FUNCIONES DE LOS MIEMBROS DEL COMITÉ EJECUTIVO NACIONAL

The previous three chapters have placed considerable emphasis on the importance of citizen participation in the development process. The analyses have produced evidence for the absence of sustainable rural development in Botswana. It also points out the absence of effective participation by the peasantry in the development process. Specifically, we attribute the prevalence of rural underdevelopment since 1966 to the absence of an alternative to the bureaucratic rigidity of the state (see Chapters 3 & 4). The argument is that there is a need for the evolution of alternative rural institutions capable of facilitating peasant participation in national development and the promotion of social welfare.

These interpretations of peasant participation and rural underdevelopment in Botswana, however, raise conceptual and empirical questions that call for deeper analysis. There are three critical questions that particularly deserve attention. First, what is participation? Second, is participation necessary for development? Finally, who should lead development? We need to address these critical questions within the context of Botswana before we can clearly establish where the responsibility for the welfare of the nation's people rest.

Theoretically, there is no universal definition of political participation. However, some development theorists and practitioners readily associate peasant participation with the writings of the social scientist lllich (1971), whose argument is that peasant participation can only occur where there is de-professionalisation in all domains of life; e.g, national development planning, schooling, health care, transportation etc (Goulet, 1989). According to this school of thought, de- professionalisation makes "ordinary peopfe" responsible for their own well-being. This perspective thus affirms the superior value of popular participation over elite decision making.

Its normative nature accords well with Freire's (1973) doctrine which has been succinctly summarised thus:

the supreme cornerstone of development is whether people who were previously treated as mere objects, known and acted upon, can now actively know and act upon, thereby becoming subjects of their own social destiny (Goulet, 1989, p. 165).

In other words, participation allows oppressed people to become active subjects of knowledge and action. When this happens, according to the de-professionalisation school of thought, the oppressed people, hitherto bound to a culture of silence, "begin to construct their proper human history and engage in processes of authentic development" (ibid.).

The de-professionalisation perspective evolved as an analytical framework designed to address the plight of the poor in both the colonial and the immediate post-colonial period (lllich 1976; Freire 1973). The problems of poverty in the Third World, however, have since become more complex as dynamic processes of development in the 1980s and the early 1990s clashed head-on with growing intra-national forces of social differentiation marked by intense class struggles, ethnicity and cultural discrimination, inter alia. In the 1990s we find that the poor are in effect "part society" and rarely synonymous with a given national polity. This is particularly the case in Botswana and other African nation states as our analysis will demonstrate.

It is against this background that development specialists and practitioners now call for more practical and operational, as opposed to abstract, definitions of participation. But the broad outlines of the de-professionalisation framework still have strong merits and possibjy applicable ideas as subsequent analysis with respect to Botswana illustrates. For our purposes here, and given the major thrust of our argument in the previous three chapters, an appropriate working definition of participation is the one adopted by the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD) which contends that participation designates

...[the] organised efforts to increase control over resources and regulative institutions in given social situations, on the part of groups and movements hitherto excluded from such control (Wolfe, 1983, p.

2).

In short, participation is not only about participatory democracy, that is a political regime that allows a large segment of the population to take a direct and active part in Government or the formation of public policy (Raymond, 1978), but it also designates the conferment of citizenship. The concept of citizenship as used in this context, is discussed in Chapter 3 of this thesis where we contend that the three spheres of citizenship, the civil, the political and the socio-economic spheres are central to any discussion of human welfare.

In terms of entitlement theory, participation essentially denotes citizens' ability to enjoy the four entitlement relations delineated by Sen (1981, pp. 1-7) and widely accepted in a private ownership market economy. These are:

i) trade-based entitlement: where an individual is entitled to own what they obtain by trading their own produce with a willing party or multilaterally with a willing set of parties;

ii) production-based entitlement: an individual is entitled to own what they get by arranging production using their own resources or resources hired from willing parties meeting the agreed conditions of trade;

iii) own labour entitlement: one is entitled to one's own labour power, and thus to the trade- based and production-based entitlements related to one's own labour power; and

iv) inheritance and transfer entitlement: where an individual is entitled to own what is willingly given to them by any agent who legitimately owns what is thus bequeathed

It should, however, be emphasised that participation is not a mere economic phenomena, it is also a political phenomenon. Whether discussed as a goal or a means for arriving at more optimal economic outcomes, participation has as its central feature, the aspect of originating aspect hence the question of who should lead development. Three distinct sources of participation are evident in Third World rural development (Goulet, 1989 and Bratton, 1989).

i) Participation can be induced from above by some authority or expert; usually the state.

ii) Participation can be spontaneously generated from below usually during a crisis or perceived communal threat.

iii) Participation can arise as a catalytic action of third party change agents, for example, missionaries, non-Govemmental organisations, militant political movements and general development practitioners.

Peasant economic participation, as distinct from political participation (note that these phenomena often dovetail and reinforce each other), is a problematic issue. This is all the more so in the LDCs where the concept of a peasantry is often very fluid. There are raging debates about the "peasant concept" in Botswana and the Third World in general (Scott, 1976 and 1985; Lipton, 1968; Harriss, 1982 and Ellis, 1988). Central to this debate is the concept of the peasantry. Is the category of the "peasant economy" in the LDC a useful one? Are rural economies based on "households" units of production as mainstream economics claim? Is the peasantry in the LDCs a class? What is the political role of peasants in the post-colonial states? This debate on the concept of peasants in Botswana remaines unresolved (Molutsi, 1986 and Tsie, 1995 and 1996b).

Such questions are often thrown about without due regard to their theoretical implications. Within the structural/historical approach to peasant studies there is a strong debate between what may be broadly characterised as (i) the "differentiation perspective" and (ii) the notion of a "specific peasant economy" on the other (Harriss, 1982, p. 24). Structural/historical studies contend that with increasing commoditisation and commercialisation in agrarian societies a process is set in motion which leads to the evolution of distinct social groups, usually called classes, over time. Proponents of a specific peasant economy generally characterise peasants as "part society" and usually emphasise their subordinate relationships to external agents like the

state, markets and the dominant culture. However, in practice, as we shall see, the line between these perspectives is very thin.

In this thesis we contend that conceptually, it is illogical to refer to peasants as a class. Peasant society is more often than not heterogeneous due to ethnic, customary, religious, age, sex, political and economic differences as is the case in the historical context of Botswana for example (see Chapters 2). Our analysis here will also illustrate that peasants are not always risk-averse. They also appreciate the efficacy of economic rationality and efficiency. The argument that peasants do not optimise profits will be shown not always to be true; especially with respect to the communities discussed in this chapter.