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SFB 564: F3.2 - Development intervention, state administration and local society: conditions for political participation in the highlands of Northern Thailand and Northern Vietnam
Project
Project code: DFG SFB 564: F3.2
Contract period: 01.07.2003
- 30.06.2006
Purpose of research: Applied research
During the first phase the focus of the F 3 research project has been on the interface between local institutions and foreign-sponsored development assistance programs. One major finding was that local groups (local villagers, development workers and agencies, NGO) had different interests in their involvement to set up or facilitate hill-tribe networks, defining the agendas, establishing administrative structures and translating objectives into operations. The outcome represents a compromise between the various groups involved, shaped by cultural relations between the ethnic groups and their respective advantages, as well as the administrative and political cultures of development organisations and their linkages to economic and political structures beyond the local level. Another important finding was that the interface has effects on the local groups towards formalization, by which a better compatibility with the local administration was achieved, on the expense of integration of the group-members into local community.
Phase two of project F3 uses the results from the interface analysis for the examination of encounters within newly established administrative bodies (in Thailand: TOA and TCC) between local organisations, local administration and local government service agencies. These bodies set up in the context of decentralization policies, are supposed to link local organizations as representatives of local society with the regional and national political and administrative system, to enhance development opportunities more suited to local interests. An important question is, whether these new bodies develop the interface towards a “public sphere” (Öffentlichkeit) or are forms of bureaucratization. This has far reaching effects on political participation of local groups, representation of local interests, organisational pattern, and thus legitimacy of the new institutions. The aim of the F3.2. project is to develop inter¬face analysis further by taking into account these processes of formalization and their consequences. The focus of F3.2. is thus on political participation in the sense of articulation of local demands through representation.
Interests as well as the ability to articulate these as demands, i.e. political participation depend on acting possibilities (agency), based on the vertical and horizontal position of an individual or group within a social structure. Consequently, public representation and political participation should be examined with the question what different social strata can participate and are represented. This requires an actors oriented social structure analysis. The policies of administrative reform towards decentralization in Vietnam and Thailand, by which the degree of political participation is to be increased, result from national political changes and how these are locally implemented. Accordingly, the analysis of the local interfaces and encounters have to be investigated as localized articulations between society and political/administrative system, as outlined as long term perspective of the F3 project in the initial proposal. Network approaches are seen as most appropriate for such an analysis because they allow to integrate local social dynamics resulting from personal interactions and relations (i.e. networks), including those between farmers and representatives of the administration, NGO and development workers, with processes of change within the political system (decentralization policies).
Section overview
Subjects
- Agricultural Sociology
- Agroeconomics
