The Internalization of Participation Norms by International Organizations
| DOI | 10.1177/002070201206700114 |
| Published date | 01 March 2012 |
| Date | 01 March 2012 |
| Subject Matter | The Best of Études Internationales |
| International Journal | Winter 2011-12 | 195 |
In the 1980s, the failure of the type of development then practiced led to
the emergence of the participatory approach to sustainable development.
Those who advocated this new technique were seen by governments and the
Bretton Woods institutions at best as idealists far removed from the harsh
economic realities of development; at worst, some governments considered
them subversive elements who should be imprisoned.
This new approach, presented most forcefully in the 1987 Brundtland
report, came principally from nongovernmental actors in the environmental,
humanitarian, and development fields, as well as from academia, and in
particular the discipline of international relations. It proposed three major
Camille Bethoux &
Stéphane La Branche
The internalization of
participation norms
by international
organizations
The case of sustainable development and dams
THE BEST OF ÉTUDES INTERNATIONALES
Camille Bethoux is a research assistant at the Grenoble Institute of Political Studies;
Stéphane La Branche is head of the planet, energy, and climate research chair, Grenoble
Institute of Political Studies, France. The article was translated from the original French by
Susan M. Murphy.
| 196 | Winter 2011-12 | International Journal |
| Camille Bethoux & Stéphane La Branche |
responses to the inadequacies of the top-down infrastructural approach:
first, economic development should be culturally appropriate, indigenous,
and internalized by the community; second, it should be the result of a
decision made by citizens and assisted by multiple actors, in a participatory,
decentralized, bottom-up process; and finally, development should take into
account the environmental needs of future generations. Concerns for justice
and equity between generations, as well as between the rich and the poor, the
powerful and the vulnerable, thus gave birth to the participatory approach
to sustainable development. Once nongovernmental and intergovernmental
organizations adopted the concept during the 1990s, development projects
needed to embrace participatory democratic norms in order to obtain funding
from state development agencies. Subsequently, in 1997, even the World
Bank integrated the concept into its “good governance” notion.1 In its 2000
report, the world commission on dams postulated that participatory norms
constituted the answer to development’s material and financial performance
problems, to the negative effects on the environment and culture, and
above all to the problem of the community’s failure to “own” the project.2
Recommendations linked to the approach have thus become norms which,
proliferating in an ever-increasing number of fields, are becoming a sine
qua non, even a discursive system in the Foucauldian sense of the term.3
Although this is not an unusual process, it is interesting to ask exactly when
international organizations adopted these norms.
In this article, we examine the case of international organizations
promoting dams who adopted participatory norms under the influence of
non-state and non-hegemonic actors, notably development, humanitarian,
and environmental NGOs. This adoption has had a noticeable effect:
whereas, during the 1980s, only about 20 percent of dam projects included
participation in the decision-making process, 10 years later that number had
risen to 50 percent.4 Two observations can be made. First, there has been a
dissemination of participatory norms and principles among different actors
to varying degrees, the effect of which has been more than rhetorical, since
the dam projects themselves have been affected. Second, these norms have
been internalized to the extent that actors not only take them into account
1 “World development report 1997,” World Bank, Washington, DC, 1997.
2 “Dams and development: A new framework for decision-making,” report of the
world commission on dams, London, 2000.
3 Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge (Brighton: Harvester, 1980).
4 World commission on dams report, 176.
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