization, the prescription of organisational structures and decision-making processes could also be understood as the partial organization of citizens through the introduction of hierarchy. They describe hierarchy as “decisions about how to make decisions”, more specifically, “who shall have the power to influence others by their decisions and how their decisions shall be made” (Ahrne and Brunsson, 2019b: 13). However, in the case of the MDFs, the introduction of a governance structure and of rules for decision-making was not so much focused on bringing some people into a position of taking decisions for others but rather determined how the forums should work together, i.e. how often they should meet and how they were to interact with the local administration. The structures and decision-making processes prescribed by the charter can thus be seen as rules. Catalogue of tasks The partial organization of citizens through rules includes “the goals they are expected to achieve” (Ahrne and Brunsson, 2019b: 11). In the case of the MDFs, the forums’ objectives were detailed in Article 5 of the draft charter, while Article 6 specified the functions of the MDFs. The objectives included providing a “space for dialogue”, increasing “awareness of stakeholders about collective action to influence the urban development agenda”, promoting “collaborative applied urban research to find sustainable practical solutions to critical urban challenges”, improving “coordination and networking arrangements among stakeholders in the urban domain”, promoting “pro-active integrated participatory planning, development and management of the urban actors in urban areas” as well as organising “regular conferences and training events for purposes of influencing legal and policy reforms for effective

174

6

Organising Civil Society by Setting Rules

urban development and management” (D7: The Charter for Municipal Development Forums—Draft, MoLHUD, 2012, Article 5). These objectives are abstract. They imply far-reaching activities which placed responsibility for challenging and complicated tasks on the MDF. The charter afterwards specified the objectives by listing 16 functions. Some of these functions are closely related to what has been discussed about the forums thus far. The forums were, for example, tasked with actively participating in the prioritisation of projects under USMID, enhancing consultations on urban issues by organising forum meetings and monitoring the implementation of “resolutions pertaining to policy and legal reforms” (D7: The Charter for Municipal Development Forums—Draft, MoLHUD, 2012, Article 6d). Other functions named in the charter seem to go far beyond the mere voicing or aggregating of citizens’ interests or implementation monitoring in the context of donor interventions. The charter described, for example, that the MDFs were in general to play a “coordination role in prioritizing identified National [sic] & local urban development initiatives and facilitating sourcing of funding and technical support at all levels”. Furthermore, the MDF was to facilitate “applied research on planning and management of urban development issues” and maintain a website “for purposes of disseminating information and best practices and transferring of knowledge” (D7: The Charter for Municipal Development Forums—Draft, MoLHUD, 2012, Article 6). These impressive lists read like wish lists. They set out tasks which the MDFs in practice found difficult to fulfil. Despite the organisational and procedural structuration depicted above, the forums were not complete organisations, but only a partially organised entity of citizens. The MDFs’ limited financial resources and their lack of autonomy from bureaucratic organisations involved in the implementation of TSUPU and USMID constituted two of the forums’ main challenges. In A-Town’s annual meeting of the MDF general assembly, the MDF president Florence spoke about the forum’s need to get its own bank account: “Then another thing we must see that MDF gets its own account because members we have a very big challenge. [As] much as these people give us that money, even if they say we have allocated you this amount of money, we are not directly getting it … We must be independent so that we can be in position to report what we are doing directly” (MDF president in O5: annual meeting of the MDF general assembly, A-Town, February 2017).

By saying “we are not directly getting it”, Florence here referred to the conditionality of funds provided to the MDFs by the municipal administration. Other MDF members expressed their surprise at hearing that the MDF did not have its own bank

6.1 Formalisation of the MDFs’ Structures and Processes

175

account, and the general opinion seemed to be that the forum should have one in order to independently decide which activities it wanted to undertake. At a later point during the field research, however, the MDF focal person at the MoLHUD, Raymond, emphasised that the forums were not supposed to have a bank account but to receive funds through the municipal administration from USMID’s capacity development grant: “Sometimes they say, ‘Could we have our own independent bank account?’, yet that is not the idea. They have to use the existing accounting systems … They fall into the government system” (EI41: Raymond, MoLHUD, March 2017). This limited financial and decision-making autonomy of the forums, however, made tasks like maintaining a website or facilitating research seemingly impossible. For example, in order to set up and run a website, even if the members of the MDF had the relevant administrative skills to complete such a task, they would have to contract someone to build the website and pay for a domain, both of which require financial resources. In practice, the limited funds provided to the forums were barely enough to organise the forum’s meetings and finance workshops for forum members, e.g. in the case of C-City on the topics of lobbying, advocacy and good governance. In practice, therefore, tasks such as the maintenance of a website were not a priority for the MDFs. For other tasks mentioned in the charter, such as playing a coordinating role in prioritising identified national and local urban development initiatives, it is doubtable if the MDFs disposed of the necessary standing to fulfil their foreseen role. To be accepted as coordinators by municipal and national governments would have required the forums to have access to municipal and national government bureaucrats, to convince them to participate in such a process and to be able to convene these busy professionals. However, the MDF was a citizens’ forum which was composed of diverse groups of people with different educational and professional backgrounds, many of which would not be accepted as equals by government bureaucrats. It, therefore, seems unlikely that the MDF would succeed in such a coordinating role. Additionally, while the MDFs’ members volunteered their time to participate, the sheer number of tasks the forums were expected to accomplish resembled the workload of a full (and paid) government unit. At first sight, it might appear like a mismatch to, on the one hand, prescribe elaborate formal structures and decision-making processes for the MDFs, while, on the other hand, limiting the forum’s financial and decision-making autonomy. This setup, however, conforms with the partial organization of citizens. Indeed, Raymond described the limits as to what the bureaucracy was willing to tolerate. The forums were expected to not see themselves as an autonomous, complete organisation but were understood as partial organization under the aegis of government. Overall, the MDF charters can be seen as an attempt to organise citizens according to rules by introducing formal structures, processes and tasks. The fact that this

176

6

Organising Civil Society by Setting Rules

organisation remained partial was useful for the municipal administration as well as national bureaucrats and international organisations (see Chapter 5, Organising Civil Society by Building Membership). The economic planner in B-Ville, for example, highlighted that the benefits of an executive committee lay in its small number and thus manageability, meaning “for example if now, I say tomorrow morning I want them, I just call them, and they’ll be here” (EI50: EP, B-Ville, April 2017). He contrasted this benefit of a partially organised group of citizens such as the forums with another common form of citizen participation in local administrations in Uganda, the barazas. Barazas were large-scale information and consultation events where citizens were invited to question and monitor the use of public resources in their locality. They were convened irregularly and were open to the public. In comparison to barazas, the MDFs had a defined membership and the MDFs’ executive committees were always addressable for the municipal administration. They could readily be consulted as representatives of the community any time a municipal employee needed or desired citizen participation for an issue or a decision. The MDF charter set forth rules for the Municipal Development Forums, but paper does not blush. The following section therefore extends the perspective on the partial organization of forums through the setting of rules by analysing the observed interactions between MDFs and municipal bureaucrats and the rules reflected therein.

6.2

Formalisation of the MDFs’ Interactions with Municipal Bureaucrats

“You see the MDF was a new concept. Before TSUPU came, the MDF wasn’t there. So they came and the first financial year it was not clear to us, even to the ministry really, what their mandate was. … Actually, in the meetings we have been attending at the national level, the question is always, “Where does MDF fall? Where is it anchored? What is its position? What is it supposed to do?” And some things were not very clear because it’s not a political organisation, it’s not a technical organisation, but it’s from the community. So the questions have been hanging around, where should we anchor them and where should they get their funding from? … So the MDF is kind of still growing. … As we got used to MDF, we got sure about giving them [money] and we were given assurance by the ministry. At first we thought maybe we couldn’t give money to them because they were not part of us but then we were given the assurance by the ministry, then we spent money on them.” (EI44: USMID coordinator, C-City, March 2017)

6.2 Formalisation of the MDFs’ Interactions with Municipal …

177

On paper, the MDF was an elaborate construct. It aimed to achieve broad representation of relevant stakeholders but also had an executive structure that enabled easier interaction with the municipal administration as well as communication with other bureaucracies and organisations, if only by providing a contact person with the MDF president. However, as the quote of C-City’s USMID coordinator shows, this partial organization of citizens into a group of participants and supposed partners of municipal administrations was at first met with some confusion by municipal bureaucrats. Apparently, this confusion even existed at the level of central government even though the MoLHUD had authored the draft MDF charter. C-City’s USMID coordinator hinted at uncertainties surrounding the organisationality of the forums, when speaking about their role as a community organisation, their anchoring in and interaction with the municipal administration as well as their funding. Ronald from the MoLHUD even called it “this animal of the forum” (EI60: Ronald, MoLHUD, April 2017) to invoke the MDF’s ill-defined nature. In the face of this uncertainty, in A-Town, B-Ville and C-City, routines for the interaction between the MDFs and municipal bureaucrats evolved in the daily practices. This section argues that these routines mainly concerned the formalisation of the spaces of participation and the communication channels in the form of meetings and official letters.

6.2.1 Sending letters: Documenting Participation Amidst the many official letters filed away in A-Town’s MDF office, one exchange of written communication caught my eye. It concerned the event “Support to Keep ATown Clean”, an event in which the local community gets together to clean the streets of their town. On file were two letters. In the first communication, the MDF president informed the town clerk about this event, which was organised by the forum. She further requested the town clerk to “make formal communication to all stakeholders so they can participate”. Consequently, two days later, the town clerk sent a communication to the MDF president, inviting her to the “Keep A-Town Clean Community Exercise”. This seemingly redundant exchange of letters between the town clerk and the MDF president surprised me. Why would the town clerk invite the MDF to an event the forum itself had organised? (O8: official letters between the MDF and the municipal administration, A-Town, March 2017)

In all three municipalities where this research was carried out, the interaction between municipal bureaucrats and the forums was highly formalised as far as written communication was concerned. Formal invitations were sent out to the MDFs on a regular basis and for a large variety of events, reflecting the claim

178

6

Organising Civil Society by Setting Rules

that the forums were to participate on all issues of relevance in the municipality, “to scrutinize and inform municipal decision-making on issues like the annual municipal plans and major investment activities, development funding and the municipal budget, and to monitor infrastructure project implementation progress” (World Bank, 2013b: 42). The formal communication shared with me included invitations to stakeholder consultations on different projects financed under USMID (e.g. municipal solid waste management strategy, drainage master plan) as well as to meetings with the programme’s oversight committee.1 In A-Town, the MDF was invited to a meeting of the Programme Technical Committee PTC; in B-Ville to the commissioning and handing over of TSUPU projects as well as an USMID field visit. The MDF in A-Town also received the report of the Inspectorate of Government, which—according to the rules for interaction in the framework of USMID— the municipal government was to share with the MDF so that it could perform its monitoring function. In A-Town, the MDF was copied into communication with contractors working on USMID projects so that it could perform its monitoring function, such as conducting construction site visits. The MDFs were involved in monitoring the progress of USMID projects, and, generally, the local administration complied with what the programme prescribes in terms of MDF involvement. Whenever communication between the town clerk and other parties was of relevance to the MDFs, so it appears, the MDFs received copies of the communication. This, for example, was the case when a new focal point person for the MDF was chosen in A-Town. The town clerk informed both the focal point officer for the forums in the MoLHUD and the appointed person of the decision and sent both letters in copy to the MDF. The same happened when A-Town’s MDF Work Plan was submitted to the MoLHUD. In B-Ville, the forum received a copy of the communication from the senior planner to all other municipal bureaucrats that summarised the results of the municipality’s budget conference for the budgets of 2016/2017 as well as 2017/2018. The municipal governments also passed on invitations from the national and international level, i.e. the MoLHUD and the Cities Alliance, who via the municipal government had sent out invitations to local stakeholders. Examples of such communication in A-Town were an invitation to a workshop on the Joint Work Programme on fostering equitable economic growth in cities, the invitation to attend a clean development mechanism stakeholder sensitisation workshop and the invitation to 1

The formal communication mentioned in this paragraph is but the selection of documents I was able to gather copies of in my field research. The MDFs did, however, not keep complete records. It is therefore conceivable that the extent of formal communication was much larger than can be presented here.

6.2 Formalisation of the MDFs’ Interactions with Municipal …

179

a presentation of results of a university study on challenges of slums and solutions through slum upgrading. In these invitations, the MDF was usually addressed as a “key stakeholder” or “selected stakeholder”. Upholding official communication, on the one hand, shows transparency visà-vis the forums. On the other hand, requiring the MDF to communicate this way subjected it to a bureaucratic logic and can be seen to establish a communication routine. As Max Weber noted more than a hundred years ago, proper recordkeeping is an important aspect of bureaucracy (Weber, 1985: 122–130), and it continues to be relevant for bureaucracies today. Not least, leaving a ‘paper trail’ was important for Uganda’s municipal administrations in order to be accountable to both national governments and international organisations.

6.2.2 Meetings: Listening to People’s Needs? The interactions between the municipal administration and the local community were also formalised in the form of meetings. Throughout my fieldwork, these meetings were presented as a means of participation where the community could express its needs, while municipal bureaucrats listened and took into account these needs: “Usually we go and listen to first-hand information from the locals. We are invited as technical officers to listen to people’s needs. Then we come up with a work plan and we see how we prioritise, which one to address first” (EI34: PP, A-Town, March 2017).

A-Town’s physical planner described here that the municipal bureaucrats (“technical officers”) were invited to community meetings, listened to the needs brought forward in these meetings and then acted upon them. Similarly, the community was invited to council meetings for the same reason: “They bring ideas and ideas are taken very seriously. Like they can be in attendance in council meetings, they cannot rule anything, but they bring ideas. Because a speaker of council can call upon them and say, ‘We have MDFs there, can we get information from MDFs?’” (EI38: AE, A-Town, March 2017).

The assistant engineer of A-Town pointed out that community representatives were also seen to bring new ideas about the development of the municipality to the municipal government. The analysis presented in this section shows that in practice, meetings were not necessarily used as portrayed in these two quotes. On the contrary, meetings

180

6

Organising Civil Society by Setting Rules

were a way to keep MDFs at a distance through the use of informal practices such as neglecting needs voiced within these organised interactions and doctoring meeting minutes and attendance lists. Over the course of my field research, I was able to observe a variety of different meetings of the municipal administrations in which members of the MDFs’ executive committees participated as well as meetings among the members of the MDFs. Allowing for interaction with civil society primarily in the form of meetings was beneficial for the municipal administration as meetings were organised interactions. Meetings structured the interaction between municipal bureaucrats and the MDFs and made it more predictable. Haug understands meetings as instances of partial organization and argues that “the coming together of multiple participants implies an almost infinite number of contingencies which constitute risks for achieving the goal of the meeting. … The logic of organization attempts to address these risks through formalization, i.e., by deciding various aspects of the meeting” (Haug, 2013: 714). What did this look like in practice? Meetings usually had an agenda set beforehand, so that it was clear which issues were to be discussed. Behaviour in meetings commonly conformed to certain standards and results were often recorded in the form of minutes. An illustrative example was the annual meeting of the MDF’s general assembly in A-Town: The meeting begins with a reading of the agenda, amendments being proposed and then adoption of the amended agenda. The interaction overall is very formal. People raise hands and ask for permission to speak, rather than simply raising their voice when they want to bring up an issue. Regular reference is made by different speakers to what the “right procedure” for this meeting is. After the amended agenda is adopted, the meeting begins with a joint prayer, led by one of the representatives of religious leaders. Then, the MDF president begins by welcoming all the representatives from the different stakeholder groups present and asks the respective people to briefly stand up when ‘their’ stakeholder group is called. A few people, including the MDF president, are wearing a T-Shirt with an emblem of the MDF on it. The two local government representatives in the meeting, the deputy town clerk and the deputy mayor both give a short welcome speech. The MDF president gives thanks to all active members of the forum and then begins her report on the MDF’s activities. Afterwards, the attending MDF members have the opportunity to comment. At this time, only one representative of the local government remains present in the room: A-Town’s deputy mayor. Since critical comments pertained solely to the administrative and not the political arm of the municipal government, he does not react to criticism but rather promises to support the forum in its quest to hold local bureaucrats accountable. (O5: annual meeting of the MDF general assembly, A-Town, February 2017)

6.2 Formalisation of the MDFs’ Interactions with Municipal …

181

In B-Ville, the MDF general assembly meeting was structured similarly, beginning with a discussion of the agenda, followed by prayers and greeting words from the community development officer. In comparison to the meeting in A-Town, the discussion between MDF members and representatives of the municipal administration was lively and intense in B-Ville (O24: MDF meeting, B-Ville, April 2017). Due to the absence of municipal bureaucrats in A-Town’s MDF meeting, the forum members did not have a chance to immediately discuss the issues they raised. While in both meetings, the forum members were not shy to bring up their concerns, the administration in B-Ville was seemingly more willing to face and also address the issues raised than in A-Town. In B-Ville, the municipality’s MDF coordinator led the MDF executive committee to speak to the town clerk immediately following the meeting to resolve the issues that had been raised (O25: interaction between the MDF executive committee and the TC to solve complaints from MDF meeting, B-Ville, April 2017). Despite the seemingly higher responsiveness of B-Ville’s bureaucrats to the MDF, the concerns voiced in the meetings were similar: Are we being listened to? Is what we say being followed up? In a different type of meeting I observed, the preparation of A-Town’s USMID assessment, it became particularly evident to me why this was a major concern for the forums. The meeting was conducted on the day before independent consultants, hired by the World Bank, came to A-Town to conduct the yearly assessment of the municipality’s “progress” in implementing USMID. Given that USMID was based in a “Program-for-Results” (PfR) framework, the score in this assessment determined whether or not funds would be disbursed in the following financial year (for a description of PfR see Section 1.4.1.1, TSUPU and USMID: An Introduction). In other words: the assessment was important, and A-Town’s municipal bureaucrats had been preparing documents for this exercise before the meeting. This meeting was to consolidate documents and information gathered, and it was to make sure that the assessment would be to A-Town’s benefit and result in further USMID funds being approved. The meeting was conducted in the same location as all meetings in A-Town Municipal Council, the Municipal Hall. The deputy mayor, deputy town clerk and the USMID coordinator 2 of A-Town are facing all other bureaucrats present. After prayer and introductions, the USMID 2

The USMID coordinator was not an administrative position but an additional responsibility taken on by one of the existing bureaucrats in the municipality, e.g. the physical planner. Since the role was taken on by different municipal bureaucrats in the different municipalities taking part in USMID, I do not identify which municipal bureaucrat took on the role of USMID coordinator in A-Town, B-Ville and C-City for purposes of anonymity.

182

6

Organising Civil Society by Setting Rules

coordinator leads the meeting and calls upon the bureaucrats to fetch the relevant documents in printed form from their offices such that they can be checked in teams of two, following the four-eyes principle. When all technical officers come back with piles of documents, it becomes much more of a working meeting. Small groups are starting to discuss the various problems. The mood is not bad, despite what seemed to me like complications in providing the data necessary to get through the assessment. But mostly it is a cheerful atmosphere, and the participants laugh a lot. Even about their own shortcomings. They also poke little jokes at each other, make fun of each other. A-Town’s MDF president is present in this meeting and not shy about speaking up, offering her opinion when questions about the required documents come up, pointing out open items on the assessment to-do-list. However, she is not acknowledged by the municipal bureaucrats but mostly browsed over and ignored. The few times her interjection is acknowledged, it is not considered any further. (O12: municipal bureaucrats’ preparatory meeting for USMID assessment, A-Town, March 2017)

A common practice of municipal bureaucrats, in meetings involving the MDF, was to allow the MDF members to speak in order to provide their view on the urban development issues they considered important for the local community and to supply information that was useful for government planning purposes. At the same time, it appears that municipal bureaucrats did not listen, in the sense that they either ignored or failed to acknowledge the MDF’s comments. In other cases, they rejected the MDF members’ demands by referring to a lack of funds, as a description by B-Ville’s community development officer demonstrates: “Normally, when we sit in our meetings, sometimes they propose projects, that they feel should be worked upon, and when a new financial year is about to start, like now, there’s a budget conference, and they also come and participate. … Then we look through whatever can be funded, then rest is left out, because we cannot fund everything. … Inevitably, conflicts are there, because at times of course they have so many things they wish to be worked on, but the resource envelope is small” (EI49: CDO, B-Ville, April 2017).

As a result of this practice, finding a municipal bureaucrat who was able to provide concrete examples of forum involvement in decision-making processes for the municipality proved difficult during my field research. For instance, when I asked A-Town’s deputy town clerk to provide one example where the forum was involved in a meeting and their perspective had an impact on what the municipal administration did with respect to a policy or programme, he responded: “I can for now not be able to point to any” (EI36: DTC, A-Town, March 2017). Meetings as structured interactions, the analysis shows, allowed for something that could be termed ‘hearing without listening’. The donor interventions TSUPU

6.2 Formalisation of the MDFs’ Interactions with Municipal …

183

and USMID required municipal bureaucrats to involve the MDFs in some of their decision-making processes. In order to maintain a high level of control over this interaction, the municipal administrations formalised it as much as possible by limiting the interaction to official communication in letters and to official meetings. Within the formalised interaction in meetings, then, municipal bureaucrats found an informal way to further limit the interaction with the forums, i.e. by simply not following up on comments by the MDFs. Arnstein wrote about such practices, purporting that meetings “can also be turned into vehicles for oneway communication by the simple device of providing superficial information, discouraging questions, or giving irrelevant answers” (Arnstein, 1969: 219). She points out that, consequently, inviting citizens’ opinions “offers no assurance that citizen concerns and ideas will be taken into account” (Arnstein, 1969: 219). Two other informal practices which pervaded the formalised interaction between municipal bureaucrats and MDFs in meetings can be seen in a similar vein: the doctoring of minutes and attendance lists. The following observation serves as a case in point: A few days before the consultants arrive for assessment, the municipal bureaucrats hold a final preparation meeting. All municipal department heads are supposed to account for the documents necessary from their area of work and the MDF president also attends to ensure compliance with the MDF-related assessment indicators. Before the meeting, I chat with Florence, the MDF president, and she tells me that, in preparation for the USMID assessment, she has to work on minutes of an MDF meeting which was held a while back, that she has to change the minutes to show that they had discussed an IGG3 report. The MDF receiving and deliberating on this report is one of the assessment criteria for USMID, the MDF’s opinion on it should be taken into account. Yet, the MDF had not been given the report at the time of the actual meeting and thus had not discussed it. A few days prior, Florence had told me that the MDF had just been given the IGG report “now”, supposedly because of the upcoming USMID assessment. The original minutes of the MDF meeting thus could not include a reference to the discussion of the IGG report and had to be ‘retrofitted’ for the USMID assessment. As the meeting is about to begin, the municipal bureaucrats start coming to the Municipal Hall, where the meeting takes place and where I am already seated next to the MDF president. When A-Town’s USMID Coordinator walks into the municipal hall, 3

IGG stands for Inspector General of Government. The IGG’s mandate is to fight corruption in Uganda and promote the adherence to the rule of law. S/he monitors government activities and reports to the parliament twice per year. “The IGG report” refers to a report each municipality has to prepare biannually to report on alleged corruption cases and describe the actions it has taken to counter corruption. As part of the conditionalities for receiving USMID funds, this report has to be presented to and discussed at an MDF meeting.

184

6

Organising Civil Society by Setting Rules

the MDF president walks over to him and asks him to sign the attendance sheet for an MDF meeting that took place several months ago. The USMID coordinator starts the meeting: “Now, colleagues! I want to informally start this meeting, because really, what matters mostly is us, you know! To handle those areas of gaps that we have. … And we best not leave any light space, any gap for us in this assessment”. As the meeting begins, it becomes clear that an important topic is the retrospective adjustment of minutes to adhere to the conditions of USMID. The Technical Planning Committee (TPC) in theory is a regular meeting of the municipality’s department heads. According to USMID assessment criteria, these meetings should be attended by at least two thirds of the municipal department heads. The USMID coordinator continues: “Now, the other area under the minimal solutions, planner, the TPC minutes, they are checking on the attendance to see whether at least two thirds of the heads of departments have attended the TPC meetings. So, planner, just check the attendance book, if it is there, please pass it over to officer to check and see whether we have at least two thirds of our heads of departments, at least five in every meeting. Where we don’t have, let people sign. Officer, check the attendance book at TPC starting July 2015 to June 2016 and see if there is any head of department missing, so that they sign so that we have the two thirds being met”. There is a notebook that serves as an attendance sheet for these TPA meetings and one of the younger officers is now assigned the task to go through all meeting minutes to check which issues where discussed, who attended and whether they were fully signed. Then they start going over the minutes one by one. (O10: doctoring of MDF meeting minutes for USMID assessment, A-Town, March 2017; O12: municipal bureaucrats’ preparatory meeting for USMID assessment, ATown, March 2017)

This experience was not limited to A-Town’s MDF. Over a lunch meeting, B-Ville’s MDF executive committee opened up to me about their difficulties working with municipal bureaucrats. They mentioned that it was really only the yearly looming World Bank assessment that enabled their interaction with municipal bureaucrats at all. Throughout the year, municipal bureaucrats would not pass on information or let them participate in decision-making. Similar to the IGG report in A-Town, B-Ville’s executive committee noted that important information was often conveyed to them after the fact. Shortly before an assessment in the framework of USMID, they pointed out, there would be a sudden flurry to comply with the World Bank guidelines. Municipal bureaucrats would, for example, come to the MDF and request the forum to doctor meeting minutes for it to appear as if what was supposed to be discussed by the forum under the World Bank’s assessment criteria had indeed been discussed. While the formalisation in meetings and the informal practice of doctoring attendance lists enabled municipal bureaucrats to limit interaction with the MDFs, the informal practices of ‘hearing but not listening’ and of doctoring minutes restricted the MDFs’ influence. This was facilitated by the World Bank’s practice

6.2 Formalisation of the MDFs’ Interactions with Municipal …

185

of validation through minutes and attendance lists. For the World Bank, minutes and attendance lists were a main means to assess whether or not a USMID project was implemented as planned. Consider the following quote by senior World Bank bureaucrat Carine: “[T]here is a cycle within USMID of project identification … Now, through the project identification, you find there are times when the communities really need to get engaged and really need to be part of the discussion. So the municipality sits and says, ‘Yes, the MDF was involved, the communities were actually there, the meetings actually took place’, because they will show you the minutes of those meetings, then there is the step of ‘road approved’ maybe there were ten roads, they’ve approved the five, that’s one step. And you will see the minutes. Then there is the step of ‘who is on the road, are there compensations to happen? Blablabla...’. The contractor will come on board, they will decide on when the road, the construction begins. There you will also see minutes. And those minutes could also be reflected in what you see at the municipality in their grievance handling committee. So you might be able to validate” (EI59: Carine, WB Uganda, April 2017).

Carine from the World Bank described how meeting minutes were used to verify that the MDFs had been involved in the various stages of the USMID project cycle, e.g. project identification, project approval (“road approved”) and project implementation. In the project implementation phase, she noted, the MDFs were supposed to be involved in handling relocation and compensation issues (“who is on the road, are there compensations to happen?”) and in the management of construction works (“The contractor will come on board …”) (see Section 4.2, World Bank: Participation as a Tool for Monitoring and Accountability). By retrospectively adjusting meeting minutes and attendance lists for meetings, the municipal bureaucrats were able to significantly limit their interactions with the MDFs while at the same time complying with World Bank assessment standards. Rather than ensuring that participation actually takes place, the World Bank practice of validation through minutes might thus have had the opposite effect. In this confluence of formality and informality, the MDFs as partial organization are no different from a complete or formal organisation (Kühl, 2015b; Luhmann, 2000). Formalising the interaction between municipal bureaucrats and MDFs in official letters and meetings was useful for the municipal administration for two reasons. First, it made it easier to maintain organisational boundaries of the municipal administration. In practice, the MDF was unable to fully ‘enter’ municipal processes and was kept out of certain circles they would need to have been part of if they were to have fulfilled the role of monitoring the municipal administration. Second, the formalisation left a paper trail, which the administration needed for the World Bank’s assessment. At the same time, the

186

6

Organising Civil Society by Setting Rules

formalisation of interactions, the partial organization through rules and routines actually enabled some of the informal practices that were seen. Because of the existence of minutes and attendance lists and their prime function in the World Bank’s assessment practices, the municipal administration was, throughout most of the year, at ease with limiting its own interaction with the MDFs and keeping the forums at a comfortable distance to the administration’s core activities. As a result of the administration’s ability to manipulate minutes and lists shortly before an assessment, it was still able to prove that it had done its job in accordance with World Bank guidelines. In a sense, then, partial organization made decoupling easier.

6.3

Narratives of the MDFs’ Prospective Formalisation in Legal Frameworks

“We shall have to fit them into the community-based services, that’s where they fall. … I think we’re trying to incorporate them. … They’re asking us to kind of formalise them because they have been a bit informal.” (EI44: USMID coordinator, C-City, March 2017)

The administrations’ desire to organise citizens and formalise their interaction with them is also visible on a discursive level. As C-City’s USMID Coordinator highlighted in this quote, the municipal administrations should have formally incorporated the MDFs into their structures, specifically under community-based services. The “they” he was referring to is the national government, represented by the MoLHUD. As part of the TSUPU programme, the MoLHUD initiated a process to “institutionalise” the MDFs by making the participatory mechanism mandatory for all municipal councils in the National Urban Policy. The term “institution” is here not used in the neo-institutionalist sense as taken-for-granted elements and collectively shared scripts or frames of social reality. Rather, it is the in-vivo term used in the field to denote the further formalisation of MDFs in legal frameworks. TSUPU’s programme document emphasised the importance of institutionalisation several times (Cities Alliance, 2010: 20). It was supposed to be achieved by including the forums as mandatory mechanism of participation in the newly written National Urban Policy. As mentioned in Section 1.4.1.1 (TSUPU and USMID: An Introduction), the formulation of Uganda’s first urban policy was part of the activities of the MoLHUD in TSUPU. However, amidst political manoeuvres before the national parliamentary and presidential election in March 2016, the

6.3 Narratives of the MDFs’ Prospective Formalisation …

187

Cabinet rejected the draft National Urban Policy and tasked the MoLHUD with extensive corrections. With the National Urban Policy declined in cabinet and undergoing a process of revision at the time of field research, collective actors on the national and the local level engaged in discursive practices around the supposed or desired institutionalisation.4 Bureaucrats from the MoLHUD who carried responsibility for the National Urban Policy promoted a narrative of institutionalisation in the policy itself. Ronald from the MoLHUD mentioned that the draft of the policy included the MDFs as a participation mechanism in municipalities. He noted that through this inclusion in the draft, the forums would be institutionalised once the policy was approved. “And we hope in the urban policy we can formalise them. They used to challenge them on ground that they are illegal, and they are not formal. So in the draft policy we have provided for forums as an institution that can engage, that can give stakeholders a platform to be actively involved in their city planning, development and management. And once the urban policy is approved, they will no longer be challenged on illegal grounds” (EI60: Ronald, MoLHUD, April 2017).

The perspective that the MDFs should be “institutionalised”, integrated into the legal framework for local governments was reiterated by most of the MoLHUD bureaucrats I spoke to (EI62: Derrick, MoLHUD, April 2017; EI41: Raymond, MoLHUD, March 2017; EI40: William, MoLHUD, March 2017). I heard the same from other representatives of the national government (EI16: Grace, NPA, February 2017; EI23: Ibrahim, MoLG, March 2017) and the World Bank (EI27: Geraldine, WB Uganda, March 2017). Both Raymond and William from the MoLHUD also argued that while the National Urban Policy was not very specific with respect to the MDFs, “once the policy is approved, we shall translate the policy principle or the strategy to be backed by law” (EI41: Raymond, MoLHUD, March 2017), “once the policy is approved, we can see how we can operationalise them” (EI40: William, MoLHUD, March 2017). The institutionalisation of MDFs was seen as necessary to resolve existing uncertainties regarding their roles, financing and responsibilities. In other words: institutionalisation was seen as important to further establish order. It was at the same time expected to ensure their persistence after the end of donor programmes and to protect the forums from the influence of municipal bureaucrats. As Ronald 4

The National Urban Policy was approved in June 2017, thence shortly after my field research ended. The policy mentions the establishment and roll-out of forums across all urban hierarchies as a strategy to improve urban administration and management.

188

6

Organising Civil Society by Setting Rules

pointed out in above quote, they had been challenged as illegal. Ibrahim from the Ministry of Local Government (MoLG) argued that when institutionalised, the MDFs “cannot be washed aside” (EI23: Ibrahim, MoLG, March 2017). To understand what the two national bureaucrats mean, it is important to consider the perspectives of municipal bureaucrats, who often referred to the institutionalisation of the forums with a different connotation. For them, the fact that the forums were not institutionalised posed a problem, as the following quotes from municipal bureaucrats show. “We’re trying to lobby from the central government so that they can be legalised. You see, they don’t have that legal status” (EI48: CDO, C-City, March 2017).

C-City’s community development officer pointed out that the forums did not have a legal status, indicating that they were not anchored in Uganda’s legal framework, and called for them to be “legalised”. The legal status of the MDF was presented as a deficit by municipal bureaucrats. Bureaucracies are traditionally legalistic, i.e. the adherence to legal frameworks and prescriptions is their main rationality (König and Reichard, 2008; Wenene et al., 2016; Ziekow et al., 2014). Legalistic administrative culture has been and is increasingly challenged or complemented by managerialist and governance perspectives, which focus on efficient and effective administration or the inclusion of citizens, respectively. In Uganda’s local bureaucracy, however, the traditional legalistic culture is still dominant, not least because of its de facto fiscal dependence on central government transfers (see Section 1.4.2, Uganda’s Politico-administrative System over Time).5 For municipal bureaucrats in Uganda, the Local Government Act guided their work (see Section 1.4.2), which is why B-Ville’s environment officer alluded to the forums being questioned on the grounds of whether they were included in the LGA: “I think as per now, those development forums are not in the laws of Uganda. They are not yet there. So, I think now it’s a challenge for them because they don’t have legal backing. It’s a policy that was made by the ministry, but they have not put it in the law so that they can have legal backing when they are doing their work. Now they are working as volunteers, they don’t have any legal backing. I think the government should come up and legalise them and put them in the government structures. Which will help them when they are doing their work. Because at time X they start asking

5

This is not to say that neopatrimonial elements are not present in the Ugandan administration, too, as was discussed in Section 1.4.2 (Uganda’s Politico-administrative System over Time).

6.3 Narratives of the MDFs’ Prospective Formalisation …

189

them, who are you? Which law? You’re under Local Government Act? You’re under Land Act? You’re...” (knocks on table to signal ‘etc.’) (EI58: EO, B-Ville, April 2017).

She argued that because the forums lacked a legally binding status and, hence, the local bureaucrats would not know which law provided or allowed for the MDFs’ participation and inclusion in municipal affairs, municipal bureaucrats would be critical of them. One of the recurring themes behind this constant reference to the MDFs’ lack in legality was mentioned by B-Ville’s deputy town clerk: “Because it’s the first of its kind, and we were trying to talk about its legality so that it can continue, … [We] just talked about legalising it, putting it in the law. ... I think if it is put then it will be easier for us even to fund it really. Right now, we’re hoping to fund it but it’s not as free as we would have funded it if it was put in the law” (EI53: DTC, B-Ville, April 2017).

She made the argument that municipal administrations were limited in their ability to fund the MDFs because they were not “in the law”. A World Bank representative had explained this issue of funding as a problem of the MDFs not having a budget code under which they could be budgeted for by municipal bureaucrats (EI27: Geraldine, WB Uganda, March 2017). This discussion shows the limited autonomy of local governments and administrations in Uganda, especially with respect to their finances. Because they were mostly dependant on conditional transfers from the central government (see Section 1.4.2), they could not simply decide to provide financial support to a citizens’ forum as long as it was not included in the groups of beneficiaries designated in the conditional transfers from central government. Two further issues arose with the lack of institutionalisation. First, as ATown’s deputy town clerk remarked, the forums were seen as something imposed on local administrations by foreign donors. Second, municipal bureaucrats regarded them as a replication of the existing political structure, namely that of elected local councillors on all levels of local government, questioning their general relevance in the Ugandan system of local government: “The Municipal Development Forum is a recent, can I say, innovation that came about not a result of legal changes, but it is just a conditionality to external funding. But our legal framework does not provide for it. Our legal framework provides for representation by councillors who are voted into office during general elections, so these people are the ones who form the council and come here and take decisions and plan on behalf of the people. Now the municipal forum was brought as a result of the conditionality of external funding by saying we must have people through whom the community will voice their concerns directly and therefore ensuring that the citizen quorum directly

190

6

Organising Civil Society by Setting Rules

participates in the development and planning issues of the municipality. … So the MDF is kind of informal in relation to the law. [T]here is not any legal framework that we must have them in place” (EI36: DTC, A-Town, March 2017).

Local councils are the political arm of local governments and formally are the elected representatives of local communities in municipal government matters (see Section 1.4.2). A-Town’s deputy town clerk pointed out that the local councillors also “participate in monitoring and supervision in programs and then they are able to represent their views” (EI36: DTC, A-Town, March 2017). In comparison to the forums, the local government structure is formally established through the LGA. In another interview, this perceived duplication of structures was sometimes described as the forums representing a “threat” to local politicians (EI27: Geraldine, WB Uganda, March 2017) (see Section 5.2.3, Understanding the System: Behavioural Expectations and Professional Requirements). A-Town’s environment officer also mentioned that the forums were externally imposed, and he criticised the overstepping of boundaries by MDFs as long as they were not institutionalised: “You know, the problem is sometimes division of roles, knowing where your boundaries end. Like there are some people who may think because they are now MDF and maybe certain funder or donors are saying the MDF, the communities must be involved and all that—which is very good—but some people might get, may think that they are-- (he does not finish the sentence). We involve them but they are not necessarily the final decision makers, you get it? Because we also have the law which guides us and MDF is not institutionalised, it’s not [a] legal thing” (EI28: EO, A-Town, March 2017).

He argued that the MDFs often did not understand the limits of their role within the municipal bureaucracy and posited that they were not in the position to take decisions. In the environment officer’s understanding, this problem came about because the forums were not institutionalised and as a consequence there was no clear guidance on how they should be involved in the municipal administration. Overall, the comments show that municipal bureaucrats often were at best sceptical towards the forums, if not overtly opposed to them. Therefore, unless they were institutionalised, the MDFs were expected to be discontinued with the end of the USMID programme, as both municipal bureaucrats and MoLHUD representatives noted: “At present there’s no recovering them. They’re not covered by law; it was just a condition of the funders of the programme that we should have them. Maybe, if they can be included in the law, then they can remain. It can be included in the Local Government Act. If they don’t, that one will be optional to different local governments.

6.3 Narratives of the MDFs’ Prospective Formalisation …

191

A local government can decide to maintain it or they can decide to do away with it, it is not in the law. … So if there’s no law, the council may not give them the facilitation. And if they don’t have facilitation, then it will not work” (EI50: EP, B-Ville, April 2017). “For now, the USMID document is kind of an instrument which is signed by ministers, [so] we have that backing. Even the Inspectorate of Government said that is good enough. But once a project closes, again we shall have question marks. So, we’ve been working on that. Now [in the] policy, forums are provided for. Once approved, we shall be strong. We say, now we need a law, we need to put it in the what? In the law. This concept note [suggests] we amend the Local Government Act. If the policy delays, we have this concept, invite Ministry of Local Government, to put in in their provision” (EI41: Raymond, MoLHUD, March 2017).

B-Ville’s economic planner and Raymond from the MoLHUD argued that unless municipal bureaucrats were obliged by a national law to facilitate and involve the MDFs, they were unlikely to do so. The forums would then end with the development interventions which had financed them, and which had ensured at least a certain level of involvement through including the forums in their conditionalities. This perspective was also brought forward by the representative of a non-governmental organisation involved in the implementation of TSUPU and USMID. Hand-in-Hand’s interim director emphasised that “when the project [USMID programme] ends, this structure [the MDF] will phase out” (EI24: interim director, Hand-in-Hand, April 2017). Already during the 2015 fieldwork, Hand-in-Hand’s then executive director had referred to the NGO’s own relationship with municipal administrations as unstable, “today they give you land; tomorrow they destroy 10 houses” (PI21: executive director, Hand-in-Hand, November 2015). Echoing this perspective, a representative of one of Uganda’s associations of local authorities suggested “involvement could be at the goodwill of the council” (PI23: secretary general, association of local authorities, November 2015). Institutionalisation was about order, or more specifically, about the inclusion of the MDF into an established order. The rationalities for this differed between municipal bureaucrats, on the one hand, and central government bureaucrats, the World Bank and NGO representatives, on the other hand. The former perceived MDFs as an externally imposed requirement necessary to receive funds and were overall critical of them. However, faced with the MDFs’ implementation, they viewed institutionalisation as an opportunity to clearly establish the forums’ role and tasks in the municipal administration. From the perspective of municipal bureaucrats, institutionalisation would also enable a hierarchisation between the forums and municipal bureaucrats which would clearly establish the municipal

192

6

Organising Civil Society by Setting Rules

administration’s decision-making authority and limit the forums influence. Central government bureaucrats, the World Bank and NGO representatives feared that without institutionalisation, as long as no legal framework obliged municipal administrations to establish and work with the forums, the MDFs were in danger of failing as a concept. They assumed that local bureaucrats would not accept and therefore abandon the forums as a measure of participation. A comment by A-Town’s deputy town clerk might serve as an indication that this expectation was not too far from the truth. Asked whether the MDF was involved in regular meetings between the municipal bureaucrats, he pointed out that they were not involved because of their undefined legal status: “Technical planning meeting, no, we don’t involve them because the law does not provide for them” (EI36: DTC, A-Town, March 2017).

6.4

Intermediate Conclusion

The analysis of empirical data in this Section has shown the various ways in which bureaucratic organisations on the international, national, and local level organised citizens into MDFs by introducing rules and establishing routines. Section 6.1 has analysed the forums’ charters, which set rules for structures and processes of the MDFs. The level of organisation envisaged in the MoLHUD’s draft charter was quite elaborate. This showed that the organisations involved in setting up the forums were interested in setting detailed rules to account for as many eventualities as possible in the organisation of citizens. Section 6.2 demonstrated that implicit rules, or more specifically routines, existed for the interactions between municipal bureaucrats and MDFs. In comparison to the charters, however, these were not written rules but rather manifested in the practices observed in the field. By largely restricting interaction to formal communication by official letters and in planned and pre-structured meetings, the municipal administrations were able to protect their organisational boundaries. Rather than ad hoc interactions, official letters are well thought through and carefully phrased forms of communication. They usually represent only a fraction of the processes they describe and therefore leave out much of the potential contestation around certain issues. In pre-structured meetings, by setting an agenda and restricting speaking times, municipal bureaucrats were able to influence how much interaction with forum members they were willing to allow. They had furthermore developed the informal practice of allowing MDF members to participate and make their worries known while leaving their concerns mostly unheard or even unacknowledged. Both official letters and meetings, however, fulfilled another

6.4 Intermediate Conclusion

193

function for municipal bureaucrats. Official letters served to formally document how the forums were taking part in administrative processes within the municipality, that they were included in meetings, asked their opinion, and participated in decision-making. Interaction in meetings showed that the MDFs could raise issues with the municipal council. For municipal administrations, therefore, this formalisation of their interactions with the forums left a trail and made them accountable to the donors. At the same time, the analysis has shown that the MDF was requested to doctor documents to convey that processes were in line with requirements of the donor programme. Lastly, a third dimension of the partial organization through rules was revealed in narratives about the need to institutionalise the forums (see Section 6.3). According to this narrative, an inclusion of MDFs in existing legal frameworks for local governments in Uganda would clarify the MDFs’ rights and responsibilities. In particular, it would allow to clearly distinguish the MDF from the role of municipal bureaucrats. This “relocating the poor within the prevailing order” (Cornwall, 2004: 78, emphasis in the original) was seen as an important step for a greater acceptance of the forums in municipal governments. All three dimensions are in this thesis understood to constitute a partial organization of citizens through the introduction of rules in the sense that they established guidelines for the behaviour of citizens. These guidelines defined how citizens should organise themselves, which goals they were expected to achieve, and how they should interact with municipal bureaucrats. In the case of narratives of formalisation, they sketched out a vision of integrating the forums into the existing order of municipal government through their inclusion in a written policy or law. This interpretation of written rules, routines and narratives of formalisation as three elements of the partial organization of citizens through rule-setting differs from Ahrne and Brunsson’s narrower conceptualisation of rules existing mainly in the written form (Ahrne and Brunsson, 2011: 86). This divergence is explored further in the discussion in Section 7.1.3 (Partial Organization as Deciding on a Relationship). For the organisational actors involved, the organisation of citizens by introducing rules was useful because it enabled them to draw clear boundaries between their own formal organisations and the partially organised citizens: The MDF was allowed to participate, but the bureaucratic organisations involved in the implementation of TSUPU and USMID defined the limits of the forum’s activities. The local administrations were intent on remaining in charge of decision-making and, in their interactions with the forums, maintained their organisational boundaries and made sure the forums were involved only in those activities delineated in

194

6

Organising Civil Society by Setting Rules

TSUPU and USMID. And, as the analysis of informal practices in meetings in Section 6.2.2 has shown, at times the MDFs were not even involved therein. Similar to what has been shown for the organisation of citizens through membership in Chapter 5 (Organising Civil Society by Building Membership), by asserting rules for the MDFs and establishing routines for their interaction with municipal bureaucrats, the municipal administration decided on the type of relationship it wanted to have with local citizens (see in particular Section 5.3, Intermediate Conclusion). Specifically, the relationship was formalised—one could even say bureaucratised—through the introduction of elaborate structures and processes within the MDFs and of strictly official interactions with the municipal bureaucrats. Like the creation of members, the formalisation of interactions also ruled out a conflictual or politicised relationship with citizens. In conceptualising the introduction of rules for the MDFs and routines for the bureaucrats’ interactions with them as an organisational decision, the analysis presented in this chapter diverges from the neo-institutionalist perspective taken in Chapter 4 (Responding to the Myth of Participation through Interpretation and Decoupling). Sociological neo-institutionalism understands organisations as influenced by taken-for-granted beliefs and norms, or, in other words, institutions. The concept of partial organization approaches organisation as a social order based on decisions. Ahrne and Brunsson are adamant about the importance of this differentiation: “We suggest that there are key differences between behaviour based on beliefs and norms on the one hand and behaviour constrained by formal rules and similar aspects of organization on the other” (Ahrne and Brunsson, 2011: 89). The analysis presented here does not want to contest this point. It does, however, show that institutions and organisation can be linked. In the case of the MDFs, participation was an institutionalised expectation in the field of international development. As the analysis in Chapter 4 has demonstrated, different organisations in the field found different ways to respond to and deal with this expectation, leading to differing real organisational consequences (Bromley and Powell, 2012). The partial organization of citizens, then, constituted one of these consequences. The myth of participation was here translated into organisational terms through the introduction of explicit and implicit rules (see Ahrne and Brunsson, 2011: 96). These linkages between institutions and decided orders, and the prospective extension of a neo-institutionalist framework with the perspective of partial organization, are discussed further in Section 7.2 (Contribution of the Study). Two further similarities in the empirical analysis of Chapter 4 and 6 catch the eye and suggest potential interfaces between the two theoretical approaches of the rationalized myth and partial organization. First, the introduction of routines

6.4 Intermediate Conclusion

195

for the interaction between municipal bureaucrats and the MDFs on the level of everyday practices, resembles the means-ends decoupling that was depicted in the analysis of municipal bureaucrats’ reactions to the myth of participation in Section 4.3 (Local Administrations: Participation as a Donor Conditionality, see also Section 2.4 for the theoretical background). Participation in the MDFs was implemented in form and also in the interactions. However, limiting interactions to official meetings and communications ensured that the forums had a weak relationship to the core tasks of municipal administrations. These points are discussed in more detail in Section 7.1.2 (Understanding Decoupling of MDFs in Municipal Administrations). Second, the narrative of a prospective institutionalisation of MDFs in Uganda’s existing legal framework echoes, if only nominally, an institutional perspective. As explained in Section 2.2 (A Neo-institutionalist Perspective on Participation in Development), Scott defines three pillars as the constitutive elements of institutions: regulative, normative and cultural-cognitive systems (Scott, 2014). Participation has in this thesis been understood as a takenfor-granted element in the field of international development, i.e. as belonging to the cultural-cognitive pillar of institutions. A formalisation of MDFs into existing legal frameworks could be interpreted as an institutionalisation into the regulative system, which is based on rules and laws. And indeed, Ahrne and Brunsson note that “[o]ne use of the concept of institution is close to or equivalent to part of our concept of organization” (Ahrne and Brunsson, 2011: 89). At the same time, however, they argue for a clear and strict distinction between institutions and organisation because rules are often taken for granted only superficially: “one may be highly aware of the rules, dislike them and even criticize them, yet find it necessary to comply with them. They form a kind of external objective constraint” (Ahrne and Brunsson, 2011: 89). It, therefore, makes sense to view the narrative around institutionalisation of MDFs into Uganda’s legal frameworks as the discussion of a decided order rather than an institutionalisation in the neo-institutionalist sense.

7

Discussion and Conclusion

This thesis set out to study participatory mechanisms in development interventions from an organisational perspective. It sought to understand how the different organisations involved in the implementation of a development intervention understand and interpret participation and to explore the organisational consequences arising from these different understandings and interpretations for participatory mechanisms and their organisationality. Theoretically, the thesis drew on two frameworks, namely the neoinstitutionalist concept of the rationalized myth and Ahrne and Brunsson’s partial organization. Participation was understood as a rationalized myth, meaning the organisations in the field of international development are expected to include participatory elements in their projects and programmes, whether this is conducive to the organisation’s goal or not. The Municipal Development Forums (MDFs) were seen as the empirical embodiment of this myth. Additionally, the concept of partial organization was employed to grasp the forums’ organisationality. Empirically, the study constituted an interpretive, multi-sited ethnography which used MDFs as a case study of a participatory mechanism introduced as part of development interventions. Key organisations in the field analysed for this study were the Cities Alliance, the World Bank’s Uganda Country Office, the Ugandan Ministry of Lands, Housing and Urban Development (MoLHUD) as well as municipal administrations and MDFs in the secondary cities of ATown, B-Ville and C-City. Ethnographic interviews, observations and documents, such as development interventions’ programme documents or written communication between the MDFs and municipal administrations, constituted the body of data. This chapter in the following presents a summary and discussion of the empirical findings (Section 7.1, for more detailed intermediate conclusions see

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2021 E. M. Schindler, Structuring People, Sozialwissenschaftliche Zugänge zu Afrika, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-35903-4_7

197

198

7

Discussion and Conclusion

Sections 4.4, 5.3 and 6.4). The discussions in Sections 7.1.1 (Explaining Different Interpretations of the Rationalized Myth), 7.1.2 (Understanding Decoupling of MDFs in Municipal Administrations) and 7.1.3 (Partial Organization as Deciding on a Relationship) contextualise the findings in more detail within the theoretical frameworks. In doing so, they abstract from the concrete empirical findings and examine broader implications for the two main theoretical approaches, rationalized myths and partial organization. Section 7.2 highlights the theoretical, methodological and empirical contributions of the study. Specifically, it discusses what the perspective of partial organization adds to the existing understanding of how organisations deal with institutionalised expectations such as the myth of participation. It furthermore points out the benefits and challenges of an ethnographic approach and highlights that the empirical contribution lies in the focus on urban development interventions in secondary cities of the Global South. Section 7.2 ends with a review of the empirical findings with respect to what practitioners can learn about participatory mechanisms in development interventions. Section 7.3 assesses the study’s limitations. Section 7.4 presents avenues for future research.

7.1

Summary and Discussion of Findings

This thesis was overall interested in the implementation of participation in the framework of development interventions and was in particular guided by an organisational perspective on the subject. Donors and recipients of aid are organisations, and this thesis sought to elicit the distinctive effects of organisational factors on the implementation of participation in development interventions. In a neo-institutional tradition, it understood participation as a rationalized myth in the field of development. As such, participation is an institutionalised expectation which all organisations in the field have to duly consider in order to be considered legitimate field participants. However, since existing research on participation in development has shown that the myth does not come with an organisational blueprint on “how to do participation” and that participation is like a container that can be filled with different meanings (Section 1.1, Participation in Development Interventions: Research Themes and Questions), the first research question aimed at illuminating which meanings the organisations associate with participation. It asked whether different organisations involved in the implementation of the development intervention understand and interpret participation differently, and if so, how. The second research question was interested in whether these understandings and interpretations had implications of an organisational nature for the participatory mechanisms in question and how these consequences could

7.1 Summary and discussion of findings

199

be explained. In the course of the abductive research process (see Chapter 3, Methodological Framework), it became apparent that what was striking about the implementation of MDFs was their organisationality. That is to say that through the forums, the citizenry was organised to be a partner that had a known membership and could be subjected to rules. Ahrne and Brunsson’s concept of partial organization was found to grasp this phenomenon from an organisational perspective. In the following, I provide a summary of the findings presented in the empirical analysis in Chapters 4 (Responding to the Myth of Participation through Interpretation and Decoupling), 5 (Organising Civil Society by Building Membership) and 6 (Organising Civil Society by Setting Rules). Furthermore, I discuss the findings, taking into consideration their theoretical and practical implications. Specifically, Section 7.1.1 reviews and discusses different interpretations of the myth of participation in TSUPU and USMID. It asks what can be learned about rationalized myths from the research conducted in this thesis and suggests potential extensions to the theoretical framework. Section 7.1.2 considers the municipal administrations’ decoupling of participation from what they understood as their core activities. Section 7.1.3 summarises the findings regarding the partial organization of citizens and discusses this as a decision on the relationship between the administrations and the civil society.

7.1.1 Explaining Different Interpretations of the Rationalized Myth Section 4.1 (Cities Alliance: Participation as Empowerment) and Section 4.2 (World Bank: Participation as a Tool for Monitoring and Accountability) addressed the first research question. They analysed programme documents of TSUPU and USMID, the two development interventions which introduced and worked with MDFs as participatory mechanisms, as well as interview and observation data. They showed that participation was a rationalized myth for the organisations involved in the implementation, especially for the World Bank, one of the main donor organisations, and for the local administrations. A key finding in the analysis was that while structurally both programmes adopted the MDFs as a mechanism to implement participation, TSUPU and USMID operated with different understandings of participation. TSUPU had designed and established the MDFs in five Ugandan municipalities as instruments of empowerment for poor and marginalised people. The forums were to enable citizens to conduct

200

7

Discussion and Conclusion

own projects and give them a voice in the development of their place of residence. In USMID, on the other hand, the MDFs were tasked with monitoring and scrutinising the programme implementation of local administrations and with convincing local citizens of the benefits of USMID’s infrastructure development projects so that there would be no complications with either compensation or rebellious communities. Specifically, the empirical analysis found that MDFs in different locations were involved in different forms of monitoring. In A-Town, they exposed cases of corruption which occurred during the implementation of USMID projects. A-Town’s MDF, furthermore, monitored the work of contractors involved in the construction of roads funded by USMID. In B-Ville, the forum held the municipal administration accountable in regard to the prioritisation of road projects funded by USMID. Moreover, the forums were involved in the mediation of compensation issues during the implementation of USMID’s infrastructure projects. In these cases, the MDFs were caught between “the community” on one side and the local government on the other. The intermediate conclusion to Chapter 4 showed that this reframing was guided by existing organisational guidelines and templates for participation, which were recently summarised in the World Bank’s general framework for citizen engagement (World Bank, 2014). These findings suggest that there are two acceptable or legitimate interpretations of participation available in the field of development, namely empowerment and functionality, and different actors use different interpretations. As described in the theoretical framework in Chapter 2, legitimacy is a core concept in sociological neo-institutionalism. In the neo-institutionalist perspective, organisations do not seek to construct their structures and processes in line with the criterion of efficiency. Rather, they strive for legitimacy in the environment into which they are embedded. Deephouse et al. define legitimacy as “the perceived appropriateness of an organization to a social system in terms of rules, values, norms and definitions” (Deephouse et al., 2017). Participation is regarded as an appropriate element of interventions and as an appropriate organisational practice in the field of development. Participation is not a rule. Instead, it can be considered a value or a norm in the field. This finding can be seen as an organisational perspective on what Pretty called the “two overlapping schools of thought and practice” with respect to participation in development: “One [school of thought and practice] views participation as a means to increase efficiency, the central notion being that if people are involved, then they are more likely to agree with and support the new development or service. The other sees participation as a fundamental right, in which the main aim is to initiate mobilization for collective action, empowerment and institution building” (Pretty, 1995: 1251).

7.1 Summary and discussion of findings

201

The first school of thought and practice Pretty mentions resembles the World Bank’s functionalist approach to the MDFs, while participation as a fundamental right is akin to TSUPU’s understanding of participation as empowerment. It remains unexplained, though, how these two legitimate understandings of participation in the field of development evolved. The following paragraphs consider potential extensions of the theoretical framework used in this thesis to shed light on this question. From the perspective of organisational theory, the differential interpretation of participation in TSUPU and USMID illustrates that, as mentioned in the intermediate conclusion to Chapter 4, organisations are not merely passive recipients of institutional pressures from the field. Instead, they “filter and alter environmental demands” (Wooten and Hoffman, 2017: 61), such as the myth of participation. This finding raises a new question: have the World Bank and the Cities Alliance, as central actors of the field, shaped the interpretations of participation that are generally accepted as legitimate in the field of development and that became evident in how the MDFs were seen in TSUPU and USMID? Especially an organisation that is as dominant in the field of development as the World Bank is likely to have influenced field-level understandings of participation. A fieldlevel analysis of the evolution of the organisational concept of participation into a myth, i.e. a reconstruction of how it was conceived and diffused in the field of development and the role of the World Bank in shaping this myth, could thus provide an insightful addition to the analysis in Chapter 4. This additional perspective could build on DiMaggio and Powell’s concept of isomorphism (DiMaggio and Powell, 1983) to investigate whether mimetic processes or the establishment of professional standards played a role in the diffusion of participation. Alternatively, it could draw on research about the agency of organisations in reaction to institutionalised expectations such as the institutional work framework or the concept of translation of a global model or idea to fit local contexts. Lawrence and Suddaby defined institutional work as “the purposive action of individuals and organizations aimed at creating, maintaining and disrupting institutions” (Lawrence and Suddaby, 2006: 215). Since research on institutional work “explores the practices and processes associated with actors’ endeavors to build up, tear down, elaborate and contain institutions, as well as amplify or suppress their effects” (Hampel et al., 2017: 558), it provides an approach that could help to understand how the World Bank shaped the understanding of participation as functional and as a tool for monitoring and accountability. The analysis of field-level practices such as participation in development is common in research on institutional work. Perkmann and Spicer, for example, study how management fashions turn into institutions. They describe

202

7

Discussion and Conclusion

three types of institutional work involved in this process: political work, which “is aimed at generating new configurations of actors and establishing and reconfiguring rules and property rights”; technical work, which “involves designing frameworks that suggest, recommend or prescribe certain courses of action”; and cultural work, which “establishes or reframes belief systems and values, often by linking practices with more widely anchored discourses” (Perkmann and Spicer, 2008: 813). Other authors have studied institutional work in the financial services industry (Riaz et al., 2011) and in the field of housing “for the hard-to-house” (Lawrence and Dover, 2015). Similarly, the translation perspective has focused on how popular ideas and concepts in administration and management do not diffuse passively through a field but are imitated in a performative process, in which ideas are shaped and changed. An important element of translation is the understanding that “[…] a thing moved from one place to another cannot emerge unchanged: to set something in a new place is to construct it anew” (Czarniawska and Sevón, 2005b: 8). Translation also captures the materiality of the process: “Ideas must materialize, at least in somebody’s head; symbols must be inscribed. […] A practice or an institution cannot travel; they must be simplified and abstracted into an idea, or at least approximated in a narrative permitting a vicarious experience, and therefore converted into words or images. Neither can words nor images travel until they have materialized, until they are embodied, inscribed or objectified, as only bodies or things can move in time and space” (Czarniawska and Sevón, 2005b: 9).

The idea of participation, for example, could be seen to materialise in the many organisational guidelines mentioned in the intermediate conclusion to Chapter 4. Analyses of translation processes then show how ideas and concepts, which originate somewhere and become applied elsewhere, are adapted to fit the realities of the new locality, resulting in “local versions of models and ideas in different local contexts” (Wedlin and Sahlin, 2017: 109). The role of dominant organisations in the field, such as the World Bank, is seen as that of a fashion leader. Those organisations imitating and translating are described as “fashion followers” (Wedlin and Sahlin, 2017: 106). As Wedlin and Sahlin note, “[d]ominating organizations form reference points and models for the rest of the organizations in the same field” (Wedlin and Sahlin, 2017: 108). The translation perspective therefore would allow for an analysis of how the idea of participation evolved, including those travelling models in which the idea materialised, such as policy papers and programmes of international development agencies. It could furthermore provide the theoretical framework for inquiring how, in the case of the MDFs, the idea of participation is adopted and enacted in Ugandan municipalities.

7.1 Summary and discussion of findings

203

These perspectives highlight how the research in this thesis could be expanded to current institutional research and thus further insights about the myth of participation in development.

7.1.2 Understanding Decoupling of MDFs in Municipal Administrations The analysis of empirical data presented in Section 4.3 (Local Administrations: Participation as a Donor Conditionality) considered how the municipal bureaucrats involved in the two development interventions TSUPU and USMID responded to the myth of participation that confronted them in the form of the MDFs. Other than the World Bank and Cities Alliance, which worked with different understandings of participation in their programmes TSUPU and USMID, the local administrations did not seem to have such an interpretational repertoire readily available. Neither did they follow one of the two donor narratives in full. Instead, in their own narratives, they branded the MDFs as an external requirement and, in their practices, they kept the MDFs away from what they understood as their core activities. In interviews across the three municipalities, local bureaucrats emphasised that the MDFs were not understood as an accepted element of their everyday tasks and regular activities but rather perceived as a donor conditionality which had to be implemented to receive programme funds. In practice, this meant that the forums were involved exclusively in those activities that pertained to and were financed by the two interventions. They were not an integral partner in all municipal development projects, as had been the objective of the MDFs when they were established in TSUPU. This is, for example, illustrated by the fact that the forums’ presidents and members were never allowed to participate in the municipal bureaucrats’ weekly technical planning meetings, in which general matters of municipal development were discussed. The MDF members would, however, be invited to participate in the meetings of USMID’s Steering Committee. The distancing of the forums from municipal bureaucrats’ everyday activities was also reflected in the way the local bureaucrats dealt with the donors’ request to provide an office for the MDFs. While two of the researched municipalities found reasons to simply deny the request, A-Town’s administration provided an office which was both dilapidated and located in the most far-flung corner of the municipal offices. The marginalisation of MDFs in local administrations suggests that a key theoretical assumption formulated by Meyer and Rowan in their seminal 1977

204

7

Discussion and Conclusion

article – namely, that rationalized myths are met with ceremonial adoption and decoupling – holds true in this case. As described in the theoretical framework in Chapter 2, the neo-institutionalist literature sees decoupling as the common response to rationalized myths. Boxenbaum and Jonsson note: “decoupling means that organizations abide only superficially by institutional pressure and adopt new structures without necessarily implementing the related practices” (Boxenbaum and Jonsson, 2017: 80). Decoupling is thus a separation of organisational structures from practices. The MDFs existed as a structure but were irrelevant to the everyday practices of municipal bureaucrats in A-Town, B-Ville and C-City. The empirical research in Chapter 4 (Responding to the Myth of Participation through Interpretation and Decoupling), Chapter 5 (Organising Civil Society by Building Membership) and Chapter 6 (Organising Civil Society by Setting Rules) has shown that the forums were implemented and to a certain extent operational. Hence, the response of municipal bureaucrats to the MDFs might also be seen as a case of a recently suggested new way of theorising decoupling: meansends decoupling. Means-ends decoupling explains how “an organization can set up a structure and implement it fully, yet leave the essentials of its operations untouched by decoupling the means and the ends of the action” (Boxenbaum and Jonsson, 2017: 90). The originators of this innovation in research on decoupling, Bromley and Powell, detail that when means-ends decoupling occurs, there is little or no link between daily practices and intended outcome. They provide the example of university rankings to illustrate means-ends decoupling: “The rankings game has become an expansive (and expensive) business. But rankings are only loosely connected to the quality of academic work at a university, despite their extensive impact. Efforts aimed at scoring higher on rankings are not necessarily linked to efforts to improve teaching and learning” (Bromley and Powell, 2012: 25).

Rankings are set up to monitor the quality of education and research, but despite being fully implemented, they are not actually seen by universities as a good measure of educational or research quality. In other words, the formal structures set up “have real organizational consequences, work activities are altered, and policies are implemented and evaluated” (Bromley and Powell, 2012: 14), but they do not achieve what they were built to do. The local bureaucrats’ handling of the expectation that they should cooperate with the MDFs and thence enable citizen participation can be interpreted as such a case of means-ends decoupling. The MDFs were not merely empty structural shells. Instead, they did operate and engage in municipal planning activities. However, their engagement was not

7.1 Summary and discussion of findings

205

linked to the intended outcome, i.e. an involvement in regular municipal planning projects beyond donor interventions. This also became apparent in the analysis presented in Section 6.2 (Formalisation of the MDFs’ Interactions with Municipal Bureaucrats) and Section 6.4 (Intermediate Conclusion), which showed that municipal bureaucrats formalised their interactions with MDFs in official communication and limited it to organised meetings. These practices, too, constituted means-ends decoupling: The forums were implemented, they existed, they congregated and discussed issues of municipal development, and they were involved in municipal planning. However, these activities and engagements were at best limited to the scope prescribed by the development interventions, and sometimes not even that. At the same time, the MDFs were prevented from engaging in regular municipal planning activities such as the meetings of the municipalities’ technical planning committees and their projects. An interesting question is: why do the municipal bureaucrats decouple? Boxenbaum and Jonsson note that it is important to take the organizational field into account when considering this question: “the field in which institutional processes take place is an important space to theorize. It is not only the institutional pressures that an organization experiences that are channelled through intra-field structures, but also the freedom of the organization to partly resist this pressure by decoupling” (Boxenbaum and Jonsson, 2017: 88). For means-ends decoupling, Bromley and Powell similarly delineate that it is possible when “organizational participants … consciously recognize that the actions are of limited utility but pursue these practices because they perceive larger structural pressures” (Bromley and Powell, 2012: 14). Fragmented rationalised environments, e.g. when organisations are directly accountable to a large number of stakeholders, also create conditions for means-ends decoupling. Municipal administrations in Uganda can be seen to operate in such a fragmented environment. As outlined in Section 1.4.2 (Uganda’s Politico-administrative System over Time), municipal administrations had limited autonomy in the overall administrative system. Despite the de jure decentralisation in the political, administrative and fiscal domain, municipal bureaucrats were de facto subject to scrutiny and oversight by many sides. The central government Ministry of Local Government (MoLG) was responsible for ensuring that local governments complied with their statutory requirements. Two departments in the MoLG, for example, were responsible for the inspection of local governments. Their task was to “undertake systematic verification of [the local governments’] adherence to established legal and policy frameworks, regulations, guidelines, procedures and rules to ensure efficiency and effectiveness” (Ministry of Local Government, n.d.). As one interviewee in

206

7

Discussion and Conclusion

the MoLG pointed out, “officials in the local governments pay more allegiance to Ministry of Local Government than they do to other ministries because we are the mother ministry for them” (EI23: Ibrahim, MoLG, March 2017). At the same time, the municipal bureaucrats were to a certain extent accountable to sectoral line ministries. Municipal administrations raised only limited own-source revenue and received few unconditional funds from the central government. The implementation of line ministry programmes therefore constituted an important part of the everyday tasks of Uganda’s municipal bureaucrats. The community development officers in A-Town, B-Ville and C-City, for example, received funds from the Ugandan Ministry of Gender, Labour and Social Development to implement national programmes on the local level, such as a youth livelihood programme which gave out interest-free loans to youth interest groups to enable the establishment of income-generating activities. It is therefore unsurprising that the municipal bureaucrats often spoke of the line ministries as their “mother ministries”. International development interventions such as TSUPU and USMID, then, introduced a further group of actors which held municipal bureaucrats accountable. Additionally, municipal governments were in theory accountable to their constituents. These many lines of accountability, and the constant scrutiny and evaluation which came with them, played a role in the municipal administrations’ means-ends decoupling of MDFs. Not just in the case of international development interventions, but in general, the municipal administrations were de facto implementers of programmes conceived and designed elsewhere. My empirical analysis has, furthermore, shown that the relationship between donor organisations and central government ministries, on the one hand, and local administrations, on the other hand, was one of mistrust and discontent. While the former saw local administrations as prone to corruption and in need of monitoring and disciplining, local administrations themselves suggested that they were burdened with excessive exigencies ‘from the top’. The multiplicity of expectations and of lines of accountability together with the lack of trust provided the perfect conditions for decoupling. Another interesting question that could not be addressed at length in the thesis is that of legitimacy. It is a basic theoretical assumption of sociological neoinstitutionalism that organisations adopt rationalized myths because they seek legitimacy. With the many different lines of accountability, it would be interesting to ask which organisations in the field municipal bureaucrats emulate.

7.1 Summary and discussion of findings

207

7.1.3 Partial Organization as Deciding on a Relationship Chapters 5 (Organising Civil Society by Building Membership) and 6 (Organising Civil Society by Setting Rules) addressed the second research question. The analysis in these chapters looked at the MDFs from an organisational perspective and sought to explain their organisationality. The analysis revealed how, in the framework of development interventions, the organisations in the field took decisions which resulted in the partial organization of civil society. Ahrne and Brunsson have defined partial organization as “the use of less than all organizational elements” (Ahrne and Brunsson, 2011: 84). They consider the organisational elements of membership, rules, monitoring, sanctions, and hierarchy as constitutive of formal organisation and organisations: “Organizations are expected to make decisions about (1) who can be a member; (2) rules that specify expectations for what the members shall do; (3) monitoring of what the members do; (4) positive or negative sanctions connected to the members’ tendencies to meet the decided expectations; and (5) how decisions shall be made and who shall make them” (Ahrne and Brunsson, 2019b: 8). Further, Ahrne and Brunsson argue that “[o]rganization happens … also outside the context of formal organizations” (Ahrne and Brunsson, 2019b: 4) but that this type of organisation often occurs only with one or some of the organisational elements of formal or complete organisation(s). Chapter 5 analysed interview and observation data to reconstruct the conceptualisation of citizens by representatives of donor organisations and municipal administrations. It showed that in implementing participatory mechanisms such as the MDFs, municipal bureaucrats were faced with a paradox: they were supposed to regard citizens as partners in the planning and implementation of municipal projects. At the same time, citizens were regarded as objects of transformation, both in development projects and by municipal bureaucrats overall. The bureaucrats described the citizens as not knowledgeable enough to participate in governmental activities and expected them to behave in violation of the law, at times even by destroying government projects. The analysis finds that municipal bureaucrats dealt with this paradox by closely defining who could be part of the MDFs, thereby producing communities that they could work with. By pre-defining the stakeholders who should take part in the MDFs, by working with existing community-based groups and by formulating expectations with respect to the professional backgrounds of citizens active in the MDFs, “members” were created: donors and municipal administrations clearly outlined who was “right” as a participant of the forum. One of the expectations formulated, for example, was that MDF members should ideally have experience working

208

7

Discussion and Conclusion

in the administration or, better even, in international organisations, so that they would “understand the system” rather than articulate unrealistic demands. Citizens perceived as unruly, unpredictable, erratic individuals in need of education were to a certain extent prevented from being viable participants in the MDFs. This way, the MDFs became a knowledgeable and useful partner, a functional actor in the field of organisations that comprised the municipality as well as the development intervention. This detailed definition of participants, of who was and who was not a good participant, can be understood as the partial organization of citizens through the creation of membership. As Ahrne and Brunsson emphasise, “[m]embership brings a certain identity with it, an identity that differs from that of non-members. And members expect to be treated by the organization differently than non-members are treated; similarly different behaviour is expected from its members than from others” (Ahrne and Brunsson, 2011: 86). Chapter 6 analysed the MDF charters as well as observational data pertaining to the interactions between the forums and municipal administrations in order to understand the rules that were set for structures and processes of the MDFs and for their interactions with municipal bureaucrats. The charters can be seen as a kind of operating manual for the forums. Drafted by the MoLHUD, the charters envisioned an elaborate level of organisation for the MDFs, such as the election of an executive committee and the creation of thematic working groups for different topics of relevance to municipal infrastructure development. The introduction of internal structures and processes for MDFs was important for the formal organisations involved in their implementation. The MDF executive committee served as a contact for the municipal administration, the MoLHUD, the World Bank and the Cities Alliance. It acted as the entity in charge of putting into practice what was expected of the MDFs and represented the forums in administrative meetings and decision-making processes. The thematic working groups mirrored different departments of the municipal administration, such as environment, physical development and community development. As such, they also constituted a point of contact and entity in charge of the MDFs’ input and involvement in the specific departmental initiatives and activities. Rules pertaining to the MDFs were, however, not limited to these formal rules. In addition, local administrations enacted implicit rules, or routines, for their interaction with the MDFs. They largely restricted interaction to formal communication by official letters and in planned, pre-structured meetings. These practices enabled the municipal administrations to guard their organisational boundaries while at the same time documenting precisely how they implemented participation in the form of MDFs, thereby producing accountability for the donor organisations (see Section 4.3, Local Administrations: Participation as a Donor

7.1 Summary and discussion of findings

209

Conditionality and Section 7.1.2, Understanding Decoupling of MDFs in Municipal Administrations). One common practice, for example, was to invite the MDFs to meetings, so they could provide input on what was discussed and represent the perspective of local citizens on the matter, but to not take these points into account in decision-making. The bureaucrats’ predilection for rules, furthermore, manifested in a narrative that was common throughout interviews with municipal and national bureaucrats: the prospective integration of MDFs into existing legal frameworks for local governments in Uganda. Municipal bureaucrats as well as MoLHUD representatives often depicted the forums as external to the existing legal framework in which local administrations operated and which they considered their guideline. Some interviewees outright questioned the MDFs’ legality. Only if they were to be integrated into existing legal frameworks, the narrative went, could the forums become a widely accepted and engaged participatory mechanism in Ugandan municipalities. The MoLHUD considered this important enough to include the MDFs in their National Urban Policy. The narrative around “institutionalisation” of the forums, as it was called in the field, shows the desire to introduce even further rules to organise citizens in the framework of MDFs. The finding that some municipal bureaucrats called the forums extra-legal also supports what was described in Section 4.3 (Local Administrations: Participation as a Donor Conditionality) and Section 7.1.2 (Understanding Decoupling of MDFs in Municipal Administrations): participation in the form of the MDFs, as a quasi-mandatory part of development interventions, was an externally induced, almost imposed measure. Instead of empowering citizens or being adapted to local needs and circumstances, it served the legitimation and legitimacy of this intervention for the development organisations and their communities. Overall, the empirical analysis presented in Chapter 6 showed that citizens were not only partially organised by the creation of a membership in the MDFs. The organisations in the field, furthermore, introduced a variety of rules. Ahrne and Brunsson define rules as “decisions about how people are expected to behave: when they shall meet, what they shall do, how they shall do things together, and the goals they are expected to achieve” (Ahrne and Brunsson, 2019b: 10). For the MDFs, the organisations involved in their creation and implementation introduced rules for the structures and processes internal to the forums. They furthermore established implicit rules, or routines for the interaction between the forums and the formal organisations themselves and engaged a narrative that proclaimed the need for further rules. In interpreting the formalisation of interactions between the forums and municipal bureaucrats as implicit rules, the thesis diverges from Ahrne and Brunsson’s concept, where rules exist primarily in written format

210

7

Discussion and Conclusion

(Ahrne and Brunsson, 2011, 2019b). As Breidenstein et al. note for the theoretical practice of ethnographies, “it is important that concepts are not taken as given, but that they remain open and changeable in their application to the empirical case” (Breidenstein et al., 2015: 173, author’s translation). The practices observed in the municipal administrations’ interactions with the MDFs suggested that these were routines in the sense of habitual behaviours or “repetitive, recognizable patterns” (Feldman and Pentland, 2003: 95). At the same time, these routines reflected an understanding of how to engage with the MDFs as an externally induced participatory mechanism, to the extent that they were “agreement[s] about how to do the work” (Feldman and Pentland, 2003: 98). As such, these routines effectively functioned as rules insofar as they determined how things were to be done in the interaction between municipal bureaucrats and MDFs. The analysis in Chapter 5 and 6 showed that the MDFs produce citizens as partners for municipal administrations and aid agencies and that this process can be understood as the partial organization of civil society. The perspective on participation presented in Chapters 5 and 6 took up where Chapter 4 left off in the sense that the empirical analysis presented in Chapters 5 and 6 viewed the MDFs as the result of organisational agency in the face of institutionalised pressures. Partial organization, in this case, was the response of organisations in the field to the myth of participation. But what does the analysis reveal about partial organization overall? The findings illustrate two points that Ahrne and Brunsson make: partial organization defines the relationship between those involved in it, and it constitutes an attempt at creating an order, as opposed to characterising an existing order. Ahrne and Brunsson point out that their concept of organisation “can be understood as describing a special form for achieving coordination or co-operation” (Ahrne and Brunsson, 2019b: 6). They argue that formal organisations define the “type of relationship among the people involved” (Ahrne and Brunsson, 2019b: 7). The analysis of empirical data in Chapters 5 and 6 seems to confirm this assertion. Through the partial organization of citizens in the MDFs, the organisations involved in their creation and implementation defined the relationship between administrations and citizens as functional and technocratic. The forums were to function according to specific rules which were created by the organisations in the field; its members were expected to be knowledgeable about how administrations work in order to provide useful input rather than representing an ‘unfiltered’ voice of the wider citizenry. MDFs were to co-operate with municipal administrations in matters of municipal development rather than contest governmental initiatives. The partial organization also demarcated what was not acceptable in the relationship between citizens and governmental actors: the municipal administrations, the

7.2 Contribution of the study

211

MoLHUD, and the World Bank opposed any interest of MDF members in matters perceived as political. Under no circumstances, it seems, should the idea of changing power relations – which lies at the core of conceptualisations of participation as empowerment – come to the fore. Introducing organisational elements into the relationship between governments and citizens thus makes this relationship more predictable. It significantly reduces the uncertainty administrations face when implementing participation. However, as Ahrne and Brunsson emphasise, “organization, whether complete or partial, constitutes attempts to create a specific order. It is far from certain that these attempts fully succeed, that the decisions are implemented” (Ahrne and Brunsson, 2011: 90). In particular, there is a tension or discrepancy between the order envisioned in programme documents and MDF charters and practices of dealing with the MDFs as they were developed mainly by municipal bureaucrats. In Section 7.1.2 (Understanding Decoupling of MDFs in Municipal Administrations), the municipal bureaucrats’ efforts to prevent the forums from engaging in municipal planning projects and, partially, also from being involved in USMID activities, was interpreted in part as decoupling. From the perspective of partial organization, it can also be seen as a neglect of rules and a refusal of membership. As a result, the order established differs from that which was originally intended.

7.2

Contribution of the Study

This section discusses the contributions of this thesis. It begins with the theoretical contribution which lies in connecting institutions and decided orders. The section then discusses the methodological and empirical contributions of the thesis before considering implications for practitioners in the field of development. Using both the rationalized myth and partial organization as theoretical frameworks in a thesis might seem daring at first glance. After all, the rationalized myth is a neo-institutionalist concept which sees organisations as strongly influenced by institutions. Partial organization, on the contrary, is a decided order and as such “can be seen as the opposite of … institutions” (Ahrne and Brunsson, 2019a: 22). Ahrne and Brunsson argue for a strict distinction between the two: “The concepts of network and institution are often used in such a broad sense that they risk concealing important elements of organization in contemporary society. Instead we propose more confined and precise definitions of these concepts that allow us to

212

7

Discussion and Conclusion

compare them to the concept of organization. By upholding the conceptual differences among the concepts of organization, network and institution, and by allowing for a concept of partial organization, it is possible to see the phenomena they stand for as alternative forms of order with different characteristics, causes and consequences” (Ahrne and Brunsson, 2011: 84).

And indeed, linking these two concepts and approaches had not been envisioned at the start of this thesis but proved to be useful in the abductive research process. The theoretical contribution, then, is to demonstrate that the perspective of partial organization is a prospective extension of a neo-institutionalist framework and to highlight several connections between institutions and decided orders. Conceptualising participation as a rationalized myth and thus an institutionalised environmental expectation, limits the possibilities for considering organisations’ agency. Therefore, the original theoretical framework did not take into account the organisations’ ability to take and implement decisions with respect to the myth of participation. Organisations’ power to take decisions allowed them to deal with the myth in various ways other than decoupling structures from the core of the organisation. To comprehensively analyse and understand participation in development interventions, I found that my approach needed to be complemented with a perspective that takes into account the organisations’ reactions to the myth of participation. In order to understand the MDFs from an organisational perspective, it is furthermore important for a theoretical approach to allow for different degrees of organisationality beyond formal organisations, networks and groups. For neo-institutionalist approaches, however, “what happens outside the context of formal organizations has been dubbed “organizational environments”, and organizational environments have seldom been seen as organized” (Ahrne and Brunsson, 2019b: 4). The concept of partial organization (Ahrne et al., 2016; Ahrne and Brunsson, 2011, 2019b) complements the rationalized myth in two important respects. First, it enables a conceptualisation of MDFs in organisational terms without squeezing it into existing moulds such as groups. Second, it allows us to see this partial organization as a result of organisational decision-making rather than an order that emerges from societal pressures. Bringing the two frameworks together, furthermore, enables insights about what Ahrne et al. called “the interaction between different types of social order” or “a combination of different elements of social orderings” (Ahrne et al., 2016: 99). Specifically, this thesis showed the interfaces and ties between institutions such as participation in development interventions and decided orders such as the MDF.

7.2 Contribution of the study

213

In particular, two aspects of the “complex interplay and relationships” (Ahrne and Brunsson, 2011: 85) between institutions and decided orders seem important. First, the link between participation as a rationalized myth and participatory mechanisms such as the MDFs as the partial organization of citizens confirms Ahrne and Brunsson’s proposition that institutions can be transformed into organisation or, rather, institutions are sometimes organised because it is “a quicker method than … attempts at changing institutions directly” (see also Ahrne et al., 2016; Ahrne and Brunsson, 2011: 96). Ahrne and Brunsson name the example of gender equality politics, where, so they argue, new laws are introduced in the hope that, over time, these laws will be transformed into taken-for-granted institutions. Oftentimes, a change in organisation might also be the sole option because institutions are not easily changed. Ahrne and Brunsson note that. “organization is a common strategy for those who want to change the power relations, behaviour, identities or status orders that are institutionalized. New laws are intended not only to codify existing norms in society but also to adjust people’s behaviour and influence identities and status orders” (Ahrne and Brunsson, 2011: 96).

In the case of the MDFs, it is conceivable that for the donor organisations, the organising of citizens served as a proxy for the changing of institutions in the area of state-society relations and models of bureaucracy. In other words, because aid interventions do not engage in political work and are unable to change institutions, they organise citizens so that they might work on changing their relationship with administrations themselves. For the municipal administrations, the partial organization of citizens was more related to the creation of order in the face of an institutionalised pressure which threatens to permeate organisational boundaries. A second aspect of the connection between institutions and decided orders became evident in the empirical analysis: while institutions are taken for granted, organisation is a decided order, and this has consequences for the stability of organised orders. Ahrne and Brunsson argue that while institutions “have actually succeeded in coming into being”, decided orders are “attempts to create an order” (Ahrne and Brunsson, 2008: 51, see also 2011), with the potential to fail. Including partial organization in the framework, therefore, allows us to understand that while participation might be an institutionalised expectation in the field of development interventions, the organisational constructs it spawns are far from stable. Much rather, participatory constructs such as the MDFs are decided orders, prone to being questioned and even to failure. This became visible in many points of the empirical analysis: the reframing of MDFs in USMID, the decoupling of the

214

7

Discussion and Conclusion

forums from municipal planning and development activities and projects, and the discussion around a formalisation of MDFs in Uganda’s existing legal framework. These findings showed that the forums were contested, especially in the municipal administrations, and that they were expected to eventually perish once the development intervention was completed. In a nutshell, then, by marrying the two theoretical concepts of the rationalized myth and partial organization, this study showed how organisations attempted to organise an institutionalised expectation and at the same time revealed the fragility of the partial organization. It furthermore demonstrated that the concept of partial organization cannot only be applied to the study of individual organisations but also to a field of organisations which attempts to partially organise its environment. Methodologically, this thesis is an addition to the existing body of ethnographies of development interventions and ethnographies of administrations in the Global South (Bierschenk and Olivier de Sardan, 2014; de Herdt and Olivier de Sardan, 2015). It showed the benefit of multi-sited ethnographies for studying organizational fields, namely the multi-perspectivity that has enabled an understanding of the perspectives of different organisations and actors in the field. However, it has also clearly highlighted the difficulties of doing ethnographic research in administrations of the Global South in terms of access and immersion. Last but not least, this thesis made a case for more reflexive, interpretive research in organisational studies and called attention to the importance of considering the ethics of doing research in the Global South when the researcher herself comes from the Global North. Empirically, the thesis entered relatively new territory with its focus on participation in urban development interventions in secondary cities of the Global South. Both urban development interventions and scholarship have mainly been focused on capital cities, metropolitan regions and megacities. Only in the past ten years have secondary cities of the Global South received more attention, and this study adds to that emerging body of research. Secondary urban centres such as A-Town, B-Ville and C-City are rapidly growing and in a process of transition from town to city, which puts a strain on municipal infrastructures and challenges the administrations’ capacities to manage urbanisation. Roberts argues that secondary cities in the Global South often “struggle to raise capital, raise local taxes and attract the investment that is needed to build infrastructure, attract new business enterprises and create the vibrant communities necessary in order to be diversified and create more dynamic economies, improve livelihoods and grow jobs” (Roberts, 2014: 17). In Uganda’s emerging urban centres, rapid growth resulted in many new people moving to the urban centre and an increasingly diverse citizenry.

7.2 Contribution of the study

215

This can be a challenge for the relationship between citizens and administrations. By analysing the implementation of a participatory mechanism in three Ugandan municipalities, the thesis provided insights into these relationships. For practitioners, this thesis told a cautionary tale with respect to development interventions involving participatory elements. It showed how complex and multifaceted the implementation of participatory mechanisms can be and how important it is to take into account organisational realities and rationalities, both of the complete organisations implementing an intervention as well as of the participatory mechanisms that are created. Importantly, this holds true even after decades of experience with participation in the field of development and even though the difficulties and pitfalls of implementing it are well-known. It should not be taken for granted that what is known is put into practice. The analysis in Chapter 4 has produced interesting learnings with respect to externally induced participation mechanisms which are transferred from one development intervention to another. As Kühl describes, a transfer is quite common for induced participation mechanisms, which are often integrated into “whole networks” of projects and programmes (Kühl, 1998: 60, author’s translation). Due to the different understandings of participation in TSUPU and USMID, the MDFs were faced with changing expectations and role requirements. As pointed out, the MDF consisted of engaged citizens who voluntarily offered their time to engage in the improvement of their municipality. One could, therefore, ask if this change in expectations did not overstrain the instrument in so far as it burdened the engaged citizens with having to adapt to new frameworks and roles in quick succession. One could also criticise the new role carved out for the forums in USMID as being a case of tokenism and technocratisation, resulting in the upwards delegation of decision-making and the downwards delegation of responsibility (Mosse, 2013: 3–5). In the case of employing the forums as mediators (see Section 4.2.3, The MDFs as Mediator), for example, complicated and politicised aspects of programme implementation were outsourced to voluntarily engaged citizens. The analysis in Section 4.2.3 showed that the forums were often asked to mediate when compensation issues arose during the implementation of USMID’s infrastructure projects, especially due to resettlement. This role left the forums precariously caught between two stools. These results raise the question if transferring participatory mechanisms between programmes, as happened in the case of the MDFs, can at all be helpful for local citizens and improve their ability to shape the development of their municipalities. Instead, it seems to have fulfilled an important function for the international development organisations: the sustainability of development interventions was important for the organisations’ legitimacy. Sustainability here means an intervention’s benefits are maintained, or

216

7

Discussion and Conclusion

better even, scaled up after the intervention ends. As it was put in the evaluation of TSUPU: “Will the results and outcomes of the projects continue after funding or support end?” (accenture, 2017: 74). Watkins et al. point out that “the ideal of sustainability has become a dogma in many aid programs” (Watkins et al., 2012: 297). As such, it is similar to participation in the sense that development interventions need to be framed as sustainable in order for the funders to be seen as legitimate in the field. By being transferred from one intervention to another, the MDFs continued to exist and to be involved in municipal development, albeit with a changing scope of involvement. The Cities Alliance could, therefore, claim that their intervention was sustainable. Indeed, the forums were presented as a success story at UN Habitat’s Habitat III conference in 2016 and at UN-Habitat’s World Urban Forum in 2018.1 Watkins et al. remind us that “[t]he local with an inspiring personal story, testimonials of individuals claiming to have left poverty behind, or the inspired leader of an NGO can appear at global conferences, galvanize donors, and make lofty aspirations seem attainable” (Watkins et al., 2012: 297). The evaluation of TSUPU did caution that if the forums were to remain sustainable in the long run, additional funding would be necessary. However, it also found that the replication of forums in USMID enabled “a continuation of projects post-Country Programme” (accenture, 2017: 74) and thus secured their sustainability in the short run: “[T]he World Bank Uganda Support to Municipal Infrastructure Development (USMID) programme has leveraged and scaled the MDFs” (accenture, 2017: 5). As a consequence, the Cities Alliance was able to argue that it had met the goal of sustainability for the time being. Sustainability of the intervention with respect to the MDFs, then, became the problem of the World Bank. In USMID, however, the forums were not such a prominent element of the programme in the first place. The World Bank was, furthermore, able to point towards the potential institutionalisation of the MDFs in Uganda’s existing legal framework (see Section 6.3, Narratives of the MDFs’ Prospective Formalisation in Legal Frameworks) as a step towards sustainability. The analysis in Chapters 5 and 6 brought to light aspects of politics and power. The MDFs were explicitly framed as non-political entities (see Section 5.2.3, Understanding the System: Behavioural Expectations and Professional Requirements). Engaged citizens with political interests were seen to complicate programme implementation and to introduce conflict. At the same time, several members of the MDFs had shown political ambitions. And even if 1

The forums were represented by a member of the Ugandan National Organisation of the Urban Poor at Habitat III in 2016 and by the MDF presidents of A-Town and C-City at the 2018 World Urban Forum. This information was mentioned in informal conversations with the respective individuals.

7.3 Limitations of the study

217

they had not: the fact that the forums were engaged as mediators between the municipal administration and citizens who had to relocate due to the development projects financed by USMID showed that the intervention ultimately had a political dimension. It is well known that power often plays an unfortunate role in subverting what was intended with a participatory mechanism, namely, to give voice to the citizens. Watkins et al. summarise: “The critical literature on empowerment (which also includes ownership demonstrated by participation) shows that, in practice, altering structures of power or changing indigenous institutional patterns turns out to be difficult or impossible” (Watkins et al., 2012: 296). They emphasise that the underlying goal of participatory interventions is often a change in patterns and distribution of power. This is, as the authors point out, practically impossible to achieve with a development intervention. In the case of MDFs, the partial organization of citizens became an instrument for upholding power differentials between the municipal administration and local citizens. In particular, the manifold variations of formalising the relationship between these two actors by introducing rules presented in Chapter 6 (Organising Civil Society by Setting Rules) worked to maintain existing hierarchies. Overall, these aspects of power and politics showed that the organisations in the field, in particular donor organisations, should always acknowledge that participation is political and that power differentials always exist and influence participation. As Rigon stipulates: “Careful management of participation implies tackling powerful interests which … requires various resources” (Rigon, 2014: 278). It is, therefore, crucial for practitioners to consider how to address these aspects, instead of simply framing participation as a purely technical or technocratic exercise and circumventing the issue.

7.3

Limitations of the Study

With its focus on organisations and organisationality, the study largely left aside considerations of power. As mentioned in the introduction, participatory mechanisms have been found to often be dominated by powerful local elites, thereby subverting goals such as the empowerment of marginalised people. Dill, for example, observes that “participation as a development tool may serve to entrench rather than remedy pervasive inequalities” (Dill, 2009: 719). With specific reference to the practice of building on existing community-based organisations in international development interventions, deWit and Berner caution that CBOs “inevitably reflect and reinforce local divisions, inequalities and power differentials, and elite capture of benefits is not the exception but the rule” (De Wit and

218

7

Discussion and Conclusion

Berner, 2009: 944). Rigon finds that “[p]articipation is the outcome of a political process influenced by participants’ inequalities in resources and power” (Rigon, 2014: 260). Questions of power are, therefore, highly relevant in the implementation of participatory mechanisms, in general, and, repeatedly, appeared as important in my study of the MDFs. Section 5.2.2, for example, briefly touched upon the practice of building on existing groups and relationships and explained how this was used in the creation of the MDFs. It did not, however, examine whether and how local inequalities and power differentials were reflected in these groups. A further power dynamic was important in the empirical data: the complicated and mistrustful relationship between donors and the MoLHUD, on the one hand, and the municipal administrations, on the other hand. In USMID’s programme appraisal document, for example, the World Bank had identified fraud and corruption as a major risk for programme implementation and had claimed that local governments were likely to engage in collusion and bribery (World Bank, 2013b: 29). The central government ministries tended to explicate their roles vis-à-vis local governments as consisting of training and supervision. They criticised local governments for a lack of commitment and compliance with rules and regulations and sometimes outrightly accused them of corruption. The local administrations frequently referred to a mismatch between their limited autonomy and financial resources and the comprehensive task catalogue prescribed for them. The issue was addressed intermittently in the empirical analysis, and, especially, in Section 4.2.1 (Understanding Participation as a Tool for Monitoring). Section 7.1.2 (Understanding Decoupling of MDFs in Municipal Administrations) furthermore discussed it as an underlying explanation for the municipal bureaucrats’ decoupling of the forums. Nevertheless, the thesis did not explore the conflictual intergovernmental relationships between the MoLHUD and the local administrations nor their implications for the implementation of MDFs in full detail. A second limitation of the study is methodological. As an interpretive ethnography, the thesis did not aim for the generalisability of its findings but rather sought contextualisation. Schwartz-Shea and Yanow note that interpretive researchers should ask: “Is the research sufficiently contextualized so that the interpretations are embedded in, rather than abstracted from, the settings of the actors studied?” (Schwartz-Shea and Yanow, 2012: 47). They assert that contextuality allows readers both with an academic and with a practitioner’s background to “assess the relevance of the research to their own settings” (Schwartz-Shea and Yanow, 2012: 48). For ethnographies, Breidenstein et al. argue similarly that the reader of an ethnographic analysis should feel like she is passively participating in the empirical setting, which makes thick description an important

7.4 Avenues for further research

219

element of ethnographic writing (Breidenstein et al., 2015). In the tradition of both interpretive approaches and ethnographies, my analysis in this thesis built on contextuality as an “appropriate indicator for the achievements of [the] research” (Schwartz-Shea and Yanow, 2012: 48) and was context-specific to the empirical cases in A-Town, B-Ville and C-City in Uganda. Contextuality further extended to my interpretive lens. As described in the methodological framework (Chapter 3), questions of positionality played an important role in this research project. Positionality refers to the role of the researcher in the research. Taking positionality into account appreciates the interpretivist notion that a view from nowhere is not possible and, instead, knowledge is always situated (Rose, 1997; Schwartz-Shea and Yanow, 2012; Wilkinson, 2014). Positionality affected my research, especially the data collection and relationships with research participants as well as my processing and analysing of the data generated. By writing an extensive and detailed chapter on the methodological framework and empirical research process, I therefore aimed to achieve transparency about the research, to address my positionality and to provide some of the contextuality needed for assessing the findings. Furthermore, contextuality was accomplished through thick description throughout the empirical analysis. Breidenstein et al. further note a second criterion for the quality of ethnographic research: a clear difference between the understanding of field participants and the analytical lens of the observer/researcher should be discernible. The researcher should reconstruct the experiences and meaning-making of field participants through the filter of her disciplinary discourse (Breidenstein et al., 2015: 187). Strübing et al. call this “theoretical permeation” (Strübing et al., 2018: 90–93, author’s translation). The analytical focus on organisations and organisationality in this thesis constituted such a filter and allowed me to take an observer’s rather than a participant’s perspective.

7.4

Avenues for Further Research

Four avenues for future research seem particularly promising. With respect to the rationalized myth of participation in the field of development, the discussion in Section 7.1.1 (Explaining Different Interpretations of the Rationalized Myth) has already highlighted an interesting addition to the analysis presented here. Specifically, it suggested a field-level analysis of the genesis of participation as a myth and of the World Bank’s role in shaping this myth, i.e. studying how the myth became “considered proper, adequate, rational, and necessary” (Meyer and Rowan, 1977: 345).

220

7

Discussion and Conclusion

The understanding of the concept of partial organization could be further advanced by addressing three topics that I briefly present here. Firstly, and with specific focus on the organisation of civil society in the framework of development interventions, it would be interesting to examine the introduction of further elements of formal organisation and to investigate their feasibility in practice. As set out in the theoretical framework in Chapter 2, Ahrne and Brunsson define five core elements of complete organisation: membership, rules, monitoring, sanctions and hierarchy. While the empirical analysis focused on the partial organization of civil society through membership and rules, aspects of the other elements of partial organization were also visible in the MDFs. Specifically, the creation of an elected executive in the forums can be interpreted as an attempt to introduce a hierarchy, i.e. “an authoritative centre, often represented by a special organizational unit called a board, management, government, leadership or some such term” (Ahrne and Brunsson, 2008: 46). While hierarchies usually exist in organisations to create and enforce rules, Ahrne and Brunsson acknowledge that they can also “consist merely of a mechanism for decision-making – a rule for majority vote, for instance” (Ahrne and Brunsson, 2008: 46). The MDFs’ executive committee as foreseen in the charter resembles more closely a decision-making mechanism than an authoritative centre. In practice, however, the executive committee functioned more as an organising than a decision-making mechanism. Furthermore, in the studied municipalities, from the perspective of the municipal administrations, the executive committee became equated with the overall MDF, thereby effectively decommissioning the executive as a decision-making mechanism. Similarly, through the yearly USMID performance assessments, the World Bank introduced an element of monitoring with respect to the forums. However, this monitoring exercise was not focused on the MDF itself but the interaction between the forums and the local administrations. Future research could seek to analyse case studies of the organisation of civil society where the elements of hierarchy, monitoring or sanctions play a larger role than was the case for the MDFs. Such studies could shed light on commonly and less commonly employed elements, successfully implemented elements or failures. Closely related to this suggested analysis of further elements of organisation in the organisation of civil society in development interventions is a second potential avenue for further research on the concept of partial organization: interconnections between the various elements of organisation. Schoeneborn and Dobusch argue that in the future “questions of how the various elements of organization are interconnected, what is the ‘glue’ that holds them together, and how sticky is this glue, anyway?” (Schoeneborn and Dobusch, 2019: 319) should be addressed. The empirical findings in this thesis suggested that there might be a hierarchy in

7.4 Avenues for further research

221

the partial organization of civil society in the case of MDFs. Specifically, membership seemed to be the first step in the organisation of civil society. Rules could only be applied to members. Without the creation of a membership, then, the introduction of rules could not be effective. I suspect that this would also apply to monitoring, sanctions and hierarchy. Future research could test this assumption of an inherent hierarchy between the elements of (partial) organisation or explore the interconnections in an inductive research approach. A third topic for future research on partial organization regards the concept’s limits. Ahrne and Brunsson outline the important questions that need to be addressed in such research: “why organization is sometimes partial rather than complete, … why some organizational elements are not used in specific situations…, [and] when organization fails” (Ahrne and Brunsson, 2019b: 27). In the case of MDFs, the empirical analysis showed that only two elements of organisation were readily introduced to organise civil society. At the same time, the narratives around a prospective institutionalisation of the forums into Uganda’s legal framework for local governments (see Chapter 6) indicated that this partial organization challenged the local administrations: in a sense, it was too far on the ‘partial’ end of the spectrum, not far enough towards ‘complete’ organisation. In the organisation of civil society, partial organization is but a crutch for bureaucratic organisations.

Annex I—Interviews, Observations, and Documents

In the following, I provide an overview of the empirical data generated throughout the three phases of field research. Specifically, I list all interviews conducted throughout the study, the exploratory interviews conducted in the first phase of field research in November and December 2015 as well as the ethnographic interviews and semi-structured interviews conducted in the second and third phase of field research. The lists further detail observations and documents. Observations refer to field notes, memos, vignettes and recordings of interactions, meetings, short conversations and other everyday situations in the field. Field notes were usually handwritten notes jotted into my notebook during or immediately after a day in the field. Some field notes were expanded into memos interpreting and analysing what I had observed. Throughout the research process, I also produced vignettes, which often draw on multiple field notes, memos and documents. Memo writing and the use of vignettes in the research process are described in further detail in the methodological framework in Chapter 3. I diligently followed the idea that everything in the field is data and can potentially be relevant to the study, therefore the amount of field notes produced and documents gathered in the field was very extensive. The lists of observations and documents presented in the following are hence not comprehensive, they only include those observations and documents that were particularly noteworthy, surprising and relevant to the analysis. I do not state the exact dates of interviews and observations in order to maintain the anonymity of the locations A-Town, B-Ville, and C-City as well as of my individual interlocutors.

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2021 E. M. Schindler, Structuring People, Sozialwissenschaftliche Zugänge zu Afrika, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-35903-4

223

224

Annex I—Interviews, Observations, and Documents

Interviews are referenced in the text with their identification code, the pseudonym and/or position of the interviewee, the organisation or location, as well as the month and year of the interview. The identification code “PI” refers to the exploratory interviews conducted in November 2015. “P” here stands for “pilot”. The abbreviation was chosen to avoid confusion with the ethnographic interviews conducted in the second and third phase of field research. “EI” refers to ethnographic interviews. “SSI” refers to semi-structured interviews. My interview with B-Ville’s community development officer, for example, was the 49th ethnographic interview and is referenced as “EI49: CDO, B-Ville, April 2017”. Group interviews carry only one code, but the participants are listed in separate lines. Exploratory interview number 18, for example, was a group interview with six people: the town clerk, deputy town clerk, economic planner, community development officer and physical planner of a Ugandan municipality, here anonymised as “Exploration Town,” as well as a representative from Exploration Town’s local slum dwellers federation. The table below, therefore, lists “PI18” six times, with one line for each interview participant. Some people were interviewed several times. Since this is the case mostly for people who were particularly important for the research and have therefore received a pseudonym, it is transparent who was interviewed several times. MoLHUD’s Nathanael, for example, was interviewed a total of five times over the course of the research (PI10, EI1, EI12, EI17, and EI64). The only exceptions to this are the interviewees in PI15 and SSI 5 / SSI 6 as well as in PI6 and SSI8. The interviewees in PI15 are the same two deputy directors of organisational units in Kampala Capital City Authority as in SSI 5 and SSI6. The interviewee in PI6 is the same deputy director of an organisational unit in Kampala Capital City Authority as in SSI8. Observations are referenced in the text with their identification code, the type of situation, meeting or interaction observed, the location or organisation where the observation took place, as well as the month and year of the observation. An observation recorded in a memo on the physical appearance and location of the MDF office in A-Town’s municipal offices, for example, is referenced as “O7: search for the MDF office, A-Town, March 2017”. The table in this annex furthermore provides information about the type of record that was produced of the observation, i.e. whether the observation was part of a field note or was further analysed in a memo or a vignette. Some planned meetings I observed were also recorded. This is also noted in the table. The list does not include the countless short conversations and situations that I documented with only a few lines or a short comment in my field notes. One example is a conversation with the secretary of the Ugandan ethics commission that approved my research

Annex I—Interviews, Observations, and Documents

225

project, which is cited in Section 3.3.3 (Ethics). In those cases, the text explains in detail the context of the reference. Documents are referenced in the text with their identification number, document title, organisation or location, and date the document was produced. B-Ville’s MDF charter, for example, is cited as “D1: The Charter for B-Ville Municipal Development Forum, B-Ville Municipal Council and MDF, 2010”. The list presented here only includes the 18 most relevant documents. They are listed here rather than in the bibliography to protect the anonymity of A-Town, B-Ville and C-City as well as INUP and Hand-in-Hand.

Exploratory interviews (PI) PI

Pseudonym and/or position

Organisation

Date

1 2

Staff

INUP

June 2015 (via Skype)

resident director

German political foundation

November 2015

3

George, independent consultant

n/a

November 2015

4

academic

Makerere University

November 2015

5

resident director

German political foundation

November 2015

6

deputy director of an organisational unit

Kampala Capital City Authority

November 2015

7

consultant

UN-HABITAT

November 2015

8

Dominic, senior bureaucrat

MoLG

November 2015

9

activist and founder

local CBO

November 2015

10

Nathanael, senior officer Cities Alliance / MoLHUD November 2015

11

Alex, officer

MoLHUD

November 2015

12

programme officer

German political foundation

November 2015

12

programme officer

German political foundation

November 2015

13

executive director

local NGO

November 2015

14

deputy head of programme

bilateral aid organisation

November 2015

226

Annex I—Interviews, Observations, and Documents

PI

Pseudonym and/or position

Organisation

Date

15

deputy director of an organisational unit

Kampala Capital City Authority

November 2015

15

deputy director of an organisational unit

Kampala Capital City Authority

November 2015

16

staff

bilateral aid organisation

November 2015

17

staff

bilateral aid organisation

November 2015

18

town clerk (TC)

Exploration Town

November 2015

18

deputy town clerk (DTC)

Exploration Town

November 2015

18

economic planner (EP)

Exploration Town

November 2015

18

community development Exploration Town officer (CDO)

November 2015

18

physical planner (PP)

Exploration Town

November 2015

18

member

Exploration Town slum dwellers federation

November 2015

19

member

Exploration Town slum dwellers federation

November 2015

19

member

Exploration Town slum dwellers federation

November 2015

19

member

Exploration Town slum dwellers federation

November 2015

19

member

Exploration Town slum dwellers federation

November 2015

19

member

Exploration Town slum dwellers federation

November 2015

19

member

Exploration Town slum dwellers federation

November 2015

19

member

Exploration Town slum dwellers federation

November 2015

19

member

Exploration Town slum dwellers federation

November 2015

19

member

Exploration Town slum dwellers federation

November 2015

20

president

Exploration Town NGO/CBO network

November 2015

21

executive director

Hand-in-Hand

November 2015

Annex I—Interviews, Observations, and Documents

227

PI

Pseudonym and/or position

Organisation

Date

22

Kenneth, senior officer

MoLG

November 2015

23

secretary general

association of local authorities

November 2015

24

Geraldine, officer

World Bank

November 2015

25

physical planner (PP)

Ugandan municipality

November 2015

26

academic

Uganda Management Institute

November 2015

27

Raymond, officer

MoLHUD

November 2015

Ethnographic interviews (EI) EI

Pseudonym and/or position

Organisation

Date

1

Nathanael, senior officer

Cities Alliance / MoLHUD

November 2016

2

William, officer

MoLHUD

November 2016

3

former staff

Hand-in-Hand

November 2016

4

executive director

Hand-in-Hand

December 2016

5

officer

MoLHUD

December 2016

6

Raymond, officer

MoLHUD

December 2016

7

senior staff

Hand-in-Hand

February 2017

8

Florence, MDF president

A-Town

February 2017

9

president

slum dwellers federation in Kampala

February 2017

10

executive director

local NGO

February 2017

11

Kenneth, senior officer

MoLG

February 2017

12

Nathanael, senior officer

MoLHUD

February 2017

13

staff

Hand-in-Hand

February 2017

14

staff

Hand-in-Hand

February 2017

15

Raymond, officer

MoLHUD

February 2017

16

Grace, senior officer

NPA

February 2017

17

Nathanael, senior officer

MoLHUD

February 2017

228

Annex I—Interviews, Observations, and Documents

EI

Pseudonym and/or position

Organisation

Date

18

executive director / former staff

local NGO / former Hand-in-Hand

March 2017

19

chairman

National Organisation of the Urban Poor

March 2017

20

member

National Organisation of the Urban Poor

March 2017

21

staff

Hand-in-Hand

March 2017

22

staff

Hand-in-Hand

March 2017

23

Ibrahim, senior officer

MoLG

March 2017

24

interim director

Hand-in-Hand

March 2017

25

community development officer (CDO)

A-Town

March 2017

26

former senior staff

Hand-in-Hand / MoLHUD

March 2017

27

Geraldine, officer

World Bank

March 2017

28

environment officer (EO)

A-Town

March 2017

29

mayor

A-Town

March 2017

30

Florence, MDF president

A-Town

March 2017

31

MDF vice president

A-Town

March 2017

32

Florence, MDF president

A-Town

March 2017

33

MDF member

A-Town

March 2017

34

physical planner (PP)

A-Town

March 2017

35

Bryan, MDF member

A-Town

March 2017

36

deputy town clerk (DTC)

A-Town

March 2017

37

economic planner (EP)

A-Town

March 2017

38

assistant engineer (AE)

A-Town

March 2017

39

deputy mayor

A-Town

March 2017

40

William, officer

MoLHUD

March 2017

41

Raymond, officer

MoLHUD

March 2017

42

MDF president

C-City

March 2017

43

town clerk (TC)

C-City

March 2017

44

USMID coordinator

C-City

March 2017

45

mayor

C-City

March 2017

46

Alex, officer

MoLHUD

March 2017

47

Carine, senior officer

World Bank

March 2017

Annex I—Interviews, Observations, and Documents

229

EI

Pseudonym and/or position

Organisation

Date

48

community development officer (CDO)

C-City

March 2017

49

community development officer (CDO)

B-Ville

April 2017

50

economic planner (EP)

B-Ville

April 2017

51

mayor

B-Ville

April 2017

52

procurement officer

B-Ville

April 2017

53

deputy town clerk (DTC)

B-Ville

April 2017

54

town clerk (TC)

B-Ville

April 2017

55

MDF secretary

B-Ville

April 2017

56

MDF member (NGO representative)

B-Ville

April 2017

57

MDF vice president

B-Ville

April 2017

58

environment officer (EO)

B-Ville

April 2017

59

Carine, senior officer

World Bank

April 2017

60

Ronald, officer

MoLHUD

April 2017

61

senior staff

Hand-in-Hand

April 2017

62

Derrick, officer

MoLHUD

April 2017

63

MDF president

C-City

April 2017

64

Nathanael, senior officer

MoLHUD

April 2017

Semi-structured interviews SSI

Pseudonym and/or position

Organisation

Date

1

academic

Makerere University

December 2016

2

academic

Makerere University

December 2016

3

academic

Makerere University

December 2016

4

academic

Makerere University

December 2016

5

deputy director in one organisational unit

Kampala Capital City Authority

February 2017

6

deputy director in one organisational unit

Kampala Capital City Authority

February 2017

230

Annex I—Interviews, Observations, and Documents

SSI

Pseudonym and/or position

Organisation

Date

7

executive director

local NGO

March 2017

8

director in one organisational unit

Kampala Capital City Authority

March 2017

9

senior staff

Delegation of the European Union to Uganda

March 2017

Observations O

Type of record

Type of situation / Location or meeting / interaction organisation

Date

1

field note

workshop on the potential of oil and gas revenues for inclusive development

German political foundation

November 2015

2

field note

presentation of results of a research project about citizen participation in TSUPU

MoLHUD

December 2016

3

field note

visit to a slum community in Kampala

Hand-in-Hand

December 2016

4

field note

meeting of the executive committee

National Organisation of the Urban Poor

February 2017

5

field note and recording

annual meeting of the A-Town MDF general assembly

February 2017

6

field note

visit of the Nigerian Urban Poor Organisation

Hand-in-Hand

March 2017

7

memo

search for the MDF office

A-Town

March 2017

Annex I—Interviews, Observations, and Documents

231

O

Type of record

Type of situation / Location or meeting / interaction organisation

Date

8

memo

official letters between the MDF and the municipal administration

A-Town

March 2017

9

field note and vignette

inspection of trading licenses

A-Town

March 2017

10

memo

doctoring of MDF meeting minutes for USMID assessment

A-Town

March 2017

11

field note

researcher’s introduction to municipal bureaucrats

A-Town

March 2017

12

field note, recording and vignette

municipal bureaucrats’ preparatory meeting for USMID assessment

A-Town

March 2017

13

field note and memo USMID assessment debriefing meeting between municipal bureaucrats and the assessing consultants

A-Town

March 2017

14

field note

site visit to municipal A-Town TSUPU and USMID projects with MDF president

March 2017

15

field note

MDF president’s A-Town report on USMID assessment debriefing meeting to MDF members

March 2017

16

field note and memo meet-up with Geraldine to receive consent form in front of municipal bureaucrats

A-Town

March 2017

17

recording, memo and vignette

A-Town

March 2017

angered interaction between CDO and MDF president

232

Annex I—Interviews, Observations, and Documents

O

Type of record

Type of situation / Location or meeting / interaction organisation

Date

18

field note

report of MDF member Bryan about municipal bureaucrats’ meeting with WB about USMID assessment

A-Town

March 2017

19

field note

site visit to slum A-Town settlement & TSUPU project with MDF president

March 2017

20

field note

MDF meeting with visiting MDF members from another municipality

C-City

March 2017

21

field note

site visits to municipal TSUPU and USMID projects

C-City

March 2017

22

field note

workshop on community policing in one of Kampala’s divisions

German political foundation

March 2017

23

field note

everyday interactions B-Ville between CDO and community in her office

April 2017

24

field note and recording

MDF meeting

B-Ville

April 2017

25

field note

interaction between the MDF executive committee and the TC to solve complaints from MDF meeting

B-Ville

April 2017

26

field note

lunch with MDF executive committee

B-Ville

April 2017

27

field note

site visit to municipal B-Ville TSUPU and USMID projects

April 2017

Annex I—Interviews, Observations, and Documents

233

O

Type of record

Type of situation / Location or meeting / interaction organisation

Date

28

vignette and recording

researcher’s interaction with Carine, WB

April 2017

World Bank

Documents D

Title

Organisation / location

Date

1

The Charter for B-Ville Municipal Development Forum

B-Ville Municipal Council and MDF

2010

2

A-Town City Profiling Report

Hand-in-Hand

2010

3

B-Ville Municipality Slum Profile

Hand-in-Hand

2010

4

Municipal Local Government Council 5-Year Development Plan

A-Town

2010/2011

5

A-Town Municipality Enumeration Report

Hand-in-Hand

2012

6

B-Ville Municipality Enumeration Report

Hand-in-Hand

2012

7

The Charter for Municipal Development Forums—Draft

MoLHUD

2012

8

The Charter for A-Town Municipal Development Forum

A-Town Municipal Council and MDF

2013

9

Learning-by-Doing Approach for Participation (Toolkit)

Hand-in-Hand

2013

10

MDF roles, functions, and MoLHUD institutional linkages (Power Point Presentation)

2015

11

Capacity Building Workplan C-City

2015/2016

234

Annex I—Interviews, Observations, and Documents

D

Title

Organisation / location

Date

12

Municipal Local Government Council 5-Year Development Plan

A-Town

2015/2016

13

MDF Annual Report

C-City

2015/2016

14

Proposed MDF Performance MoLHUD Indicators

2016

15

Capacity Building Workplan C-City

2016/2017

16

List of documents / information to be assembled by the Municipality technical teams for the annual performance assessment in USMID

MoLHUD

2016/2017

17

The Charter for B-Ville Municipal Development Forum

B-Ville Municipal Council and MDF

2017

18

Our Practices for Change

INUP

n.d. (accessed 2 May 2019)

Bibliography

accenture (2017) Programme Evaluation of Cities Alliance Country Programmes Ghana, Uganda and Vietnam. Brussels: Cities Alliance. Ahrne, G. and Brunsson, N. (2008) Meta-organizations. Cheltenham; Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar. Ahrne, G. and Brunsson, N. (2011) Organization outside organizations: the significance of partial organization. Organization 18(1): 83–104. Ahrne, G. and Brunsson, N. (eds.) (2019a) Organization outside Organizations: The Abundance of Partial Organization in Social Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ahrne, G. and Brunsson, N. (2019b) Organization Unbound. In: Ahrne, G. and Brunsson, N. (eds.) Organization outside Organizations: The Abundance of Partial Organization in Social Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 3–36. Ahrne, G., Brunsson, N., and Seidl, D. (2016) Resurrecting organization by going beyond organizations. European Management Journal 34(2): 93–101. Alvesson, M. and Spicer, A. (2019) Neo-Institutional Theory and Organization Studies: A Mid-Life Crisis? Organization Studies 40(2): 199–218. Anderl, F. (2016) The myth of the local: How international organizations localize norms rhetorically. The Review of International Organizations 11(2): 197–218. Anderl, F. (2017) Strengthening civil society through development cooperation? Localizing participation in post-Suharto Indonesia. In: Bonacker, T., Heusinger, J. von, and Zimmer, K. (eds.) Localization in Development Aid: How Global Institutions Enter Local Lifeworlds. London; New York, NY: Routledge, pp. 154–172. Andrews, M. (2008) The Good Governance Agenda: Beyond Indicators without Theory. Oxford Development Studies 36(4): 379–407. Apelt, M., Besio, C., Corsi, G., von Groddeck, V., Grothe-Hammer, M., and Tacke, V. (2017) Resurrecting organization without renouncing society: A response to Ahrne, Brunsson and Seidl. European Management Journal 35(1): 8–14. Apthorpe, R. (2013) Coda: With Alice in Aidland: A Seriously Satirical Allegory. In: Mosse, D. (ed.) Adventures in Aidland: The Anthropology of Professionals in International Development. New York, NY: Berghahn, pp. 199–220. Arnstein, S.R. (1969) A Ladder Of Citizen Participation. Journal of the American Institute of Planners 35(4): 216–224. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2021 E. M. Schindler, Structuring People, Sozialwissenschaftliche Zugänge zu Afrika, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-35903-4

235

236

Bibliography

Auswärtiges Amt (2015) Stabilitätsanker Uganda. Pressemitteilung vom 21.11.2015. Available at: http://www.auswaertiges-amt.de/DE/AAmt/BM-Reisen/2015/12_Afrika/151 121_BM_Uganda.html (accessed 24 October 2016). Awortwi, N. (2010) The Past, Present, and Future of Decentralisation in Africa: A Comparative Case Study of Local Government Development Trajectories of Ghana and Uganda. International Journal of Public Administration 33(12–13): 620–634. Awortwi, N. (2011) An unbreakable path? A comparative study of decentralization and local government development trajectories in Ghana and Uganda. International Review of Administrative Sciences 77(2): 347–377. Awortwi, N. and Helmsing, A.H.J. (2014) In the name of bringing services closer to the people? Explaining the creation of new local government districts in Uganda. International Review of Administrative Sciences 80(4): 766–788. Bachmeyer, G. and Shermbrucker, N. (2014) Innovative communal sanitation models for the urban poor—Lessons from Uganda. London: London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Banks, N., Hulme, D., and Edwards, M. (2015) NGOs, States, and Donors Revisited: Still Too Close for Comfort? World Development 66: 707–718. Bansal, P. and Penner, W.J. (2002) Interpretations of Institutions: The Case of Recycled Newsprint. In: Hoffman, A.J. and Ventresca, M.J. (eds.) Organizations, Policy, and the Natural Environment. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, pp. 311–326. Baumeler, C. (2009) Entkopplung von Wissenschaft und Anwendung. Eine neoinstitutionalistische Analyse der unternehmerischen Universität. Zeitschrift für Soziologie 38(1): 68–84. Bebbington, A., Lewis, D., Batterbury, S., Olson, E., and Siddiqi, M.S. (2007) Of Texts and Practices: Empowerment and Organisational Cultures in World Bank-funded Rural Development Programmes. The Journal of Development Studies 43(4): 597–621. Becker-Ritterspach, J.C.E. and Becker-Ritterspach, F.A.A. (2006) Organisationales Feld und Gesellschaftlicher Sektor im Neo-Institutionalismus. In: Senge, K. and Hellmann, K.-U. (eds.) Einführung in den Neo-Institutionalismus. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, pp. 118–136. Behrends, A., Park, S.-J., and Rottenburg, R. (2014) Travelling Models: Introducing an Analytical Concept to Globalisation Studies. In: Behrends, A., Park, S.-J., and Rottenburg, R. (eds.) Travelling Models in African Conflict Management: Translating Technologies of Social Ordering. Leiden; Boston, MA: Brill, pp. 1–40. Berckmoes, L.H. (2013) Dealing with Deceit: Fieldwork Encounters and Lies in Burundi. In: Thomson, S., Ansoms, A., and Murison, J. (eds.) Emotional and Ethical Challenges for Field Research in Africa: The Story Behind the Findings. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 123–138. Bierschenk, T. and Olivier de Sardan, J.-P. (eds.) (2014) States at Work: Dynamics of African Bureaucracies. Leiden; Boston, MA: Brill. Bierschenk, T., Chauveau, J.-P., and Olivier de Sardan, J.-P. (2002) Local Development Brokers in Africa: The rise of a new social category. Department of Anthropology and African Studies Working Paper 13. Mainz: Johannes Gutenberg Universität. Birkholz, S. (2019) Doing political aid: an ethnography of Northern democracy assistance and NGOisation in Lebanon. Unpublished dissertation. Technische Universität, Berlin.

Bibliography

237

Blumer, H. (1954) What is Wrong with Social Theory? American Sociological Review 19(1): 3–10. Boddy, J., Neumann, T., Jennings, S., Morrow, V., Alderson, P., Rees, R., and Gibson, W. (2017) The Research Ethics Guidebook. A Resource for Social Scientists. Institute of Education, University of London. Available at: http://www.ethicsguidebook.ac.uk/ (accessed 26 January 2017). Bohnsack, R. (2000) Rekonstruktive Sozialforschung: Einführung in Methodologie und Praxis qualitativer Forschung. Opladen: Leske + Budrich. Booth, D. (2012) Aid effectiveness: bringing country ownership (and politics) back in. Conflict, Security & Development 12(5): 537–558. Boxenbaum, E. and Jonsson, S. (2017) Isomorphism, Diffusion and Decoupling: Concept Evolution and Theoretical Challenges. In: Greenwood, R., Oliver, C., Lawrence, T., and Meyer, R. (eds.) The SAGE Handbook of Organizational Institutionalism. London: SAGE, pp. 77–97. Bratton, M. and Van de Walle, N. (1997) Democratic Experiments in Africa: Regime Transitions in Comparative Perspective. Cambridge; New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Breidenstein, G., Hirschauer, S., Kalthoff, H., and Nieswand, B. (2015) Ethnografie: die Praxis der Feldforschung. Konstanz: UVK. Bromley, P. and Meyer, J.W. (2015) Hyper-Organization: Global Organizational Expansion. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bromley, P. and Powell, W.W. (2012) From Smoke and Mirrors to Walking the Talk: Decoupling in the Contemporary World. The Academy of Management Annals 6(1): 483–530. Bromley, P., Hwang, H., and Powell, W.W. (2012) Decoupling revisited: Common pressures, divergent strategies in the U. S. nonprofit sector. M@n@gement 15(5): 469–501. Brunsson, N. (2003) Organized hypocrisy. In: Sevón, G. and Czarniawska, B. (eds.) The Northern Lights: Organization theory in Scandinavia. Malmö; Copenhagen: Liber; CBS Press, pp. 201–222. Brunsson, N. (2006) The Organization of Hypocrisy: Talk, Decisions and Actions in Organizations. Copenhagen: CBS Press. Bundesministerium für wirtschaftliche Zusammenarbeit und Entwicklung (2018) Glossar: Partizipation. Available at: https://www.bmz.de/de/service/glossar/P/partizipation.html (accessed 6 December 2018). Bundesministerium für wirtschaftliche Zusammenarbeit und Entwicklung (2019) Thema: Good Governance—Rahmenbedingung für Entwicklung. Available at: https://www.bmz. de/de/themen/goodgovernance/index.html (accessed 23 July 2019). Burawoy, M. (1998) The Extended Case Method. Sociological Theory 16(1): 4–33. Buyse, A. (2018) Squeezing civic space: restrictions on civil society organizations and the linkages with human rights. The International Journal of Human Rights 22(8): 966–988. Cammack, D. (2007) The Logic of African Neopatrimonialism: What Role for Donors? Development Policy Review 25(5): 599–614. Campbell, J.L. (2004) Institutional Change and Globalization. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Chambers, R. (1994) The Origins and Practice of Participatory Rural Appraisal. World Development 22(7): 953–969.

238

Bibliography

Chambers, R. (2003) Whose Reality Counts? Putting the First Last. London: Intermediate Technology. Chambers, R. (2017) Can We Know Better? Reflections for Development. Rugby: Practical Action Publishing. Charmaz, K. (2014) Constructing Grounded Theory. London; Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Charton, H. (2014) The Politics of Reform: A Case Study of Bureaucracy at the Ministry of Basic Education in Cameroon. In: Bierschenk, T. and Olivier de Sardan, J.-P. (eds.) States at Work: Dynamics of African Bureaucracies. Leiden; Boston, MA: Brill, pp. 249–269. Chatterjee, P. (1993) The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Cities Alliance (1999) Cities Without Slums. Action Plan for Moving Slum Upgrading to Scale. Available at: https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/961151468181775 920/pdf/809480WP0Citie0Box0379824B00PUBLIC0.pdf (accessed 19 May 2020). Cities Alliance (2010) Transforming Settlements of the Urban Poor in Uganda. A Secondary Cities Support Programme—Programme Document. Available at: https://openkn owledge.worldbank.org/handle/10986/12765 (accessed 24 October 2016). Cities Alliance (2013) Standard Operating Procedures. Available at: https://www.citiesall iance.org/sites/default/files/Standard%20Operating%20Procedures_Main&Annexes% 20-%2012%20November%202013.pdf (accessed 6 December 2018). Cities Alliance (2016) Cities Alliance Charter. Available at: https://www.citiesalliance.org/ sites/default/files/CA_Charter_R1.pdf (accessed 13 May 2019). Cities Alliance (2019a) About Cities Alliance. Available at: https://www.citiesalliance.org/ about-cities-alliance (accessed 11 October 2019). Cities Alliance (2019b) Country Programmes. Available at: https://www.citiesalliance.org/ how-we-work/our-operations/country-programmes (accessed 11 October 2019). Cities Alliance (2020) Transforming the Settlements of the Urban Poor in Uganda (TSUPU) Programme. Available at: https://citiesalliance.org/transforming-settlements-urban-pooruganda-tsupu-programme (accessed 19 May 2020). Clark, L. and Kingsolver, A. (2017) Briefing Paper on Informed Consent. American Anthropological Association Committee on Ethics. Available at: http://www.americananthro. org/ParticipateAndAdvocate/Content.aspx?ItemNumber=13144&RDtoken=13233& userID (accessed 26 January 2017). Clark-Kazak, C.R. (2013) Research as ‘Social Work’ in Kampala? Managing Expectations, Compensation and Relationships in Research with Unassisted, Urban Refugees from the Democratic Republic of Congo. In: Thomson, S., Ansoms, A., and Murison, J. (eds.) Emotional and Ethical Challenges for Field Research in Africa: The Story Behind the Findings. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 96–106. Cleaver, F. (1999) Paradoxes of Participation: Questioning Participatory Approaches to Development. Journal of International Development 11(4): 597–612. Cleaver, F. (2001a) Institutional Bricolage, Conflict and Cooperation in Usangu, Tanzania. IDS Bulletin 32(4): 26–35. Cleaver, F. (2001b) Institutions, Agency and the Limitations of Participatory Approaches in Development. In: Cooke, B. and Kothari, U. (eds.) Participation: The New Tyranny? London; New York: Zed Books, pp. 36–55. Cleaver, F. (2012) Development Through Bricolage: Rethinking Institutions for Natural Resource Management. Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge.

Bibliography

239

Clifford, J. (1988) The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Clifford, J. and Marcus, G.E. (eds.) (1986) Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Cohn, C. (2006) Motives and methods: using multi-sited ethnography to study US national security discourses. In: Ackerly, B.A., Stern, M., and True, J. (eds.) Feminist Methodologies for International Relations. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, pp. 91–107. Cole, W.M. (2012) Human Rights as Myth and Ceremony? Reevaluating the Effectiveness of Human Rights Treaties, 1981–2007. American Journal of Sociology 117(4): 1131–1171. Cooke, B. and Kothari, U. (eds.) (2001a) Participation: The New Tyranny? London; New York, NY: Zed Books. Cooke, B. and Kothari, U. (2001b) The Case for Participation as Tyranny. In: Cooke, B. and Kothari, U. (eds.) Participation: The New Tyranny? London; New York, NY: Zed Books, pp. 1–15. Cornwall, A. (2004) Spaces for transformation? Reflections on issues of power and difference in participation in development. In: Hickey, S. and Mohan, G. (eds.) Participation: from Tyranny to Transformation? Exploring New Approaches to Participation in Development. London; New York, NY: ZED Books, pp. 75–91. Cornwall, A. (2006) Historical Perspectives on Participation in Development. Commonwealth & Comparative Politics 44(1): 62–83. Cornwall, A. (2008) Unpacking ‘Participation’: models, meanings and practices. Community Development Journal 43(3): 269–283. Cornwall, A. and Brock, K. (2005) What do Buzzwords do for Development Policy? A critical look at ‘participation’, ‘empowerment’ and ‘poverty reduction’. Third World Quarterly 26(7): 1043–1060. Cornwall, A., Robins, S., and Von Lieres, B. (2011) States of Citizenship: Contexts and Cultures of Public Engagement and Citizen Action. Institute of Development Studies Working Paper 363. Brighton: University of Sussex. Crawford, G., Kruckenberg, L.J., Loubere, N., and Morgan, R. (2017) Global Development Fieldwork: A Relational Perspective. In: Crawford, G., Kruckenberg, L.J., Loubere, N., and Morgan, R. (eds.) Understanding Global Development Research: Fieldwork Issues, Experiences and Reflections. Los Angeles, CA: SAGE, pp. 3–24. Czarniawska, B. and Sevón, G. (eds.) (2005a) Global Ideas: How Ideas, Objects and Practices Travel in the Global Economy. Malmö; Copenhagen: Liber; CBS Press. Czarniawska, B. and Sevón, G. (2005b) Translation is a Vehicle, Imitation its Motor, and Fashion sits at the Wheel. In: Czarniawska, B. and Sevón, G. (eds.) Global Ideas: How Ideas, Objects and Practices Travel in the Global Economy. Malmö; Copenhagen: Liber; CBS Press, pp. 7–12. Czarniawska-Joerges, B. and Sevón, G. (eds.) (1996) Translating Organizational Change. Berlin; New York, NY: Walter de Gruyter. Dados, N. and Connell, R. (2012) The Global South. Contexts 11(1): 12–13. Danielzik, C.-M. and Bendix, D. (2016) Mit dem postkolonialen Pflug über entwicklungspolitische Felder. Die Beispiele Tourismus- und reproduktive Gesundheitspolitik. In: Ziai, A. (ed.) Postkoloniale Politikwissenschaft: Theoretische und empirische Zugänge. Bielefeld: Transcript, pp. 273–291.

240

Bibliography

de Herdt, T. and Olivier de Sardan, J.-P. (eds.) (2015) Real Governance and Practical Norms in Sub-Saharan Africa: The game of rules. London; New York, NY: Routledge. De Wit, J. and Berner, E. (2009) Progressive patronage? Municipalities, NGOs, CBOs and the Limits to Slum Dwellers’ Empowerment. Development and Change 40(5): 927–947. Dean, R.J. (2017) Beyond radicalism and resignation: the competing logics for public participation in policy decisions. Policy & Politics 45(2): 213–230. Deephouse, D.L., Bundy, J., Tost, L.P., and Suchman, M.C. (2017) Organizational Legitimacy: Six Key Questions. In: Greenwood, R., Oliver, C., Lawrence, T., and Meyer, R. (eds.) The SAGE Handbook of Organizational Institutionalism. London: SAGE, pp. 27– 52. DeWalt, K.M. and DeWalt, B.R. (2011) Participant Observation: A Guide for Fieldworkers. Kindle Edition. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Dill, B. (2009) The Paradoxes of Community-based Participation in Dar es Salaam. Development and Change 40(4): 717–743. DiMaggio, P.J. and Powell, W.W. (1983) The Iron Cage Revisited: Institutional Isomorphism and Collective Rationality in Organizational Fields. American Sociological Review 48(2): 147–160. Dobronogov, A., Keefer, P.E., Morisset, J., Ranaweera, T., Sebudde, R.K., Wane, W., and White, R. (2014) Are you Being Served? Do More Districts Mean Better Service in Uganda? Uganda Economic Update 3. Washington, D.C: World Bank. Available at: http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/622261468349824965/Are-you-being-ser ved-do-more-districts-mean-better-service-in-Uganda (accessed 24 October 2016). Dobusch, L. and Schoeneborn, D. (2015) Fluidity, Identity, and Organizationality: The Communicative Constitution of Anonymous. Journal of Management Studies 52(8): 1005– 1035. Dodworth, K. (2017) Multipositionality in the ‘Field’. In: Crawford, G., Kruckenberg, L.J., Loubere, N., and Morgan, R. (eds.) Understanding Global Development Research: Fieldwork Issues, Experiences and Reflections. Los Angeles, CA: SAGE, pp. 213–217. Dutton, J.E. and Dukerich, J.M. (1991) Keeping An Eye on the Mirror: Image and Identity In Organizational Adaptation. Academy of Management Journal 34(3): 517–554. Eberlei, W. (ed.) (2014) Zivilgesellschaft in Subsahara Afrika. Wiesbaden: Springer VS. Erdmann, G. and Engel, U. (2007) Neopatrimonialism Reconsidered: Critical Review and Elaboration of an Elusive Concept. Commonwealth & Comparative Politics 45(1): 95– 119. Erkkilä, T. and Piironen, O. (2014) (De)politicizing good governance: the World Bank Institute, the OECD and the politics of governance indicators. Innovation: The European Journal of Social Science Research 27(4): 344–360. European Union Election Observation Mission to Uganda 2016 (2016) Post-Election Day Statement 25 February 2016. Available at: http://www.eods.eu/library/post-election-daystatement-25022016.pdf (accessed 24 October 2016). Eyben, R. (2013) The Sociality of International Aid and Policy Convergence. In: Mosse, D. (ed.) Adventures in Aidland: the anthropology of professionals in international development. New York, NY: Berghahn, pp. 139–160. Fechter, A.-M. (2007) Transnational Lives: Expatriates in Indonesia. Aldershot, UK; Burlington, VT: Ashgate.

Bibliography

241

Feldman, M.S. and Pentland, B.T. (2003) Reconceptualizing Organizational Routines as a Source of Flexibility and Change. Administrative Science Quarterly 48(1): 94–118. Ferguson, J. (1994) The Anti-Politics Machine: ‘Development,’ Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Francis, P. and James, R. (2003) Balancing Rural Poverty Reduction and Citizen Participation: The Contradictions of Uganda’s Decentralization Program. World Development 31(2): 325–337. Freire, P. (2000) Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York, NY: Continuum. Freistein, K. (2016) Effects of Indicator Use: A Comparison of Poverty Measuring Instruments at the World Bank. Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis: Research and Practice 18(4): 366–381. Friedland, R. and Alford, R.R. (1991) Bringing Society Back In: Symbols, Practices, and Institutional Contradictions. In: Powell, W.W. and DiMaggio, P.J. (eds.) The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, pp. 232– 263. Fujii, L.A. (2010) Shades of truth and lies: Interpreting testimonies of war and violence. Journal of Peace Research 47(2): 231–241. Fujii, L.A. (2012) Research Ethics 101: Dilemmas and Responsibilities. PS: Political Science & Politics 45(04): 717–723. Fung, A. (2006) Varieties of Participation in Complex Governance. Public Administration Review 66(s1): 66–75. Gaventa, J. and Barrett, G. (2012) Mapping the Outcomes of Citizen Engagement. World Development 40(12): 2399–2410. Gaventa, J. and Valderrama, C. (1999) Participation, Citizenship and Local Governance. In: Strengthening participation in local governance. Workshop held at the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, 21–24 June 1999. Available at: https://www.participatorymethods.org/sites/participatorymethods. org/ files/participation%20citzienship%20and%20local%20governance_gaventa.pdf (accessed 6 December 2018) Geertz, C. (1973) The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. New York, NY: Basic Books. Giuliani, E., Ciravegna, L., Vezzulli, A., and Kilian, B. (2017) Decoupling Standards from Practice: The Impact of In-House Certifications on Coffee Farms’ Environmental and Social Conduct. World Development 96: 294–314. Goetz, A.M. and Gaventa, J. (2001) Bringing citizen voice and client focus into service delivery. Institute of Development Studies Working Paper 138. Brighton: University of Sussex. Goffman, E. (1990) [1956] The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York, NY: Doubleday. Green, E. (2015) Decentralization and Development in Contemporary Uganda. Regional & Federal Studies 25(5): 491–508. Greenwood, R. and Hinings, C.R. (1996) Understanding Radical Organizational Change: Bringing together the Old and the New Institutionalism. The Academy of Management Review 21(4): 1022–1054. Greenwood, R., Oliver, C., Lawrence, T.B., and Meyer, R.E. (eds.) (2017) The SAGE Handbook of Organizational Institutionalism. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.

242

Bibliography

Grindle, M.S. (2004) Good Enough Governance: Poverty Reduction and Reform in Developing Countries. Governance 17(4): 525–548. Grindle, M.S. (2010) Good Governance: The Inflation of an Idea. Harvard Kennedy School of Government Faculty Research Working Paper RWP10–023. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Kennedy School of Government. Gruffydd Jones, B. (2009) ‘Cities Without Slums’? Global architectures of power and the African city. In: Proceedings of African Perspectives 2009. The African Inner City: [Re]sourced. International conference held at the University of Pretoria, 25–28 September 2009 (ed. K.A. Bakker), pp. 57–68. Guijt, I. and Shah, M.K. (1998) The Myth of Community: Gender Issues in Participatory Development. London: Intermediate Technology Publications. Hall, S. (1994) Der Westen und der Rest: Diskurs und Macht. In: Mehlem, U. (ed.) Rassismus und kulturelle Identität. Ausgewählte Schriften. Hamburg: Argument Verlag, pp. 137–179. Hallett, T. and Ventresca, M.J. (2006) Inhabited Institutions: Social Interactions and Organizational Forms in Gouldner’s Patterns of Industrial Bureaucracy. Theory and Society 35(2): 213–236. Hammett, D. (2018) Engaging citizens, depoliticizing society? Training citizens as agents for good governance. Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography 100(2): 64–80. Hampel, C.E., Lawrence, T.B., and Tracey, P. (2017) Institutional Work: Taking Stock and Making It Matter. In: Greenwood, R., Oliver, C., Lawrence, T., and Meyer, R. (eds.) The SAGE Handbook of Organizational Institutionalism. London: SAGE, pp. 558–590. Hannerz, U. (2003) Being there... and there... and there! Reflections on multi-site ethnography. Ethnography 4(2): 201–216. Hartmann, E. (2011) Strategien des Gegenhandelns: zur Soziodynamik symbolischer Kämpfe um Zugehörigkeit. Konstanz: UVK. Hasse, R. and Krücken, G. (2005) Neo-Institutionalismus. Bielefeld: transcript. Haug, C. (2013) Organizing Spaces: Meeting Arenas as a Social Movement Infrastructure between Organization, Network, and Institution. Organization Studies 34(5–6): 705–732. Helfferich, C. (2009) Die Qualität qualitativer Daten: Manual für die Durchführung qualitativer Interviews. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften. Henkel, H. and Stirrat, R. (2001) Participation as Spiritual Duty; Empowerment as Secular Subjection. In: Cooke, B. and Kothari, U. (eds.) Participation: The New Tyranny? London; New York: Zed Books, pp. 168–184. Hensell, S. (2015) Coordinating intervention: International actors and local ‘partners’ between ritual and decoupling. Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding 9(1): 89–111. Hericks, K. (2011) Entkoppelt und institutionalisiert: Gleichstellungspolitik in einem deutschen Konzern. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften. Hickey, S. (2012) Beyond ‘Poverty Reduction through Good Governance’: The New Political Economy of Development in Africa. New Political Economy 17(5): 683–690. Hickey, S. and King, S. (2016) Understanding Social Accountability: Politics, Power and Building New Social Contracts. The Journal of Development Studies 52(8): 1225–1240. Hickey, S. and Mohan, G. (eds.) (2004a) Participation: from Tyranny to Transformation? Exploring New Approaches to Participation in Development. London; New York, NY: ZED Books. Hickey, S. and Mohan, G. (2004b) Relocating participation within a radical politics of development: insights from political action and practice. In: Hickey, S. and Mohan, G. (eds.)

Bibliography

243

Participation: from Tyranny to Transformation? Exploring New Approaches to Participation in Development. London; New York, NY: Zed Books, pp. 159–174. Hickey, S. and Mohan, G. (2004c) Towards participation as transformation: critical themes and challenges. In: Hickey, S. and Mohan, G. (eds.) Participation: from Tyranny to Transformation? Exploring New Approaches to Participation in Development. London; New York, NY: ZED Books, pp. 3–24. Holland, J., Brocklesby, M.A., and Abugre, C. (2004) Beyond the technical fix? participation in donor approaches to rights-based development. In: Hickey, S. and Mohan, G. (eds.) Participation: from Tyranny to Transformation? Exploring New Approaches to Participation in Development. London; New York, NY: Zed Books, pp. 252–268. Holland, J., Jones, S., and Kardan, A. (2015) Understanding participation in development: towards a framework. International Development Planning Review 37(1): 77–94. Holma, K., Kontinen, T., and Blanken-Webb, J. (2018) Growth Into Citizenship: Framework for Conceptualizing Learning in NGO Interventions in Sub-Saharan Africa. Adult Education Quarterly 68(3): 215–234. Holzer, B. (2006) Spielräume in der Weltgesellschaft: Formale Strukturen und Zonen der Informalität. In: Schwinn, T. (ed.) Die Vielfalt und Einheit der Moderne: kultur- und strukturvergleichende Analysen. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, pp. 259– 180. Jerve, A.M. (2002) Ownership and Partnership: Does the New Rhetoric Solve the Incentive Problems in Aid? Forum for Development Studies 29(2): 389–407. Joshi, A. and Schultze-Kraft, M. (2014) Introduction—Localising Governance: An Outlook on Research and Policy. IDS Bulletin 45(5): 1–8. Jourdan, L. (2013) From Humanitarian to Anthropologist: Writing at the Margins of Ethnographic Research in the Democratic Republic of Congo. In: Thomson, S., Ansoms, A., and Murison, J. (eds.) Emotional and Ethical Challenges for Field Research in Africa: The Story Behind the Findings. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 12–26. Jreisat, J. (2010) Comparative public administration and Africa. International Review of Administrative Sciences 76(4): 612–631. Keijzer, N. and Klingebiel, S. (2019) Ownership for sustainable development cooperation— A new old principle. The Current Column of 21 January 2019. Bonn: Deutsches Institut für Entwicklungspolitik. Kelle, U. and Kluge, S. (2010) Vom Einzelfall zum Typus: Fallvergleich und Fallkontrastierung in der qualitativen Sozialforschung. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften. Khan, F.R., Westwood, R., and Boje, D.M. (2010) ‘I feel like a foreign agent’: NGOs and corporate social responsibility interventions into Third World child labor. Human Relations 63(9): 1417–1438. King, S. (2015) Political capabilities for democratisation in Uganda: good governance or popular organisation building? Third World Quarterly 36(4): 741–757. König, K. and Reichard, C. (eds.) (2008) Theoretische Aspekte einer managerialistischen Verwaltungskultur. Speyer: Deutsches Forschungsinstitut für Öffentliche Verwaltung. Kontinen, T. and Millstein, M. (2017) Rethinking Civil Society in Development: Scales and Situated Hegemonies. Forum for Development Studies 44(1): 69–89. Korf, B. (2006) Dining with Devils? Ethnographic Enquiries into the Conflict–Development Nexus in Sri Lanka. Oxford Development Studies 34(1): 47–64.

244

Bibliography

Krasznai Kovacs, E. and Bose, A. (2014) Flirting with boundaries: ethical dilemmas for performing gender and sexuality in the field. In: Lunn, J. (ed.) Fieldwork in the Global South: Ethical Challenges and Dilemmas. New York, NY: Routledge, pp. 109–119. Kruckenberg, L.J., Crawford, G., Loubere, N., and Morgan, R. (2017) Towards a Relational Understanding of Development Research. In: Crawford, G., Kruckenberg, L.J., Loubere, N., and Morgan, R. (eds.) Understanding Global Development Research: Fieldwork Issues, Experiences and Reflections. Los Angeles, CA: SAGE, pp. 225–250. Krüger, A.K. (2014) Wahrheitskommissionen: die globale Verbreitung eines kulturellen Modells. Frankfurt/Main: Campus. Kruse, J. (2014) Qualitative Interviewforschung: Ein integrativer Ansatz. Weinheim: Beltz Juventa. Kubik, J. (2013) Ethnography of Politics: Foundations, Applications, Prospects. In: Schatz, E. (ed.) Political Ethnography: What Immersion Contributes to the Study of Power. Kindle Edition. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Kühl, S. (1998) Wenn Partizipation zum Problem wird. Die begrenzte Nützlichkeit von Partizipation in Entwicklungshilfeprojekten. Erfahrungen aus Zentralafrika. Peripherie 72: 51–70. Kühl, S. (2008) Die Professionalisierung der Professionalisierer? Das Scharlatanerieproblem im Coaching und der Supervision und die Konflikte um die Professionsbildung. Organisationsberatung, Supervision, Coaching 15(3): 260–294. Kühl, S. (2009) Capacity Development as the Model for Development Aid Organizations. Development and Change 40(3): 551–577. Kühl, S. (2014) Gruppen, Organisationen, Familien und Bewegungen. Zur Soziologie mitgliedschaftsbasierter Systeme zwischen Interaktion und Gesellschaft. In: Heintz, B. and Tyrell, H. (eds.) Interaktion – Organisation – Gesellschaft revisited. Berlin, Boston, MA: De Gruyter. Kühl, S. (2015a) Gesellschaft der Organisationen, organisierte Gesellschaft, Organisationsgesellschaft. In: Apelt, M. and Wilkesmann, U. (eds.) Zur Zukunft der Organisationssoziologie. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, pp. 73–91. Kühl, S. (2015b) The Diffusion of Organizations: The Role of Foreign Aid. In: Holzer, B., Kastner, F., and Werron, T. (eds.) From Globalization to World Society. Neo-Institutional and Systems-Theoretical Perspectives. New York, NY: Routledge, pp. 258–278. Lang, S. (2013) NGOs, civil society, and the public sphere. Cambridge; New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Lawrence, T.B. and Dover, G. (2015) Place and Institutional Work: Creating Housing for the Hard-to-house. Administrative Science Quarterly 60(3): 371–410. Lawrence, T.B. and Suddaby, R. (2006) Institutions and Institutional Work. In: Clegg, S.R., Hardy, C., Lawrence, T.B., and Nord, W.R. (eds.) The SAGE Handbook of Organization Studies. London: SAGE, pp. 215–254. Lerum, K. (2001) Subjects of Desire: Academic Armor, Intimate Ethnography, and the Production of Critical Knowledge. Qualitative Inquiry 7(4): 466–483. Leslie, H. and Storey, D. (2003) Practical Issues. In: Scheyvens, R. and Storey, D. (eds.) Development Fieldwork: A Practical Guide. London: SAGE, pp. 77–95. Lewis, D. (2002) Civil Society in African Contexts: Reflections on the Usefulness of a Concept. Development and Change 33(4): 569–586.

Bibliography

245

Lewis, D. and Mosse, D. (eds.) (2006a) Development Brokers and Translators: The Ethnography of Aid and Agencies. Bloomfield, CT: Kumarian Press. Lewis, D. and Mosse, D. (2006b) Encountering Order and Disjuncture: Contemporary Anthropological Perspectives on the Organization of Development. Oxford Development Studies 34(1): 1–13. Lewis, D. and Mosse, D. (2006c) Theoretical Approaches to Brokerage and Translation in Development. In: Lewis, D. and Mosse, D. (eds.) Development Brokers and Translators: The Ethnography of Aid and Agencies. Bloomfield, CT: Kumarian Press, pp. 1–26. Lewis, J.I. (2014) When Decentralization Leads to Recentralization: Subnational State Transformation in Uganda. Regional & Federal Studies 24(5): 571–588. Li, T.M. (2007) The Will to Improve: Governmentality, Development, and the Practice of Politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Li, T.M. (2013) Rendering Society Technical. Government through Community and the Ethnographic Turn at the World Bank in Indonesia. In: Mosse, D. (ed.) Adventures in Aidland: the anthropology of professionals in international development. New York, NY: Berghahn, pp. 57–79. Lie, J.H.S. (2015) Developmentality: An Ethnography of the World Bank-Uganda Partnership. New York, NY: Berghahn Books. Lipson, M. (2007) Peacekeeping: Organized Hypocrisy? European Journal of International Relations 13(1): 5–34. Luhmann, N. (2000) Organisation und Entscheidung. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. Lunn, J. (2014) Rethinking ethics in field research: integral, individual, and shared. In: Lunn, J. (ed.) Fieldwork in the Global South: Ethical Challenges and Dilemmas. New York, NY: Routledge, pp. 1–10. MacLean, T.L. and Behnam, M. (2010) The Dangers of Decoupling: The Relationship Between Compliance Programs, Legitimacy Perceptions, and Institutionalized Misconduct. Academy of Management Journal 53(6): 1499–1520. Mamdani, M. (1996) Indirect Rule, Civil Society, and Ethnicity: The African Dilemma. Social Justice 23(1/2 (63–64)): 145–150. Mansuri, G. and Rao, V. (2013) Localizing development: does participation work? Washington, D.C: World Bank. March, J.G., Simon, H.A., and Guetzkow, H.S. (1958) Organizations. New York, NY: Wiley. Marcus, G.E. (1995) Ethnography in/of the World System: The Emergence of Multi-Sited Ethnography. Annual Review of Anthropology 24(1): 95–117. Marsland, R. (2006) Community Participation the Tanzanian Way: Conceptual Contiguity or Power Struggle? Oxford Development Studies 34(1): 65–79. Mense-Petermann, U. (2006) Das Verständnis von Organisation im Neo-Institutionalismus. Lose Kopplung, Reifikation, Institution. In: Senge, K. and Hellmann, K.-U. (eds.) Einführung in den Neo-Institutionalismus. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, pp. 62–74. Merry, S.E. (2006) Transnational Human Rights and Local Activism: Mapping the Middle. American Anthropologist 108(1): 38–51. Meyer, J.W. and Jepperson, R.L. (2005) Die ‘Akteure’ der modernen Gesellschaft: Die kulturelle Konstruktion sozialer Agentschaft. In: Meyer, J.W., Krücken, G., and Kuchler, B. (eds.) Weltkultur: Wie die westlichen Prinzipien die Welt durchdringen. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, pp. 47–84.

246

Bibliography

Meyer, J.W. and Rowan, B. (1977) Institutionalized Organizations: Formal Structure as Myth and Ceremony. American Journal of Sociology 83(2): 340–363. Meyer, J.W., Boli, J., Thomas, G.M., and Ramirez, F.O. (2005) Die Weltgesellschaft und der Nationalstaat. In: Meyer, J.W., Krücken, G., and Kuchler, B. (eds.) Weltkultur: Wie die westlichen Prinzipien die Welt durchdringen. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, pp. 85–132. Meyer, J.W., Drori, G.S., and Hwang, H. (2006) World Society and the Proliferation of Formal Organization. In: Meyer, J.W., Drori, G.S., and Hwang, H. (eds.) Globalization and Organization: World Society and Organizational Change. Oxford; New York, NY: Oxford University Press, pp. 25–49. Meyer, R. and Hammerschmid, G. (2006) Die Mikroperspektive des Neo-Institutionalismus. Konzeption und Rolle des Akteurs. In: Senge, K. and Hellmann, K.-U. (eds.) Einführung in den Neo-Institutionalismus. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, pp. 160– 171. Ministry of Lands, Housing and Urban Development (n.d.) Welcome to the Ministry of Lands, Housing & Urban Development. Available at: http://mlhud.go.ug/ (accessed 12 October 2019). Ministry of Local Government (ed.) (2014) Decentralization and Local Development in Uganda. Available at: https://www.ug.undp.org/content/uganda/en/home/library/Inclus iveEffectiveGovernanceprogramme/DecentralizationandLocalDevelopmentinUganda. html (accessed 24 October 2016). Ministry of Local Government (n.d.) Department of Urban Inspection—Objective/Purpose. Available at: https://www.molg.go.ug/department/urban-inspection (accessed 24 June 2020). Ministry of Public Service (2011) Job Descriptions and Specifications for Jobs in Local Governments. Available at: https://psc.go.ug/sites/default/files/downloads/Local%20G overnment%20Job%20Description%20.pdf (accessed 7 June 2018). Miraftab, F. (2004a) Invited and Invented Spaces of Participation: Neoliberal Citizenship and Feminists’ Expanded Notion of Politics. Wagadu 1: 1–7. Miraftab, F. (2004b) Making Neo-liberal Governance: The Disempowering Work of Empowerment. International Planning Studies 9(4): 239–259. Mitchell, T. (1995) The Object of Development. America’s Egypt in Power of Development. In: Crush, J. (ed.) Power of Development. London: Routledge, pp. 125–152. Mitchinson, R. (2003) Devolution in Uganda: An Experiment in Local Service Delivery. Public Administration and Development 23(3): 241–248. Mitlin, D. (2011) Cities for Citizens in the Global South: Approaches of Non-Governmental Organizations Working in Urban Development. In: Reinalda, B. (ed.) The Ashgate Research Companion to Non-State Actors. Farnham: Ashgate, pp. 419–433. Moe Fejerskov, A. (2016) Understanding the nature of change: how institutional perspectives can inform contemporary studies of development cooperation. Third World Quarterly 37(12): 2176–2191. Mohan, G. (2007) Participatory Development: From Epistemological Reversals to Active Citizenship. Geography Compass 1(4): 779–796. Mohan, G. and Stokke, K. (2000) Participatory development and empowerment: the dangers of localism. Third World Quarterly 21(2): 247–268. Morgan, R. and Grugel, J. (2017) Encounters with the Powerful: Researching Elites. In: Crawford, G., Kruckenberg, L.J., Loubere, N., and Morgan, R. (eds.) Understanding

Bibliography

247

Global Development Research: Fieldwork Issues, Experiences and Reflections. London: SAGE, pp. 123–139. Mosse, D. (2001) ‘People’s Knowledge’, Participation and Patronage: Operations and Representations in Rural Development. In: Cooke, B. and Kothari, U. (eds.) Participation: The New Tyranny? London; New York, NY: Zed Books, pp. 16–35. Mosse, D. (2013) Introduction: The Anthropology of Expertise and Professionals in International Development. In: Mosse, D. (ed.) Adventures in Aidland: the anthropology of professionals in international development. New York, NY: Berghahn, pp. 1–31. Mosse, D. (2014) Knowledge as Relational: Reflections on Knowledge in International Development. Forum for Development Studies 41(3): 513–523. Mosse, D. and Kruckenberg, L.J. (2017) Beyond the Ivory Tower: Researching Development Practice. In: Crawford, G., Kruckenberg, L.J., Loubere, N., and Morgan, R. (eds.) Understanding Global Development Research: Fieldwork Issues, Experiences and Reflections. Los Angeles: SAGE, pp. 193–212. Müller, F. (2016) Von Wissenproduktion, Weltordnung und ‘worldism’. Postkoloniale Kritiken und dekoloniale Forschungsstrategien in den Internationalen Beziehungen. In: Ziai, A. (ed.) Postkoloniale Politikwissenschaft: Theoretische und empirische Zugänge. Bielefeld: Transcript, pp. 235–254. Murray, W.E. and Overton, J. (2003) Designing Development Research. In: Scheyvens, R. and Storey, D. (eds.) Development Fieldwork: A Practical Guide. London: SAGE, pp. 17– 35. National Planning Authority (2009) The Comprehensive National Development Planning Framework. Available at: http://npa.go.ug/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/CNDPFRevised-04-09-09.pdf (accessed 28 April 2020). National Planning Authority (2015) Second National Development Plan (NDP II) 2015/16— 2019/20. Available at: http://npa.go.ug/wp-content/uploads/NDPII-Final.pdf (accessed 24 October 2016). Nederveen Pieterse, J. (2010) Development Theory: Deconstructions/Reconstructions. Los Angeles, CA; London: SAGE. Nicolini, D. (2009) Zooming in and Zooming Out: A Package of Method and Theory to Study Work Practices. In: Ybema, S., Yanow, D., Wels, H., and Kamsteeg, F. (eds.) Organizational Ethnography: Studying the Complexities of Everyday Life. London: SAGE, pp. 120–138. Nicolini, D. and Monteiro, P. (2016) The Practice Approach: For a Praxeology of Organisational and Management Studies. In: Langley, A. and Tsoukas, H. (eds.) The SAGE Handbook of Process Organization Studies. London: SAGE, pp. 110–126. Ogora, L.O. (2013) The Contested Fruits of Research in War-Torn Countries: My Insider Experience in Northern Uganda. In: Thomson, S., Ansoms, A., and Murison, J. (eds.) Emotional and Ethical Challenges for Field Research in Africa: The Story Behind the Findings. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 27–41. Oliver, C. (1991) Strategic Responses to Institutional Processes. The Academy of Management Review 16(1): 145–179. O’Meally, S.C. (2013) Mapping Context for Social Accountability: A Resource Paper. Washington, D.C: World Bank. Available at: https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/han dle/10986/16490 (accessed 6 December 2018). O’Reilly, K. (2009) Key Concepts in Ethnography. London: SAGE.

248

Bibliography

Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (ed.) (2005) The Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness and the Accra Agenda for Action. Available at: https://www. oecd.org/dac/effectiveness/34428351.pdf (accessed 30 July 2019). Pache, A.-C. and Santos, F. (2010) When Worlds Collide: The Internal Dynamics of Organizational Responses to Conflicting Institutional Demands. Academy of Management Review 35(3): 455–476. Pachirat, T. (2013) The Political in Political Ethnography: Dispatches from the Kill Floor. In: Schatz, E. (ed.) Political Ethnography: What Immersion Contributes to the Study of Power. Kindle Edition. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Pader, E. (2014) Seeing with an Ethnographic Sensibility: Explorations Beneath the Surface of Public Policies. In: Yanow, D. and Schwartz-Shea, P. (eds.) Interpretation and Method: Empirical Research Methods and the Interpretive Turn. Armonk, NY: Routledge, pp. 194– 208. Pateman, C. (2012) Participatory Democracy Revisited. Perspectives on Politics 10(01): 7– 19. Perera-Mubarak, K. (2014) Power play: ethical dilemmas of dealing with local officials and politicians. Experiences from post-tsunami research in Sri Lanka. In: Lunn, J. (ed.) Fieldwork in the Global South: Ethical Challenges and Dilemmas. New York, NY: Routledge, pp. 206–216. Perkmann, M. and Spicer, A. (2008) How are management fashions institutionalized? The role of institutional work. Human Relations 61(6): 811–844. Perrow, C. (1991) A society of organizations. Theory and Society 20(6): 725–762. Pretty, J.N. (1995) Participatory Learning for Sustainable Agriculture. World Development 23(8): 1247–1263. Reay, T. and Hinings, C.R. (2005) The Recomposition of an Organizational Field: Health Care in Alberta. Organization Studies 26(3): 351–384. Reckwitz, A. (2003) Basic Elements of a Theory of Social Practices. Zeitschrift für Soziologie 32(4): 282–301. Reckwitz, A. (2008) Praktiken und Diskurse. Eine sozialtheoretische und methodologische Relation. In: Kalthoff, H., Hirschauer, S., and Lindemann, G. (eds.) Theoretische Empirie: zur Relevanz qualitativer Forschung. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, pp. 188– 209. Reichertz, J. (2016) Qualitative und interpretative Sozialforschung. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften. Republic of Uganda (1995) Constitution of the Republic of Uganda. Republic of Uganda (1997) Local Governments Act. Riaz, S., Buchanan, S., and Bapuji, H. (2011) Institutional work amidst the financial crisis: emerging positions of elite actors. Organization 18(2): 187–214. Rigon, A. (2014) Building Local Governance: Participation and Elite Capture in Slumupgrading in Kenya: Participation and Elite Capture in Kenya. Development and Change 45(2): 257–283. Roberts, B.H. (2014) Managing Systems of Secondary Cities. Policy Responses in International Development. Brussels: Cities Alliance. Robins, S., Cornwall, A., and von Lieres, B. (2008) Rethinking ‘Citizenship’ in the Postcolony. Third World Quarterly 29(6): 1069–1086.

Bibliography

249

Rocha Menocal, A. and Sharma, B. (2008) Joint Evaluation of Citizens’ Voice & Accountability: Synthesis Report. London: DFID. Roggenkamp, S.D. and White, K.R. (2001) Is hospital case management a rationalized myth? Social Science & Medicine 53(8): 1057–1066. Rose, G. (1997) Situating knowledges: positionality, reflexivities and other tactics. Progress in Human Geography 21(3): 305–320. Rosin, M. (2009) Projekte in der Entwicklungszusammenarbeit. Eine organisationssoziologische Betrachtung von Entwicklungskooperationen im Südkaukasus. Diplomarbeit. Fakultät für Soziologie, Universität Bielefeld. Available at: https://www.uni-bielefeld. de/fakultaeten/soziologie/fakultaet/arbeitsbereiche/ab3/pdf/diplomarbeit-rosin_09.07. 27.pdf (accessed 28 May 2019). Rossi, B. (2006) Aid Policies and Recipient Strategies in Niger. Why Donors and Recipients Should Not Be Compartmentalized into Separate ‘Worlds of Knowledge’. In: Mosse, D. and Lewis, D. (eds.) Development Brokers and Translators: The Ethnography of Aid and Agencies. Bloomfield, CT: Kumarian Press, pp. 27–49. Rottenburg, R. (1996) When Organization Travels: On Intercultural Translation. In: Czarniawska-Joerges, B. and Sevón, G. (eds.) Translating Organizational Change. Berlin; New York, NY: Walter de Gruyter, pp. 191–240. Rottenburg, R. (2002) Weit hergeholte Fakten: eine Parabel der Entwicklungshilfe. Stuttgart: Lucius & Lucius. Rubongoya, J.B. (2007) Regime hegemony in Museveni’s Uganda: Pax Musevenica. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Rusca, M., Schwartz, K., Hadzovic, L., and Ahlers, R. (2015) Adapting Generic Models through Bricolage: Elite Capture of Water Users Associations in Peri-urban Lilongwe. The European Journal of Development Research 27(5): 777–792. Sachs, J., Schmidt-Traub, G., Kroll, C., Durand-Delacre, D., and Teksoz, K. (2017) SDG Index and Dashboards Report 2017. New York, NY: Bertelsmann Stiftung and Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN). Said, E.W. (1979) Orientalism. New York, NY: Vintage Books. Schäfer, H. (2016) Einleitung: Grundlagen, Rezeption und Forschungsperspektiven der Praxistheorie. In: Schäfer, H. (ed.) Praxistheorie. Ein soziologisches Forschungsprogramm. Bielefeld: transcript, pp. 9–26. Schaffer, F.C. (2014) Ordinary Language Interviewing. In: Yanow, D. and Schwartz-Shea, P. (eds.) Interpretation and Methods: Empirical Research Methods and the Interpretive Turn. Armonk, NY: Routledge, pp. 183–193. Schatz, E. (2009) Introduction: Ethnographic Immersion and the Study of Politics. In: Schatz, E. (ed.) Political ethnography: what immersion contributes to the study of power. Chicago, IL; London: The University of Chicago Press, pp. 1–22. Scherm, E. and Pietsch, G. (2005) Erfolgsmessung im Personalcontrolling—Reflexionsinput oder Rationalitätsmythos? Betriebswirtschaftliche Forschung und Praxis 2005(01): 43– 57. Scheyvens, R., Nowak, B., and Scheyvens, H. (2003) Ethical Issues. In: Scheyvens, R. and Storey, D. (eds.) Development Fieldwork: A Practical Guide. London: SAGE, pp. 139– 166.

250

Bibliography

Schoeneborn, D. and Dobusch, L. (2019) Alternating between Partial and Complete Organization: The Case of Anonymous. In: Ahrne, G. and Brunsson, N. (eds.) Organization outside Organizations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 318–333. Schriewer, J. (2009) ‘Rationalized Myths’ in European Higher Education: The Construction and Diffusion of the Bologna Model. European Education 41(2): 31–51. Schwartz-Shea, P. and Yanow, D. (2012) Interpretive Research Design: Concepts and Processes. New York, NY: Routledge. Scott, W.R. (1994) Conceptualizing Organizational Fields. Linking Organizations and Societal Systems. In: Derlien, H.-U., Gerhardt, U., and Scharpf, F.W. (eds.) Systemrationalität und Partialinteresse: Festschrift für Renate Mayntz. Baden-Baden: Nomos, pp. 203–221. Scott, W.R. (2014) Institutions and Organizations: Ideas, Interests, and Identities. Los Angeles: SAGE. Scott, W.R. and Meyer, J.W. (1991) The Organization of Societal Sectors: Propositions and Early Evidence. In: Powell, W.W. and DiMaggio, P. (eds.) The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, pp. 108–140. Senge, K. and Hellmann, K.-U. (eds.) (2006) Einführung in den Neo-Institutionalismus. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften. Sheely, R. (2015) Mobilization, Participatory Planning Institutions, and Elite Capture: Evidence from a Field Experiment in Rural Kenya. World Development 67: 251–266. Shehata, S. (2014) Ethnography, Identity, and the Production of Knowledge. In: Yanow, D. and Schwartz-Shea, P. (eds.) Interpretation and Method: Empirical Research Methods and the Interpretive Turn. Armonk, NY: Routledge, pp. 209–227. Siegel, K.M. (2017) The Nature of Power in Elite Interviews: Researching Environmental Politics in the Southern Cone of South America. In: Crawford, G., Kruckenberg, L.J., Loubere, N., and Morgan, R. (eds.) Understanding Global Development Research: Fieldwork Issues, Experiences and Reflections. London: SAGE, pp. 147–151. Smidt, H. (2018) Shrinking Civic Space in Africa: When Governments Crack Down on Civil Society. GIGA Focus Africa 4. Hamburg: GIGA German Institute of Global and Area Studies—Leibniz-Institut für Globale und Regionale Studien, Institut für Afrika-Studien. Available at: https://www.giga-hamburg.de/en/publications/11568057shrinking-civic-space-africa-when-governments-crack-down-civil-society/ (accessed 11 October 2019). Soss, J. (2014) Talking Our Way to Meaningful Explanations: A Practice-Centered View of Interviewing for Interpretive Research. In: Yanow, D. and Schwartz-Shea, P. (eds.) Interpretation and Method: Empirical Research Methods and the Interpretive Turn. Armonk, NY: Routledge, pp. 161–182. Speer, J. (2012) Participatory Governance Reform: A Good Strategy for Increasing Government Responsiveness and Improving Public Services? World Development 40(12): 2379–2398. Spies, E. (2009) Das Dogma der Partizipation: interkulturelle Kontakte im Kontext der Entwicklungszusammenarbeit in Niger. Köln: Köppe. Staddon, S. (2014) ‘So what kind of student are you?’ The ethics of ‘giving back’ to research participants. In: Lunn, J. (ed.) Fieldwork in the Global South: Ethical Challenges and Dilemmas. New York, NY: Routledge, pp. 249–261. Stock, J.H. and Watson, M.W. (2007) Introduction to econometrics. Boston, MA: Pearson/Addison-Wesley.

Bibliography

251

Strübing, J., Hirschauer, S., Ayaß, R., Krähnke, U., and Scheffer, T. (2018) Gütekriterien qualitativer Sozialforschung. Ein Diskussionsanstoß. Zeitschrift für Soziologie 47(2): 83–100. Suchman, M.C. (1995) Managing Legitimacy: Strategic and Institutional Approaches. The Academy of Management Review 20(3): 571. Suddaby, R., Elsbach, K.D., Greenwood, R., Meyer, J.W., and Zilber, T.B. (2010) Organizations and Their Institutional Environments—Bringing Meaning, Values, and Culture Back In: Introduction to the Special Research Forum. Academy of Management Journal 53(6): 1234–1240. Tacke, V. (2006) Rationalität im Neo-Institutionalismus. Vom exakten Kalkül zum Mythos. In: Senge, K. and Hellmann, K.-U. (eds.) Einführung in den Neo-Institutionalismus. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, pp. 89–101. Thomson, S., Ansoms, A., and Murison, J. (eds.) (2013a) Emotional and Ethical Challenges for Field Research in Africa. The Story Behind the Findings. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Thomson, S., Ansoms, A., and Murison, J. (2013b) Introduction: Why Stories Behind the Findings? In: Thomson, S., Ansoms, A., and Murison, J. (eds.) Emotional and Ethical Challenges for Field Research in Africa: The Story Behind the Findings. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 1–11. Transparency & Accountability Initiative (n.d.) Strategy 2017–2019. Available at: https:// www.transparency-initiative.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/tai_report_final_web.pdf (accessed 23 September 2019). Transparency, Accountability, and Participation (TAP) Network (2019) About. Available at: https://tapnetwork2030.org/about/ (accessed 23 September 2019). United Nations Human Settlements Programme (2014) The State of African Cities 2014. Re-imagining sustainable urban transitions. Nairobi: United Nations Human Settlements Programme. Available at: https://unhabitat.org/state-of-african-cities-2014-re-imaginingsustainable-urban-transitions (accessed 22 August 2017). van der Borgh, C. and Terwindt, C. (2012) Shrinking operational space of NGOs – a framework of analysis. Development in Practice 22(8): 1065–1081. von Heusinger, J. (2017) Kulturelle Konflikte in der Entwicklungszusammenarbeit. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften. Vorrath, J. (2013) Challenges of Interviewing Political Elites: A View from the Top in PostWar Burundi. In: Thomson, S., Ansoms, A., and Murison, J. (eds.) Emotional and Ethical Challenges for Field Research in Africa: The Story Behind the Findings. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 57–69. Wacquant, L.J.D. (2003) Leben für den Ring: Boxen im amerikanischen Ghetto. Konstanz: UVK. Waddington, H., Sonnenfeld, A., Finetti, J., Gaarder, M., and Stevenson, J. (2019) Does incorporating participation and accountability improve development outcomes? Metaanalysis and framework synthesis. 3ie Systematic Review 43. London: International Initiative for Impact Evaluation (3ie). Wagner, A. (2013) Partizipation in der Entwicklungszusammenarbeit. In: Weber, S.M., Göhlich, M., Schröer, A., Fahrenwald, C., and Macha, H. (eds.) Organisation und Partizipation: Beiträge der Kommission Organisationspädagogik. Organisation und Pädagogik 13. Wiesbaden: Springer VS, pp. 333–342.

252

Bibliography

Wagner, A. (2016) Doing Grassroots: die Organisierung von Communities in der Entwicklungszusammenarbeit. Wiesbaden: Springer VS. Walgenbach, P. (1998) Zwischen Showbusiness und Galeere. Zum Einsatz der DIN EN ISO 9000er Normen in Unternehmen. Industrielle Beziehungen 5(2): 135–164. Walgenbach, P. and Meyer, R.E. (2008) Neoinstitutionalistische Organisationstheorie. Stuttgart: Verlag W. Kohlhammer. Wanyama, E. (2016) Towards a Narrow Bridge: A Critical Overview of the Operating Environment for Civil Society Organisations in Uganda. Recht in Afrika 19(2): 173–194. Watkins, S.C., Swidler, A., and Hannan, T. (2012) Outsourcing Social Transformation: Development NGOs as Organizations. Annual Review of Sociology 38(1): 285–315. Weaver, C. (2008) Hypocrisy Trap: The World Bank and the Poverty of Reform. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Weber, M. (1985) [1922] Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Grundriss der verstehenden Soziologie. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. Wedlin, L. and Sahlin, K. (2017) The Imitation and Translation of Management Ideas. In: Greenwood, R., Oliver, C., Lawrence, T., and Meyer, R. (eds.) The SAGE Handbook of Organizational Institutionalism. London: SAGE, pp. 102–127. Wenene, M.T., Steen, T., and Rutgers, M.R. (2016) Civil servants’ perspectives on the role of citizens in public service delivery in Uganda. International Review of Administrative Sciences 82(1): 169–189. White, S.C. (1996) Depoliticising development: The uses and abuses of participation. Development in Practice 6(1): 6–15. Wilkinson, C. (2008) Positioning ‘Security’ and Securing One’s Position: The researcher’s role in investigating ‘security’ in Kyrgyzstan. In: Wall, C.R.L. and Mollinga, P.P. (eds.) Fieldwork in Difficult Environments: Methodology as Boundary Work in Development Research. Berlin: LIT Verlag, pp. 43–67. Wilkinson, C. (2014) On Not Just Finding What You (Thought You) Were Looking For: Reflections on Fieldwork Data and Theory. In: Yanow, D. and Schwartz-Shea, P. (eds.) Interpretation and Method: Empirical Research Methods and the Interpretive Turn. Armonk, NY: Routledge, pp. 397–405. Williams, G. (2004) Towards a repoliticization of participatory development: political capabilities and spaces of empowerment. In: Hickey, S. and Mohan, G. (eds.) Participation: from Tyranny to Transformation? Exploring New Approaches to Participation in Development. London; New York, NY: ZED Books, pp. 92–107. Wong, F.F. (2017) Hybridization and the Case of a ‘Successful’ Gender Mainstreamed Community-based Disaster Management Project in Cambodia. In: Bonacker, T., Heusinger, J. von, and Zimmer, K. (eds.) Localization in development aid: how global institutions enter local lifeworlds. Rethinking globalizations. London; New York, NY: Routledge, pp. 115–132. Wooten, M. and Hoffman, A.J. (2017) Organizational Fields: Past, Present and Future. In: Greenwood, R., Oliver, C., Lawrence, T., and Meyer, R. (eds.) The SAGE Handbook of Organizational Institutionalism. London: SAGE, pp. 55–72. World Bank (1996) The World Bank Participation Sourcebook. Washington, D.C: World Bank. Available at: http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/289471468741587739/ The-World-Bank-participation-sourcebook (accessed 9 August 2019).

Bibliography

253

World Bank (2003) World Development Report 2004: Making Services Work for Poor People. Washington, D.C: The World Bank. Available at: https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/ handle/10986/5986 (accessed 22 September 2019). World Bank (2012a) Strengthening Governance: Tackling Corruption. The World Bank Group’s Updated Strategy and Implementation Plan. Available at: http://documents.wor ldbank.org/curated/en/170861468331809051/Strengthening-governance-tackling-corrup tion-the-World-Bank-Groups-updated-strategy-and-implementation-plan (accessed 17 May 2020). World Bank (2012b) Uganda Support to Municipal Infrastructure Development Program— Environmental and Social System Assessment: Analysis. Available at: http://documents. worldbank.org/curated/en/492801468316474434/Environmental-and-social-system-ass essment-analysis (accessed 13 September 2019). World Bank (2012c) Uganda Support to Municipal Infrastructure Development Program— Environmental and Social System Assessment: Background Annexes. Available at: http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/877041468121510579/Environmental-andsocial-system-assessment-background-annexes (accessed 13 September 2019). World Bank (2012d) Uganda Support to Municipal Infrastructure Development Program as a Program-For-Results (PforR) Operation—Technical Assessment Report. Available at: http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/485741468308649650/Uganda-Supportto-Municipal-Infrastructure-Development-USMID-program-as-a-Program-for-ResultsPforR-operation-technical-assessment-report (accessed 2 May 2019). World Bank (2013a) Engaging with citizens for improved development results: Concept note for the Strategic Framework for Mainstreaming Citizen Engagement in World Bank Group Operations. Washington, D.C: World Bank. Available at: https://consultations.worldb ank.org/sites/default/files/materials/consultation-template/engaging-citizens-improvedresultsopenconsultationtemplate/materials/ce_concept_note_final_v2.pdf (accessed 21 August 2019). World Bank (2013b) Uganda Support to Municipal Infrastructure Development—Program Appraisal Document. Available at: http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/349161 468317935471/Uganda-Support-to-Municipal-Infrastructure-Development-Program-Pro ject (accessed 18 February 2019). World Bank (2014) Strategic Framework for Mainstreaming Citizen Engagement in World Bank Group Operations. Washington, D.C: World Bank. Available at: https://openknowl edge.worldbank.org/handle/10986/21113 (accessed 30 November 2018). World Bank (2018) Engaging Citizens for Better Development. Independent Evaluation Group. Washington, D.C: World Bank. Available at: https://ieg.worldbankgroup.org/ sites/default/files/Data/Evaluation/files/Engaging_Citizens_for_Better_Development_ Results_FullReport.pdf (accessed 21 August 2019). World Bank (2019a) Program-for-Results Financing (PforR). Available at: https://www.wor ldbank.org/en/programs/program-for-results-financing (accessed 8 October 2019). World Bank (2019b) Trust Fund Annual Report for 2018–2019. Washington, D.C: World Bank Group. Available at: http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/461611570 786898020/Trust-Fund-Annual-Report-for-2018-2019 (accessed 27 April 2020). World Bank (2019c) World Bank Project Cycle. Available at: https://projects-beta.wor ldbank.org/en/projects-operations/products-and-services/brief/projectcycle (accessed 15 September 2019).

254

Bibliography

World Bank (2019d) Worldwide Governance Indicators. Available at: https://info.worldbank. org/governance/wgi/#home (accessed 26 July 2019). Yanow, D. (2014) Wherefore ‘Interpretive?’ An Introduction. In: Yanow, D. and SchwartzShea, P. (eds.) Interpretation and Method: Empirical Research Methods and the Interpretive Turn. Armonk, NY: Routledge, pp. xiii–xxxi. Yanow, D. and Schwartz-Shea, P. (2014a) Generating Data. In: Yanow, D. and SchwartzShea, P. (eds.) Interpretation and Method: Empirical Research Methods and the Interpretive Turn. Armonk, NY: Routledge, pp. 147–160. Yanow, D. and Schwartz-Shea, P. (2014b) Interpretation and Method: Empirical Research Methods and the Interpretive Turn. Armonk, NY: Routledge. Ziai, A. (2016a) Einleitung: Unsere Farm in Zhengistan. Zur Notwendigkeit postkolonialer Perspektiven in der Politikwissenschaft. In: Ziai, A. (ed.) Postkoloniale Politikwissenschaft: Theoretische und empirische Zugänge. Bielefeld: Transcript, pp. 11–24. Ziai, A. (2016b) Postkoloniale Studien und Politikwissenschaft. Komplementäre Defizite und ein Forschungsprogramm. In: Ziai, A. (ed.) Postkoloniale Politikwissenschaft: Theoretische und empirische Zugänge. Bielefeld: Transcript, pp. 25–45. Ziekow, J., Kuhlmann, S., Kropp, S., Sommermann, K.-P., Reichard, C., and König, K. (eds.) (2014) Grundmuster der Verwaltungskultur: Interdisziplinäre Diskurse über kulturelle Grundformen der öffentlichen Verwaltung. Baden-Baden: Nomos. Zirakzadeh, C.E. (2013) When Nationalists Are Not Separatists: Discarding and Recovering Academic Theories while Doing Fieldwork in the Basque Region of Spain. In: Schatz, E. (ed.) Political Ethnography: what immersion contributes to the study of power. Kindle Edition. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.