Ten - The politics of democracy and the global institutions: lessons and challenges for community development

Summary

Introduction

One of the great paradoxes of our age is the simultaneous omnipresence and absence of democracy. Wars are fought and justified in its name yet, as global markets and institutions expand their reach and influence, the power of nation states and their communities is diminished. Democracy is all at once everywhere and nowhere, as market imperatives facilitated by global institutions, but not communities and their representatives, determine national and local policy. In this chapter I explore the mechanisms through which global institutions generate broad social support for their policies. Focusing in particular on the most influential institutions, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Trade Organization (WTO), I argue that these seek to construct not just national policy, but communities themselves, effecting their disciplined inclusion into the globalised, market-driven development project.

I begin the chapter by examining the rise of the World Bank, the IMF and the WTO. I highlight the principal policies of these institutions, together with their now well-documented social and political impacts. I then go on to explore how, in the face of increasing challenges to their legitimacy, these institutions have sought to engage civil society groups and their constituent communities as ‘partners’ in managing and mitigating the social fallout accruing from their policies. Drawing on the global institutions’ own discourses, I next demonstrate how this ‘third way’ for the ‘Third World’ depoliticises civic engagement and community practice as it necessarily obfuscates the links between local issues and macro-level policies by embarking on an ambitious project of social engineering which seeks to redefine civil society and its agency. Drawing on some of my own experiences and conversations with civic groups and activists, I finally demonstrate the limits to this social engineering approach as communities, angry at their marginalisation and exploitation, either resist engagement in the global development project or, by maximising the opportunities provided by its new policy institutions, demand more effective representation from their civic leaders within it. I conclude with some lessons and challenges for community development in this regard.