1. PARTICIPATION OF PEOPLE EXPERINCING POVERTY:
LIMITS OF CURRENT PRACTICES
Maria Jeliazkova
EAPN
Although “participation” is a long - established declared norm in plenty of official
document of different international and national institution, the concept is extremely vague.
The relative theoretical and practical consensus considering participation as opportunity to
influence the decision taking processes remains abstract due to the refusal to operationalize
and differentiate and the domination of poorly understood ‘political correctness’.
The lack of enough powerful and clear concept on participation is even more
intensive when people in poverty are considered, as they are already socially excluded. Thus
the willingness to provide opportunities for their participation should start with an answer of
the question how non-participants to become participants. This presupposes as well
concrete answers to the questions: participation in what, participation where and
participation how.
Current practices impact greatly to preventing participation by:
Unidentified areas of participation: The lack of identification of core socially
significant areas of poor people participation and the lack of differentiation between
participation in a cultural event, shopping and decision making process create enormous
barriers to authentic participation. In principle this means refusal to participate. To consider
seriously the participation of people in poverty means to consider to what extend they could
influence the political process of decision making in reference with the accumulation and
distribution of public resources as well as to control the implementation of the decisions.
Functional (in)adequacy of levels of participation: Participation could be implemented
at different levels: local, regional, national and EU. However the participation in the political
process of decision making in reference with the accumulation and distribution of public
resources has to correspond to the level where such decisions are taken. Otherwise
participation is transformed into informing – for example, if local participation considers tax
incomes while tax system is decided by national authorities. Special paths for participation at
different levels have to be constructed.
Underdeveloped technologies of participation: Participation ‘technologies’ remain
underdeveloped and not addressed. Most often participation is presented as clear, easy and
simple – people are invited to be present, the lists of participants are reported and so on.
The self evident and not questioned simplicity of participation is a deception. Plenty of
failures of such technologies are reported combined with insistence for authentic
participation, control over the process, preliminary clarity on the mechanisms of decision
taking, transparency, avoiding manipulations, etc. All these could have been avoided if the
concept and the process were elaborated in a way that faces constraints.
Low capacity to participate: The real participation in the political process of decision
making for public resources and the control of the decisions’ implementation is a complex
social technology for a social choice. This means that a series of necessary conditions or
resources such as knowledge, normative framework, negotiating power, finances, etc have
to be considered. On the contrary, there is a clear refusal to address these conditions,
especially when people in poverty are concerned.
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