DRAFT please treat with respect

Whatever Happened to the Water Sellers?1

Abstract
In the late 1970s the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex developed a view that poverty could best be alleviated by capturing the last resource, groundwater, for the rural poor. Geof Wood developed a variation on this theme by combining it with a Marxian political sociology analysis of rural society in Bangladesh, and, together with the Bangladesh NGO Proshika, initiated a programme of landless irrigation. Along with several other innovative development NGOs in Bangladesh at the time, Proshika facilitated the formation of groups of landless rural poor people through conscientisation and related mobilisation techniques. At the time the World Bank was promoting Shallow Tubewells for irrigation of boro rice and, given the fragmented and inegalitarian agrarian farm structure of Bangladesh, a demand for irrigation services arose whereby STW owners provided irrigation water to farmers with plots neighbouring their STWs. Geof and Proshika saw an opportunity for some landless groups to participate in this enterprise by providing loans, technical advice, and so on. For a period some prominent development actors in Bangladesh resisted the rise of water markets and some promoted the idea that the irrigation services market should be reserved to the landless. Geof, two of us and others co-authored The Water Sellers based on evaluation of the Proshika experiment up to the mid 1980s. There is a clear tension in the book between the Marxian political economy and the evidence that economic forces were playing a crucial role in the trajectory of the landless irrigation enterprise; subsequently, as is well known, the market took over. The landless water sellers staggered on never comprising more than 1000 groups irrigating perhaps 3000 hectares while in the private sector privately owned STW numbers grew to more than a million irrigating perhaps 4 million hectares. Largely as a result Bangladesh developed from the proverbial basket case to near selfsufficiency in rice, money-metric poverty appears to have fallen at an average rate of more than 1% per annum (from around 65% in the early 1980s to 40% in 2005), real wages of agricultural labourers and of construction workers grew substantially, infant and maternal mortalities fell, and child nutritional statuses improved. This paper will revisit the analyses of the early 1980s and the theoretical and political debates and commitments that underlay them. It will address approaches that have been promoted subsequently to understand and prescribe for rural Bangladesh, and, with the benefit of hindsight, discuss whether it was better to be red than right?

Paper to be presented at festschrift for Geof Wood, University of bath, 13-14/9/2010, by Richard Palmer-Jones, School of International Development, University of East Anglia (r.palmer-jones@uea.ac.uk), Malin Arvidson, Third Sector Research Center, University of Southampton (m.arvidson@uea,ac,uk), and Sattar Mandal, Department of Agricultural Economics and Marketing, Bangladesh Agricultural University (asmandal@bids.sdnbd.org).

DRAFT please treat with respect

Some somewhat mischievous epithets

[m]odern economists must choose between being seekers after genuine knowledge or rhetoricians who make money from an apparent but unreal wisdom Johansson, 1994:102, paraphrasing Rao, 1991:55) "The left-wing movement having to build itself up out of nothing...has to create a following by telling lies. For a left-wing party in power, its most serious antagonist is always its own past propaganda." George Orwell, in Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (eds), The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, London, 1983, Volume 4, pp. 578-9 Sir Fazle [Abed the founder of BRAC] recognised that poverty in Bangladeshi villages is also a result of rigid social stratification. In these circumstances, community development will help the rich more than the poor; to change the poverty, you have to change the society.(Economist:18/2/2010 http://www.economist.com/node/15546464)2

Introduction
The point of departure for this paper comes from the book the Water Sellers, authored by Wood and Palmer-Jones, with others in 1989. The story and analysis of the Water Sellers provide the background for a discussion of choices of analytical perspectives for understanding sources of poverty and social and economic relations in Bangladesh, and subsequent policy implications for how to alleviate poverty, inequalities and injustices. The two main questions this paper elaborates refer first of all to the appropriateness of applying a Marxian approach to analysing poverty and inequality in Bangladesh. The authors of this paper draw on various types and lengths of engagement with, mainly, the arena of rural development in Bangladesh. It draws in particular on our experiences of the Water Sellers (Wood and Palmer-Jones, 1989), but also with agricultural policy more generally, NGOs in the Water and Sanitation (WATSAN) sector, and qualitative fieldwork on livelihoods in rural Bangladesh, and an ongoing longitudinal, qualitative study initiated by Swedish Sida. A significant part of our work has been in close engagement with the work and ideas of Geof Wood, which draws descriptively, analytically and prescriptively largely on Marxian analyses of the agrarian question (Wood, 1974, 1976, and elsewhere). It has in various ways been inspiring, stimulating and challenging. Nevertheless, we want to argue that the generative entrenchment (Wimsatt, 1985) of this episteme (Foucault, 1970) among large swathes of the development industry in Bangladesh, for whom it is the normative unthinking everyday ideology motivating their presentations of self (Dunn, 1993), into which many bi-lateral donors buy, and which has suited many national and international development actors well, has many problems as description, diagnosis and prescription.

the organisation he founded [BRAC], and for which his knighthood is a gong of respect, has probably done more than any single body to upend the traditions of misery and poverty in Bangladesh. (ibid)

DRAFT please treat with respect The second question is a concern with issues of the analysis of politics in development and the politics of development research and analysis. Here we heed the call of Hickey, 2009a & b, among others, to bring the analysis of politics back into development, but warn that politicised analysis may not be all that helpful. In this connection we raise, but do not necessarily answer, two sets of questions. The first is whether a, more or less explicitly acknowledged, strongly ideological disposition (see Lewis and Hossain 2008), which has guided much analytical work and agenda setting in Bangladesh, has prevented us from gaining a more critically realistic understanding of social structures and changes in Bangladesh? And, has the equally ideological (in rhetoric at least although perhaps not so much in practice) position taken up by Bangladesh development NGOs created a situation where they today have little legitimacy amongst their putative clients, the grassroots poor? The question reflects on whether the case made for the importance of bringing politics back into development is neglecting a rather important aspect of the link between politics and development, namely that played by the researcher/consultant promoting a particular and politically framed agenda? And if so, what implication may that have for how we can formulate what Hickey refers to as an analytical base from which we can better understand politics in development? The paper is laid out as follows. In the next section we briefly describe the story and analysis underlying the Water Sellers, and set out the basics of the Marxian political economy analysis of rural Bangladesh and its expectations with regard to agrarian structures, and modes of progressive intervention in it, in particular the idea that the selling of irrigation services by landless poor facilitated by a radical development NGO could constitute such an intervention. Then we discuss what has happened since, pointing out that notwithstanding the limited scale of such interventions the irrigation service market has subsequently grown more or less continuously without any meaningful influence of the NGO sector, with many pro-poor effects. We then explore more recent experiences with the participation and empowerment agenda focussing on some WATSAN projects, and we link the analysis of these experiences to the understanding of everyday concerns of poorer people derived from a qualitative livelihoods study and the qualitative longitudinal study of Bangladesh Reality Check. Finally we draw some tentative conclusions with regard to both the politicisation of development (research) intervention and the political analysis of development.

The Agrarian Question and Rural Bangladesh

The following is a very simplified account of what we have in mind; it takes off from our joint enterprise with Geof in the Water Sellers. The academic analysis underlying both the development activism of the NGO Proshika, of which the landless irrigation was a project, and the intervention itself - to overcome the obstacles to participation by the poor in the emergent profitable and empowering business of selling water services for boro rice irrigation lies in the diagnosis of the Agrarian Question in Bangladesh at the time (Wood, 1981; 1984; 1978); this in turn derived from Geofs PhD work in North Bihar. Around the same time BRAC, the well known large development NGO developed its model of The Net which is essentially the same model (BRAC, 1980; see also Jansen,1986; de Vylder and Asplund, 1982; van Beurens and ????). Sharing considerable similarities with the analysis positing an Agrarian Impasse in Bengal (Boyce, 1987) these analyses suggested that both the potential for growth and the likely distributional impacts of the second generation GR in Bengal were likely to be limited by the 3

DRAFT please treat with respect dysfunctional (disarticulated) agrarian structure of small and fragmented farms and high levels of landlessness combined with an anti-diluvian agrarian institutional structure characterised by inefficient share-cropping, usurious money-lending, debt bondage, interlocked agricultural markets, and so on (see also Crow and Murshed, 1994). The new groundwater based irrigation technologies being promoted by the World Bank in the late 1970s (see Palmer-Jones, 1993 & 1999, for a chronology), could only be economically viable within this agrarian structure if water3 could be sold to the owners of neighbouring plots, but this would be difficult in view of structural conflicts among landowners and with (share-cropping) tenants. The landless water sellers, it was suggested, might have an advantage (or at least an opportunity) in this market in that their control of this resource would not be viewed as such a threat to the prevailing power structure as control of water by more powerful members higher in the rural power structure. Many authors predicted impoverishment as the likely outcome of the spread of this technology (van Schendle, 1981; Westergaard, 1979), and indeed some perceived this to be the case (Adnan, 1999; Shahabuddin, 1999). However, the project did not prove successful in developing more than a minute presence in this market amounting at its peak to no more than 1000 active groups; between the early 1980s and the present, in Bangladesh as a whole, the number of Water Extraction Mechanisms (WEM) grew from a few tens of thousands to more than a million, with little or no evidence of a monopolistic structure developing (Palmer-Jones and Mandal, 1985; 1987; Palmer-Jones, 2001; Fujitsa and Hossain, 1995). Instead, groundwater based irrigation grew rapidly, agricultural growth was somewhat faster than population growth, real wages of agricultural labourers rose (Palmer-Jones, 1993; Palmer-Jones and Parikh, 1998; Rashid, 2002), money-metric poverty fell, and other indicators of well-being4 improved. Most importantly the agrarian structure has not (yet) polarized; instead it has been characterised by an absence of polarisation (Palmer-Jones and Mandal, 1985; 1987; Palmer-Jones, 2001; Fujitsa and Hossain, 1995) and high levels of mobility (van Schendle, 1981). This is not to argue that this process could not have been improved, or that the activities of NGOs did not play some part in productivity growth or its impacts on well-being; rather, we want to argue that it was not the agrarian structure or the broader economic system within which it is embedded that slowed down progress in well-being or otherwise had adverse effects. Of course, since all this is in the realm of the counter-factual we cannot be very confident of our analysis. Rather, speculating to some extent, we argue that there were many points at which poor policies obstructed this growth, and these were the main causes of the two major slowdowns in agricultural growth in rather than obstacles posed by the agrarian structure, such as underconsumption due to the unequal distribution of income arising from this growth (Adnan, 1999). However, it seems that this type of analysis, does not have much purchase in the development arena outside the major neo-liberal institutions, or, perhaps, even within them. Rather, most western and western educated development academics active in the country and their Bangladeshi partners and

We use the term water while it is in fact the service of delivering water to the plot that is being bought. Water, in this context, is not privately owned. 4 Infant mortality and child malnutrition are the indicators we use to support this claim. Education has apparently also improved, although maybe by not as much as proclaimed by official figures (education Watch); maternal mortality has also declined but there are no reliable nationally representative figures.

DRAFT please treat with respect collaborators have developed an analysis of poverty and socio-economic structures in Bangladesh that is near hegemonic among development professionals in the non-Washington consensus camp crudely among the like-minded group and their associates, brokers and translators in Bangladesh. This diagnosis of poverty in Bangladesh, like Woods, is broadly derived from Marxian analyses of the Agrarian Question. The analyses of the agrarian question from the mid-19th century through to the present has had an explicitly political agenda enabling the radical vanguard leading the small and insufficiently powerful urban working class to find allies with whom to conduct a socialist/communist revolution (Hossain and Tribe, 1989(?); see Akhram Lodhi and Kay, 2009, 2010, for the continuing purchase of this approach). This discourse has in recent years been somewhat eclipsed by those which identify the depoliticising of development (Ferguson 1994, Escobar) in which the essentially political issues of development are transformed into technical issues of responsive to expertise and authority. These arguments have been extended to the domestication of development NGOs which were initiated with ideologies of social mobilisation and political development but have been transformed into service providers by a combination of pressures from dominant development discourses and institutions, and local pressures from the Bangladesh state and society (Rahman, 2006). In contrast to this argument we find a third source of conflict, namely the dilemmas posed by the gaps between the model of (rural) society embodied in their ideological constructs of the nature of rural society and the consciousness of rural people. While critics argue that activist NGOs have turned from mobilisation to service provision under pressure from donors to provide microfinance, and to contract for government services, it is clear that local people have other priorities including the provision of infrastructure (roads and markets), the maintenance of law and order, and, from among the services that NGOs can provide, microfinance and related services. Thus, the conflict NGO workers and their managers encountered in their everyday interactions with their putative clients between the moral feelings structured by their commitments to the poor based on this hegemonic discourse, leads not to a numbing of their creative capacities limiting their ability to engage perhaps more productively in development arenas (Bierschenk, 1988). We return to these problems of moral selving below.

Irrigation and Agricultural Growth in Bangladesh

Agricultural development in Bangladesh has in recent decades been largely drive by the expansion of groundwater based irrigation (Palmer-Jones, 1991, 1999). While traditional modes of such irrigation were in quite widespread use their rapid expansion was initiated by projects funded by the World Bank and other aid projects during the Pakistan period, and was an important component Comilla project developed under the leadership of A.H. Khan in the late 1950s. In Comilla they became the focus of rural agricultural cooperatives which became known as the KSS in their later extension under the World Bank funded IRDP. This type of irrigation expanded greatly with the introduction of smaller scale suction based pumps and engines using lower cost shallow tubewells in the mid-late 1970s. Starting from very small beginnings several aid-based projects rapidly spread the technology into various parts of the country by-passing the cooperative structures and selling directly to individuals. At the same time a growing critique of KSS emerged, starting indeed with A.H.Khan himself, identifying the extent to which these had become monopolised by local elites (see Hartmann and Boyce, 1979, 1989) , reflecting 5

DRAFT please treat with respect parallel critiques of the green revolution in India and elsewhere (Hossain and Jones, 1983 ), and leading to attempts by the state (and it bureaucracies) to control the social and spatial location of WEMs through technology, siting and loan controls. There were several crises with the technology, some of which became the focus of national inquiries and which fed the critique of the capitalist nature of this type of development. The most formative was a lowering of the water table in late 1982 and early 1983 leading it to fall below the suction limit of STWs, in some parts of the NW where there had been very rapid expansion of STWs under various aid projects. Some STW owners responded by the deep setting their STWs, and this has been adopted as a solution to this problem more widely but without the approval of engineers, agriculturalists, and other critics. The government established a committee of inquiry which found fault in the quality of equipment and sought to regulate its imports to high quality, but more expensive brands and countries of origin (Pitman and Haque, 1984). The landless water sellers was a perhaps more imaginative response to these developments albeit based in a similar analysis (Wood, 1984), but as indicated in Wood and Palmer-Jones, 1989, this project was not without its limitations, and, as noted above, never developed beyond at most around 1000 individual groups, while the total number of STWs and similar equipment grew in the private sector to many hundreds of thousands and probably recently to more than a million. Agriculture grew rapidly as depicted by the growth of grains (Figure 1) which still dominate agricultural production in Bangladesh. Boro rice production grew rapidly (albeit from a low level, which is why initial growth rates of growth of wheat were so high in the late 1970s), as also did aman from a much larger base.

40000

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source: Bangladesh Monthly Statistical Abstract, various volumes

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Figure 1|: Sum of Grains Production by major crop in Bangladesh, 1960-2010

DRAFT please treat with respect Interesting features of this phenomenon can be seen in the trajectory of growth of cereals production in Bangladesh since the early 1960s (see Figure 2 and Figure 35). The major natural and man-made disasters affecting production are clear the fall in production associated with the war of independence Error! Reference source not found.the effects of the floods of 1987 & 1988; the 1998, 2004 and 2007 floods (for further details see Dorosh et al., ????). But other trends are also clearly observable in this record, in particular the stagnation of cereals production in the mid 1980s6, in the early 1990s and again between 2001 & 2006, The latter slowdowns coincide with BNP governments (Figure 2) reflecting both policy and the neglect (or rather mismanagement) of agriculture by the BNP governments (CPD, ????).

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Figure 2: Running total of 4 Grains Crops and political Regime, 1960 2010.

[alternate version of this graph needs tidying up but is very dramatic]

These figures depict the running total of the four main cereals in the sequence in which they are harvested (wheat, boro, aus, aman). 6 The slowdown in the mid 1980s is less immediately visible but was identified and widely debated as discussed below.

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Grains Production, Bangladesh 1960-2010

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4-season moving average growth rate)

Sheik Mujibur Zia Rahman Ershad Pakistan

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Figure 3: Total grains production in Bangladesh, 1960 2010.

DRAFT please treat with respect In the mid 1980s the issue is more contentious, but here too policy induced unfavourable patterns of agricultural prices can be apportioned some role (Palmer-Jones, 1999). One particularly interesting feature is the low price of rice in 1985 and 1986; this came about partly because of the over-import of grains following the 1984 floods; this was also a feature of the slowdowns in the early 1990s and early 2000. The latter in particular is related to mismanagement of disaster response in the form of excessive food imports following the 1998 floods, which raised stocks and depressed prices (Figure 4). This account is of course quite different to the self-congratulatory account orchestrated by IFPRI which emphasised the successful avoidance of famine following the floods by the new liberalised food policy. Since mid-1994 the rice market in Bangladesh was liberalised (Zhenmin, 1992); the public food ration schemes were largely dismantled and substituted by open market sales. After this liberalisation the private sector played a significantly greater role in food management, especially in imports, compared to the 1980s. This experience has been generally favourably reviewed especially in relation to the potential famine situation following the heavy floods in 1998 and consequent reduction in the aman rice crop (Dorosh et al. 2004). Rice price rises were somewhat mitigated (compared to 1974, for example), and it appears that the poor coped with the assistance of government and NGO interventions (Dorosh et al., 2004 [????], Chapter 9). The evidence of Torlesse et al.2003, also suggests that child nutritional status was not much affected by these floods7. However, these policies had lasting effects in driving down the price of rice. Over-import of rice in both the public and (highly subsidised) private sector lead to exceptionally high public food stocks which had a depressing effect on farm gate prices, contributing to the slowdown in growth of production (Figure 4).

However, Figure 3 of Torlesse et al. reports a rise in child under-nutrition in 1998, but this does not appear in their Figure 4. June 1998 might be early for the effect of the floods to have an effect on child nutrition, although there had been a shortfall in the aman crop of 1997 that might have contributed to such an effect. See PalmerJones, 2005?, for further analysis of these data.

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index of monthly stocks, 1982-3 = 100

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PFS stocks

Figure 4: Official Grains Stocks and Rice Price, Bangladesh, 1980 2005.

These policy induced slowdowns are more clearly seen in the trend in boro rice production (Figure 5). These slowdowns relate to unfavourable constellations of rice output prices and political interference in the supply of inputs for agriculture, especially fertilisers and diesel for irrigation; another feature that affects production growth especially in the mid 1980s is the hiatus between the ending of the big STW projects of the early 1980s providing subsidised machines, and the liberalisation of imports of diesel engines for irrigated agriculture which have been obstructed by standardisation rules restricting imports to high cost machines from Japan, South Korea and India. After liberalisation in 1986 and 1987, sanctioned by the UNDP ASR in which we (MASM and RPJ) participated, cheap Chinese machines flooded into the market allowing boro production to renew its upward growth.

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Real Rice Prices and Food Grain Stocks, 1980 = 2004

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8 slowdown 1 7

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Figure 5: Annual Boro Production, Bangladesh, 1960-2010.

[paragraph and table/graphs showing trajectories of real wages of agricultural labourers, poverty, infant and child mortalities, and child nutritional status graphs to be updated to BDHS, 2007]

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Trends in Underweight Children, 1985-2000

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Child mortalities by BDHS 1992/3 - 2004

Child Mortality Rates by Survey and Period
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These phenomena, we argue, contradict the agrarian pessimism and much of the underlying analysis of discourses framed by the agrarian question (see also McLaughlin, 1998). Apart from drawing attention the continuing growth of agricultural production, mainly irrigated HYV boro and HYV aman rice, there is little to add, given to constraints of time and space in this paper, on this subject to the contrasting chapters by Adnan, 1999, and Palmer-Jones, 1999, in Rogaly et al., 1999).

Local Governance of irrigation service markets

The second case comes from understanding the performance of the irrigation services market which underlay the growth of agriculture and attendant developments charted above8. While small scale ground and surface water irrigation have been used in Bangladesh for many years, the innovation of suction based surface mounted diesel or electric powered tubewell irrigation began to spread rapidly in response to the Green Revolution from the late 1960s (see Palmer-Jones, 1993); although state supported tubewell irrigation began in the 1950s, was also promulgated in the Comilla cooperatives (Khan, 1971 ; Bertocci, 1976), and was promoted from the late 1960 by a series of aid supported

The debate about water markets has mainly focussed on India (Shah, 1993; 2009; Palmer-Jones, 1994; 2001). It is extensive and contested. Geof has been a participant in this debate through his recent work in Purnea (Wood, 1995; 1999a; 1999b). Others who have engaged with the Bihar water markets debate include Shah and Ballabh, 1997; Wilson, 2002; Kishore, 2004). It may be noted the Geofs view of irrigation service markets in Purnea that elite families own pumpsets, and even though many cultivators have tubewells, they have to enter into multilayered transactions in order to secure access timely water (1999:775) and that generally their access to pumpsets (often corruptly) enables them to increase inequality and maintain their control of the rural economy contrasts strongly with that of Kishore who argues that this .. does not seem to be true everywhere (3486). Kishore argues that in other areas of north Bihar famers pump for profit not power (3486).

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DRAFT please treat with respect projects, these initiatives used a larger scale technology and, although projects supporting them persisted through to the 1990s, they never attained commercial viability. Palmer-Jones, 1993, has characterised these technologies as inappropriate, and attributed their persistence and wide spread to a congruence of engineering ideals and social scientists' analyses of rural social structures, the impact of the Green Revolution, the potential for irrigation management by user groups, and for reforming irrigation bureaucracies by participatory methods. Shallow Tubewells (STW) are smaller scale (< 1 cusec) suction based technologies that are less technically efficient but arguably more socially appropriate to the agrarian structure of most of south Asia, although, as noted, many development professionals did not see them in this way. This technology was being promoted in Bangladesh in the late 1970s by aid organisations especially the World Bank. Several authors have given accounts of the ways the technology arrived in and impacted on local society (van Schendel, 1981: 222-225; Hartmann and Boyce, 1983; Palmer-Jones and Mandal, 1987; Lewis, 1991; Fujita and Hossain, 1995; Adnan, 1997:296-299; and many others). In many cases the account is framed by the agrarian structure perspective which treats this irrigation technology as an agricultural factor of production like land; this view is epitomised by the application of the epithet waterlords (Hartmann and Boyce, 1983; Osmani and Quassem, 1990) to the owners to STW, mirroring the characterisation of landlords within this discourse, an attribution that was all the more plausible because of the practice of paying for these services by a share of the crop9. Given the incommensurability between even STWs and the disarticulated agrarian structure STW must either operate below capacity if it serves only the contiguous land of the owner, which raises costs, or it must either be run cooperatively by cultivators of contiguous plots within the command of the STW, or sell irrigation services (a more extended account is provided in Palmer-Jones, 2001). While our research focussed on the economic question of market performance it was framed by an anthropological or institutional economics that saw these markets as embedded in social structures. Broadly we found that there was much dynamism in this market with much competitive activity as potential and actual suppliers competed for clients, and actively managed the crop husbandry of their clients to enable them to pay irrigation service charges. At the same time clients sought out suppliers who would better supply their needs. While there was not much price competition there was much about the quantity and quality of the irrigation service. Some WEM could or would supply more or less water in more or less timely way. WEM could break down, and if prolonged this would damage both their own returns (the predominant mode of payment was by crop share) and hose of their clients providing string incentives to supply water. There was little evidence of exploitive practices such as withholding water to extract additional payments or services. A whole infrastructure grew up of suppliers of equipment and agricultural and irrigation inputs, mechanics, as well as output marketing and processors of the ever increasing rice crops (Mandal, Parker, ...????); demand for agricultural labour and labour in these
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Thus, within the agrarian Marxist view it is maintained that share-cropping constitutes a mode of exploitation, which serves to extract all the surplus from the cultivator. As is well known share-cropping, like other agrarian institutions such as crop-mortgaging, bonded labour and interlinking or factor and product markets has been the subject of much and continuing debate (Bardhan, ed., Sharma and Dreze, 1999). Debate about irrigation service markets also focussed on the issue of monopoly (Shah, 1987; 1989;1993; Palmer-Jones, 1994), and it was this that framed our research in Tangail.

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DRAFT please treat with respect upstream and downstream industries, and in supplying services and goods to meet the demand generated by increased incomes keeping real wages of rural labour and in the construction industries generally rising.. It is not appropriate here to continue this debate since we consider there to be little interest in using this aspect to explore the supposed malign influence of the rural power structure since any such influence clearly had little impact on the ability of the agrarian economy to grow and enable considerable reductions in ill-being. Rather we want to use our experience try to understand the interpretations that many authors put on the nature of rural power structure and in particular whether members of the power structure were able to monopolise the rents from natural resources. The main form of competition in this market concerned the location of tubewells and the ability to maintain the right to supply water to a sufficient number of plots within its command to provide sufficient returns to the investment10. Was this process monopolised by the power structure and was it able to restrict entrance in such a way as to exploit cultivators and to maintain control of rural society? Elsewhere we have shown that it is not the case either that you have to be a landowner, or to be a well-off cultivator to participate in owning a STW (see also Glaser, M., 1989; Fujitsa and Hossain, 1996) As others have also noted, the agrarian structure ensures that in most cases suppliers of irrigation services in one location where they own (or participate in ownership of) a tubewell, are also buyers in another where they do not own one. They often buy from those to whom they sell, or to neighbours or relatives, and this as well as competitive pressures from potential WEM owners interested to enter their space; this too serves to eliminate incentives to exploit their clients. Many of these features of irrigation service markets were well known to Wood, although we believe our interpretations of their implications differ somewhat. We have argued (building in part on our experiences with the water sellers) that it is not easy to provide quantitative evidence of economic monopoly since many costs involve in supplying irrigation services cannot readily be accounted (managers time and effort, suppliers credit, risks of loss of revenue due to breakdowns or natural disasters destroying irrigated crops, or adverse input or output price movements resulting in economic losses11. However, apart from a few cases there is much evidence that WEM owners (including the landless irrigators whom we studied in the water sellers) do not become wealthy

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this has some similarity with Woods argument about elite capture of pumpsets in Purnea See Palmer-Jones, 1994, for a critique of all the arguments proposed by Shah for monopoly. This does not mean there is not some element in some cases, and a lot in a few, of monopoly rents, or of malpractices such as withholding of water. Our argument is that this just cannot be the general case as it is inconsistent both with the aggregate data on the spread of the technology and consequent growth, the actual dynamism of the WEM sector, or the testimony of the vast majority of cultivators and suppliers and brokers of related services (WEM suppliers, WEM mechanics, diesel and fertiliser suppliers, and so on). Note, that it is possible to interpret much of Lewis, 1991, in way that is quite congruent with our argument.

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DRAFT please treat with respect through this market due to their monopoly opposition or their location in the power structure12. The question is what this tells us about the rural power structure, and its analysts? While there were some intellectual precedents including colonial scholar-administrators and social scientists in the newly independent Pakistan at the University of Dacca (Bertocci, 1976) it was the cooperation between Michigan State University (MSU)13 and the Pakistan Academy for Rural Development at Comilla in eastern part of East Pakistan, in the influential experiment with rural cooperatives beginning in the late 1950s (Raper, 1973) that initiated recent study of rural society in Bangladesh (Adnan, 1990; Bertocci, 2002:25). While earlier studies such as Mukherjees study of six villages in north Bengal (Mukherjee, 1971)14 had focussed on economic affairs Bertoccis was the first to set out the contours of what soon became understood as the rural power structure of rural Muslim society, or would now be known as the system of rural governance, in terms of local social institutions including poribar (household), bari (hamlet or cluster of houses), para (neighbourhood), gram (village), gushti (close agnatic lineage), samaj (extended lineage or patronage group; other words for similar structures are reyai, millat)15 and salish (informal institutions of conflict resolution, also salisi)(Bertocci, 1970). Drawing on studies of peasant societies (Redfield, and Lewis. 1951), political conflict was analysed as occurring between patrilineages or patronage groups within which there were hierarchies of wealth and power mitigated by ties of kinship and co-residence, and characterised by patron-client relations. As Bertocci notes, the painful birth of Bangladesh was associated with an influx of development workers, activists, and academics influenced and radicalised by the civil rights and anti-Vietnam war movements in the USA, and student disruptions of the late 1960s in Europe. A massive inflow of relief

12

Underlying these uncertainties is a debate about quantitative vs qualitative forms of evidence. In his Purnea study, Wood provides no quantitative evidence in support of most of his arguments, instead relying on narratives which, while convincing in that similar stories can be produced in similar situations, are open to disputation on the grounds that they may be at least partly ventriloquized by the investigatory process where researcher and or their interpreters, or interlocutors have strong priors as to the nature of the case, inducing a corresponding response in their inquiries. This raises broader questions about research ethics in qualitative investigations, as to not only what ethical conduct is supposed to be but whether ethical conduct was actually performed. In this I do not doubt the sincerity of qualitative researchers (I am not, unlike Orwell [The left-wing movement having to build

itself up out of nothing...has to create a following by telling lies. For a left-wing party in power, its most serious antagonist is always its own past propaganda." Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (eds), The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, London, 1983, Volume 4, pp. 578-9], calling them liars), but that it is notable, but seldom if ever noted, that
while it is expected to produce evidence of intention to be ethical (not just with regard to informed consent, but also in terms of other aspects of professional conduct, including avoidance of leading questions) it is seldom required to produce evidence that this has in fact been what has been done.
13 14

Prominent works from this provenance are by Ellickson, Macarthay, and Bertocci. Five of which were restudied by van Schendel (1981). 15 See also Nicholas, ., for earlier influential work on Bengali culture and society based largely on Hindu groups in West Bengal.

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DRAFT please treat with respect and rehabilitiation NGOs, and of aid, came to the support the new nation, widely seen as suffering a long history of exploitation by the colonial power and by Pakistan, as well as the brutality of the war of independence which followed immediately after a devastating cyclone in 1970. These actors and institutions brought new perspectives generally influenced by the resurgent Marxism within the western academy. These students of rural society were more likely to use class as their analytical frame than that of little communities comprised of competing patron-client factions more or less implicit in the literature of the preceding regime. Castigating Bertoccis all to casual (Bertocci, 2002:24) depiction of inequality in terms of cyclical kulakism, Wood argued that land is consistently being accumulated and that this facilitated diversification into off-holding sources of income, predicting the emergence of a stable rich peasant class (1976:142). Arguing that the dimension of class frequently crosscuts that of kin (242), which would inhibit the development of class-consciousness, he goes on to argue that the poor should organise outside the village to enable what is implied to be the desirable objective to counteract this differentiation, namely the abolition of private property in land (250). In a notable passage he taunts observers frequently bemused by the existence of factional competition between richer peasants of the same class into thinking that these same rich peasants are so divided among themselves to prevent economic behaviour which is objectively in their class interest (245). Rather than faction building behaviour this class are increasingly following mark[et] forms of behaviour in their transactions (245) resulting in class differentiation encouraged by the introduction of new agricultural technologies [maintaining] the poor in an increasingly weak economic and political condition (249). 16 This type of argument closely allied to the Leninist, Stalinist, Maoist analyses of the development of capitalism in agriculture, often analysed under the heading of the Agrarian Question, has extensive resonances within development studies in the 1970s through to the present (see for example the extent of literature between Griffin, 1970, and Breman, 2010; Akram Lodhi and Kay, 2010). It is hard to support this type of argument without longitudinal (or dynamic) studies as the agrarian Marxists of the 1920 realised (Kritsman, 1925-1928, discussed in Cox, 1984) realised was the only way to resolve their argument with the organisation and production school of populists lead by A. V. Chayanov (see

16

The formal administrative and political structures of Bangladesh coexist with local social institutions of Samaj and Gushti. Gushti are groups of agnatically related kin living in several groups of houses (bari) in one or more para, usually in one Gram, but sometimes in different Gram, or Mauza. One descent group can have members in different Gushti, which can be thought as corresponding to factions, between which there is often considerable rivalry. A Samaj is a local body of decision making among local Gushti undertaken in intermittent meetings Salish to hear cases and make judgements. Gushti are represented by their matbors (leaders or elders). Membership of Gushti can be fluid, and it is not possible to enumerate the whole population by their Gushti. However, Gushti and Samaj are important emic institutions through which local social and political processes function. It is notable that the canonic international works on Bangladesh society and development over the last three decades (van Schendel 1981, Wood 1994, White 1992, Lewis 1991, Jansen 1986, Hartmann and Boyce 1979;Hartmann and Boyce 1983, Rahman 1986, and so on) pay very little attention to these indigenous institutions, and give them even less analytical weight, dominated as they have been by the neo-marxist framework of class. Jansens influential Rural Bangladesh: Competition for Scarce Resources, 1986, is atypical in that the analysis by class is admitted to be naturally not used by the villagers themselves (72), but are presented as , to borrow from an eminent source, ; the executive committee of the ruling class. Clarence Maloney 1986, is a notable exception. The lacuna is all the more evident in more popular and polemical literature such as that associated with NGOs (e.g. BRACs The Net.

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DRAFT please treat with respect Solomon, 1975; and Bernstein, 2009, for a recent review). It is hard to address these issues in synchronic studies such as that undertaken by Wood and his BARD associates in 1974 leading to the 1976 publication. Willem van Schendle in the most exhaustive study of peasant mobility undertaken in the 1970s addressed this issue using more geographically dispersed set of studies focussing explicitly on the longitudinal issue in several diverse areas of Bangladesh, and creatively using the village maps to trace out trajectories of inequality in land holding as a basis for his exploration of the polarisation and cyclical models of peasant inequalities. While the designs of his studies were imperfect due to lack of detailed earlier data he came to the conclusion that the Bangladesh peasantry . is a population characterised by both enduring inequalities and remarkable mobility between positions of abject poverty and affluence. Increasingly this mobility shows a net downward trend, leading to pauperisation (not proletarianisation) and uprooting of the poorest, and subsequently to quiet starvation and large-scale famine (x). Remarkably, notwithstanding the evidence of agricultural growth, poverty reduction and human development that we have demonstrated above, in his recent history van Schendel continues to see rural Bangladesh as characterised by pauperisation [van Schendel, 2009]. Van Schedel depicts a rather different trajectory of Bangladeshi rural society to the differentiation and proletarianisation model of agrarian change (see Harriss and Harriss,1989), and is closer to that of Shanin (1974?), and Bertocci for all its casualness, than of Wood. With the benefit of hindsight one can ask which model of rural society provides the more useful, in the senses of accurate, rather than supposedly bringing about beneficent outcomes, understanding? We argue that in the space and over the time that we observed the irrigation services market in Tangail, rural society was better described in terms other than class analysis. The dispute that arose between water-sellers as to the location and command area of a STW which would compete with one located in the bore of a disused DTW, which had been controlled by a member of the agrarian elite who was now aged and unable to manage the equipment to provide reliable and efficient supplies of water (Some details from this story was in the so called vignette that I have cut out). This dispute was eventually decided not by oligopolistic collusion among competing members of the agrarian elite, but by a relatively transparent and widely supported salish in which the outcome was decided by generalisable and widely appreciated norms which enabled the market to flourish (Palmer-Jones, 2001; see also Fujita and Hossain, 1995). This line of argument then raises questions about what has happened more generally in rural Bangladesh, and whether this can be understood in terms of the analysis of the agrarian question, and it so this that we now turn.

NGOs and Development in Bangladesh

As the third epigraph to this paper suggests, participation and empowerment (P&E) NGOs have claimed on their behalf a major role in what beneficent developments there have been in Bangladesh in recent decades. However, not only is it arguable that the benefits they can claim occurred within a relatively favourable macro and micro-economic environment within which both agriculture and other sectors have been growing quite rapidly, but also they have been highly subsidised and are not obviously sustainable (Devine, 2002).

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DRAFT please treat with respect In this section we explore experiences of some development and empowerment NGOs in the late 1990s/early 2000s. The following quote from a booklet produced by a small local organisation from around 2000, illustrates the ideological framing of these interventions: [This NGO has as its] overall goal emancipating the rural poor and destitutes from the clutches of poverty, malnutrition and poor health conditions... the specific objectives of [the NGO] are to organise rural masses into groups for motivation, awareness building and saving generation The organisation quoted above was one of twelve local NGOs engaged in the implementation of two foreign donor initiated projects aimed at improving water supply and sanitation practices in the late 1990s. In the period 1998-2000 Arvidson undertook a study, using ethnographic methods17, of these two projects with particular focus on the use of P&E strategies. The underlying rationale of the two projects was two-fold: the project would be based on local interests and participation, and it should appeal to needs related to not only clean water, sanitation and related health issues, but also to desires among the poor to change power structures; they both had a clear purpose of empowerment through conscientization18. In the two projects the goals were to achieve something beyond improved access to safe water and change of hygiene behaviour, but also to introduce new platforms for participation in joint decisionmaking for the ones often excluded, and for equipping the poor with ideas and options as to how to solve long standing problems related to water, sanitation, and health. On numerous points the implementation of the P&E formula of the two projects departed from the ideal as described in project outlines. One NGO worker summarised the challenges of his work by saying they [villagers] have unity but not for this kind of work (Arvidson 2003). The implementers faced challenges related to ideas of making local knowledge count, and a lack of response to opportunities, as seen and created by the projects, for villagers to choose alternative ways of defining roles and leadership within the community. For example one of the projects advocated shared ownership in tubewells for domestic water supply. The cost-sharing rule was motivated by a desire to create a sense of ownership, sustainability, empowerment of the poor through providing them with new roles (as owners of assets) through a contribution of a small amount of money towards a tubewell. There was a clear reluctance among all villagers to engage in this shared ownership idea; participating villagers, while in no way members of the rural elite, would not grant the poorest a role as part owner since everyone knew they only contributed symbolic and small amounts of money, and villagers foresaw potential conflicts with shared ownership. The outcome was that the ideas of P&E as envisioned in project documents were quietly abandoned while project activities went ahead with individual ownership; field workers were faced with having to manage the contradictions between the messages of project ideology and texts, the imperatives of their daily practices which were equally driven by the project logic of reaching targets, and the preferences as expressed by participating villagers.

17

Involving periods of several months living with the NGO workers in villages, revisiting them on several occasions over the two year period, and again in the early 2000s. 18 This is the familiar logic that the truth will set you free in the form of a logical sequence from enlightenment to empowerment and emancipation (Fay, .). [explain]

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DRAFT please treat with respect The NGO workers were confused as to who they should serve and how; administrators where often left in the dark, perhaps turning a blind eye19, and in meetings and in formal project evaluations explicitly constraining space for fieldworkers to articulate counter-narratives as to the contradictions of the P&E aspects of the project. Villagers mostly negotiated project implementation to fit with their ideas about what and how things should be done, even though diametrically counter to the underlying ideas of the project, for example to give power to the poorest which would have the potential to change power structures and provide opportunities for the poor to take on new roles. None of this is news to anyone who has followed a rising interest in ethnographic studies of local management, or cultivation, of development intervention (see Mosse, 2004). And, although being faced with contradictions and often resorting to finding local, customised solutions is a well known part of the job for local NGO workers in general, none of this appeared in documentations of the two projects. Analysing these NGO practices Arvidson (2008) argues that while we notice practices among NGOs that are ambiguous in relation to their stated ideologies, it is not fruitful to frame our understanding of these shortcomings along the lines of NGOs being more or less genuine in their espousals of P&E. Critiques of NGOs often evolve around identifying what Bryant (2002) calls false prophets and mutant NGOs and tends towards a polarised categorisation between truly radical endeavours and profit seeking NGOs with ulterior motives. As Bryant points out the task of distinguishing between mutant and genuine NGOs is not straightforward since the world of NGOs is characterised by shifting identities and ambiguous practices (2002: 630 and 635). However, it can be argued that practices encountered at the interfaces with and within development NGOS which are morally ambiguous such as the display of authoritarian behaviour, manipulations of P&E approaches are signs of inherent dilemmas and deep seated conflicts between ideologically based rhetoric that does not correspond well with complex realities. Identifying challenges of the participation-agenda Our interpretations of the experiences of fieldworkers illustrate how the P&E agenda comes with ambiguities that gives rise to conflicts between villagers, field workers, project administrators, and funders. For example, with regard to local participation, the idea of making local perceptions and views count is highly problematic (Mosse 2001; Cleaver 2001; Brett 1996; Henkel & Stirrat 2001); public participation allows certain types of local discourse, and the local preferences that emerge are often (strategically created) products of the particular interaction set up by development project. As our example of the shared ownership in tubewells for the poor showed, local choice and preferences were glossed over in the presentation of the positive project achievements. This is further illustrated by the following. The local implementing NGO staff explained: Ten families share the TW. The rich man can pay a lot, 2-3000 taka, and the poor man pays only 2-300 taka, some 50-100 taka, that is no problem. The main thing is that they all give some money [] because of the ownership. If only one person buys a TW he can sometimes say to the neighbours that they cannot

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The truth is that we do not know how managers perceive these issues, or manage any cognitive dissonance they may experience between what they can perceive of the local contradictions and their need to maintain organisation rhetoric Of course fieldworkers are probably deliberately left with some autonomy and freedom from surveillance, which necessarily allows them some discretion (Lipskey).

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DRAFT please treat with respect come and use his TW. []If the ten families all give some amount of money nobody can tell that I am the owner because everybody is the owner of the tubewell. This is why we want everybody to pay. If there is a cost-sharing there is no problem. We dont sell the TW without seeing the 10 sharers. If I give the money, even if it is a small amount of money, I can still tell myself that I am the owner of that TW. But, in one village, out of 10 NGO facilitated tubewells only one had been installed based on the project cost-sharing principles, and this was the norm as far as ethnographic inquiry could ascertain. Villagers, rich and poor, said cost-sharing would only create problems. They said having one owner could create problems too, they admitted, with access to water. Taking that risk (being denied access to water) was considered better than taking the risks of engaging in cost-sharing; First of all it would always be a problem to collect money. People would agree to pay at first, but delay or never give the money, and that would create further conflicts. And if one person who is very poor only pays 50 taka you would still not be able to claim ownership. If the tubewell breaks down, if owned on a cost-sharing basis, there would be more disputes as to who should organise and pay for repairs and maintenance, and this would undermine moral economy. In the examples here, as in most forms of P&E projects, the approach has clear moral connotations, since the concepts hold out the promise of setting societies and individuals free, from poverty, ignorance, oppressive structures and restricting laws, and from false consciousness (see Pateman 1971). However, for projects to be able to work according to the ethos of facilitating choice rather than being a form of top-down governance (Stirrat and Henkel 2001) some preconditions for effective decision making by the poor will need to be in place from the very beginning20. Thus the empowerment goals of the project are in fact the means by which they are to come about, that is they must already be empowered. The rationalisations of the poor in contradiction with the fictions of the project with regard to cost sharing can be conceived as a Faustian bargain (Wood, 2001) but that may be to read phenomena as worse than they really are given the realities of ongoing multi-stranded interactions among different people with different resources and capabilities, in the context of state and NGO failures to offer reliable alternatives to traditional forms of social security (Platteau, 1991). In this way the ideological baggage of the neo-marxist analysis of the local power structure gets in the way of understanding and presenting to the world what is actually happening, or at least provide a different version. In this there is a curious parallel with the failure to see that the growth of a capitalist market in irrigation services could actually work out quite well (and actually seems to have), compared to alternatives that people had any reason to imagine could be achieved by NGO interventions.

Coping with discrepancies

One can speculate as to how the gaps between local phenomena and the ideologically based presentations of NGOs and radical development adepts are managed socially, discursively, actually. At

20

As Glyn Williams points out.

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DRAFT please treat with respect the local level project staff are committed to being professional welfare workers characterised by ideals of altruism, and they and the project are committed to the practices of participation, and conscientization. They seek endorsements that their performances accord with these values in courtyard meetings and other gatherings where they obtain validation from the behaviour of clients: At courtyard meetings, we see are they interested to learn? Are they listening attentively? From this I can evaluate myself as a speaker. I also pay attention to how women are talking to me when I go to the village, if they are asking me things, show[ing] me respect and trust[ing] me. If we fail, then I think that during our discussions we have not been able to consult people about their thoughts. But they also seek to rationalise clients failure to undertake the supposedly agreed actions in this case advocated behaviours with regard to hygiene and sanitation behaviour such as use sanitary latrines, hand washing with soap, and so on, in the face of their, the field workers, failure to be convincing: If the project fails [in the sense that villagers do not comply]? One reason is laziness on behalf of villagers. It can also be due to insufficient staff support, and that funding is not sufficient. Another main reason could also be that I could not cooperate or come to meetings with them. That would be the first reason. I have to give more time and change this mistake. (local NGO director) But other contradictory discourses are present among fieldworkers as they rationalise the actions of their clients: this account blames clients for the failure of NGO fieldworkers to induce participation among clients, and to become empowered. A more authoritarian stance ensues in which the clients are required to perform appropriately: We have to inspire them [the villagers]. still it is compulsory for you to set up a hygienic latrine and you have to use it, we tell them. Sometimes the villagers sit in a tea stall and I see them and I call, Hey, do you have a latrine? By tomorrow you have to go and buy one otherwise you will not be allowed to live in this village, I say. This kind of strict order we make. (local NGO staff) An ideal of facilitation, partnership, discussion, negotiation, is transformed into a blaming and bullying of the clients, which of course has to be kept from surfacing in the chain of authority upwards from the field to the NGO managers and their international patrons. Thus none of the negotiations or adjustments made in relation to the projects P&E agenda were noted in project documentation, and this is a common characteristic of the way projects are formally reported since there is so much emphasis on success within the dominating ideology of P&E that there is no space to inquire into what is actually going on at local level and whether there is something important in villagers resistance to project imperatives. Livelihoods and Governance: NGOs as agents in development interventions While the research from which the above accounts were drawn was undertaken by studying projects, an approach without such a focus, based on people in their everyday lives, offers a different and arguably 22

DRAFT please treat with respect more helpful window on the workings of ideologies and practices of development interventions. A later study by Arvidson (2004-2006) of livelihoods, institutions and change, and the study called Reality Check Bangladesh (2007-2011)21 provide such an alternative view of the way NGOs operate in poor communities (Arvidson 2008). Consequently, at least part of the methodological challenges that appear in client sponsored evaluations of interventions may have been avoided since they do not seek to make a judgment on success or failure (see Mosse 2003 for further discussions on this) and are not linked to the institutional well-being of the organisations involved22. The crucial message that we want to draw from these studies is that in neither do NGOs appear to play any great role in peoples lives, other than providing them with opportunities to take micro-credit, and as one among several actors in an increasingly diversified landscape of providers of primary health and educational services. In the former study, conducted over an 18 month period in which a group of households in a village were visited regularly, it was particularly clear that there were clashes between the ways villagers interpreted drivers of change and in the narratives of change provided by local NGOs, which drew largely on the P&E discourses discussed here. The families interviewed for the livelihoods study spoke of positive changes in their village and for their families in contexts of economic growth23. The reason for economic growth and increase in individual well-being was broadly ascribed to three factors: improved communications, diversification of livelihood opportunities, and the availability of credit from NGOs. The latter, longitudinal, study, has been taking place over three years (to date) exploring how poor families manage their lives in particular in relation to primary health and education needs. It has become very clear that most people with access to NGOs are able to make use of their entrepreneurial skills by managing multiple loans from different sources (see Fernando, 1996) taken for investment, to manage daily expenses, and to deal with shocks. Both studies reveal NGOs to be part of the institutional environment, and that they provide certain services, but remain part of the institutional scene without attempting to upset or re-arrange it, notwithstanding their rhetoric of radical criticism. Villagers perceive NGOs as distant and limited partners in comparison to the powerful and prestigious roles that NGOs claim for themselves. NGOs emphasised their own social, group based, participatory activities as crucial in creating changes for the poor and refer to this as the main force for beneficent change in society, but this is not how villagers see them. Examples from the fieldwork show how traditional restrictions due to social status and gender strongly influence some family members, while

21

This is a longitudinal, qualitative study commissioned by Sida, focusing on needs related to primary health care and primary education of people living in poverty, and their perceptions of the services available in these two areas. 22 Although they are of course linked to those of the researchers involved; it is here that the issues of academic and consultant careers, and policy entrepreneurship relate to the themes being addressed here of being read as well as red. 23 The village lies somewhere between villages 1 and 2 from the Lewis and Hossain study, in being a now connected rural area, which was not connected some 15 years ago.

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DRAFT please treat with respect other members of the same family escape such restrictions. While on the surface new and old ways of doing things seem to be operating parallel, a closer look at household relations reveals that there are processes at work both maintaining and by-passing traditional restrictions and practices creating an unobserved dynamic that is truly transformatory but are contradictory and unpredictable (nonteleological). While reports from these studies, and others (see below), suggest changes in social structures and patterns of mobilisation, the narratives provided by NGOs do not seem to have moved beyond a standardised (class based) analysis of Bangladesh society. In sum, widespread NGO activities and empowerment located at individual level do not seem to have translated into a vivid and strong civil society in the ways one might envisage given their rhetoric, in which people have and exercise freedom of voice, choice and exit without considering possible adverse social consequences. Despite the NGO-presence and their claimed empowerment effect, our field studies fail to show that any of these attempts have had much positive effect on the ways local administrations interact with the rural poor. Villagers are disappointed and disillusioned about the state and give numerous examples of how the rules of political patronage dominate. However, the state continues to play an important role in the hopes and expectations of villagers: the state should be there to support them. Villagers are remarkably silent in regards to their expectations of NGOs as strong civil society advocates for their empowerment. In this we share much of the diagnosis of Wood in his total institution metaphor (Wood, 2000 Prisoners and Escapees) and Blairs, 2005, depiction and discussion of Security and developmental concerns in Rural Bangladesh . But in relation to both of these pieces we see a weak and pessimistic characterisation of the role of markets in transforming the limiting patron-client relations into greater opportunities and achievements24. Thus, for example, Blair fails to allocate a role to markets and private non-NGO service providers in increasing availability and choice of health care and education providers, who are plainly visible and widely accessed not only by the better off but even by the poor (Reality Check, 2009)25. NGOs and Local Politics The pressure put on government officials has increased with the rise of the NGO-sector. Along with a strong influence from international donors this has resulted in projects aiming to achieve good governance. But a tentative conclusion from these two studies suggest that the way NGOs and local government officials form their practices, rhetoric and interpretation of the institutional environment in which they are operating is influenced by their ambivalent relationship as both collaborators and antagonists. The effects of the good governance agenda, along with the presence of NGOs as role models, are not clear and it is doubtful that the NGO sector has contributed to a strengthened civil society in the sense that it has deepened democracy beyond a mere procedures of elections and voting. What seems to dominate the relationship is a sense of rivalry spurred by competition for resources and prestige. Rather than increasing options and improving availability of welfare-services for the poor, this

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We would level a very similar criticism at Jan Bremans account of the transformations of of the lives of dalit groups in rural Gujarat. 25 The diversity of service providers is enhanced by externally funded NGOs of course, but also by private non-NGO philanthropists, the state and market sources. By philanthropists we mean both state employees and market providers providing free or subsidised services to the poor.

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DRAFT please treat with respect rivalry appears to have negative effects as each seeks to evade criticism rather than innovate services. The mutually antagonistic stance between NGOs and the state26 both limits villagers institutional choices as it entails limited scope for change in either sector; there is little cross-sectional knowledge exchange, and very difficult to hold either side accountable towards the citizens they serve. Citizens operate within a sphere characterized by unrule of law, as discourses of governance and development point up, but what is lacking in these discourses is any vision for the role of (socially embedded, regulated) markets and their dynamics with other actors in civilising society, in favour of the role of experts and adepts in the development industry. These arguments concur strongly with other studies and raises questions regarding NGOs self-acclaimed role as ethical role-models and the effects their long term presence has had on developing civilising codes of conduct, holding the state and private sectors to account. Stiles (Stiles 2002) argues that the NGO sector has failed to link up with other civil society organisations; Duncan et als (Duncan and others 2002) impression is that civil society in Bangladesh is fragmented and unable to bring effective pressure for systemic reform. Other studies conclude that the state sector is characterised by inefficiency and corruption (Duncan; SHarif; Landell-Mills; Hulme, and Roy 2002), by lack of autonomy from wider society, and failure to provide security and fair access to welfare services to its poorer citizens (Wood 2000;Duncan and others 2002;Bode and Hows 2003;Moore 2001). Elected local government members rely on democratic procedures to legitimize their position, but in practice show little devotion to democratic principles (Lewis and Hossain 2005). We may achieve greater understanding of the practical meaning of P&E as an ideological approach to development by recognising the complex set of processes set in motion during, and the dilemmas inherent in, NGO work. This insight illustrates the problems of locating P&E activities and evaluations almost exclusively to the individual level, which is the everyday reality of NGOs, based on the idea that social changes start with target groups and individual empowerment. This supports the point made by Williams (2004:98, in Hickey and Mohan) that successful examples of the P&E approach reflect synergies between political institutions and social mobilization rather than individual participation alone (and itself echos earlier analyses of the way governments successfully incorporate marginalised groups into the circuits of policy making (Cox, Lowe and Winter, 1991; Dimitri et al., 2005).

Conclusions
What then of the two points we introduced earlier, that the radical policy research and action agenda is limited by its focus on revolutionary social transformation and by antagonism towards the state and market, and secondly the tension between bringing back political analysis and being explicitly political? Our first example shows that the NGO interventions, aimed at capturing control of the last resource for the poor, into the irrigation service market had no relevance to its subsequent development, which arguably has been the main driver of the poverty reduction. It is not just with the benefit of 25 years hindsight we can draw the conclusion that the way water markets subsequently developed was different from that predicted by Proshika and others. This was clear quite early on, which hence begs the question why other avenues, that would have challenged the dominating Marxian prediction of

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NGOs and their staff emphasise that they are unlike state employees, and vice versa.

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DRAFT please treat with respect immiserising growth, where not pursued. Our second example shows an alternative account of how the irrigation service market is socially embedded radically different from the neo-Marxist paradigm. Referring to other Bangladesh studies the analyses of Peter Bertocci (1971) may have had as much to offer to our understanding of rural social structures. Understanding the role of NGOs and the participation and empowerment agenda in Bangladesh is not straightforward and to pose it as either successful or failing projects may not be appropriate. As Hickey and Mohan (2005) note, the practice of participation in development moved virtually unchecked from the margins to the mainstream of development since the mid 1980s (p. 3). This is certainly the case in Bangladesh where the concepts of participation and empowerment have been essential ingredients in development projects in Bangladesh over a long period, and particularly so among the countrys large NGO community. Over the last decade there has however been increasing scepticism regarding the achievements of both participation and empowerment and NGOs, internationally as well as in Bangladesh. The concept of participation has faced criticism for its failure to live up to its promises to empowerment and ultimately to transform obstructive and unequal social structures that prevent growth based on equality in terms of improved well-being and opportunities (Cook and Kothari, 2001). Critique of the participation and empowerment agenda, pointing at the lack of radical achievements by way of social upheaval, is often met by proponents using terms such as true, authentic or genuine, or imply that the context (organisational or political environment) in which it is practiced has corrupted its true intent (McGee 2002; Michener 1998; Mikkelsen 1995; Rahnema and Bawtree 1997). By becoming mainstream the participatory approach has become a tool rather than an end in itself, a management strategy (Mikkelsen 1995), used for instrumental purposes to verify and legitimate predefined plans (McGee 2002), or a cosmetic label used with no other intentions than to give a human face to an essentially technocratic project (Chambers 1994). Steifel and Wolfe (199x), however, argue that the reference to genuineness is misleading, or in Fergusons terms depoliticising (Ferguson, 1994); for a radical social analyst the notion of genuine participation requires class struggle by individuals who have gained class consciousness, and hence facilitators of participation must become more explicitly political (Hickey, 2009). But, it may equally be wrong to assume that such an apparently genuinely politicised participatory project will transform individuals and communities from nonparticipatory into participatory societies. In reality, the participation and empowerment approach leads to much more open ended, unpredictable, outcomes, as we saw in the discussion of everyday perceptions of the roles of NGOS, radical and others, as having little to offer by way of socially transformatory resources. The ideological impetus behind the adoption of participation and empowerment approaches to rural development, faced with the slow, almost imperceptible change, and intransigence of social beings and institutions among poor communities in Bangladesh, morphs into a rather authoritarian view of poverty and change. When faced with problems presented by the implementation of participation and empowerment projects this ideological conviction leads to fingers being pointed at misunderstandings and misuse, at management and implementation levels: while this may be true, i.e. lack of understanding of what attitudes towards project implementation need to be in order for participation and empowerment to work out, the problems reveal inherent contradictions in this ideological 26

DRAFT please treat with respect approach, and makes proponents disregard realities, and local suggestions, that propose other ways of approaching change may be more suitable.

The contradictions at the grassroots, and the tyranny of the participation and empowerment approach as best practice, have been addressed in studies since the early 2000s (Cook and Kothari 2001), as also to some extent have the procedures and relations surrounding the interfaces between projects and development experts (Mosse, 2004, Mosse and Lewis oeuvre 2005 & 2006). However, the fact that the participation and empowerment approach has faced challenges in Bangladesh has not led to any greater understanding of social, economic, power structures in Bangladesh communities. The choices that poor people make, the interactions between what we may call patrons and clients, remain observed largely through the perspectives of a class-analysis (cf. the faustian bargain, Wood 2001). Similarly, the nature of the improvement in well-being in Bangladesh is seen as alleviation of poverty rather than a more substantial, sustainable and true eradication of poverty that would involve a transformation of society that goes beyond the hitherto achieved improvements of poverty levels (Woods, 2001). Hence, improvements in well-being are dismissed as inauthentic, and the behaviours and choices made by poor people are largely seen to confirm the diagnosis that the poor has yet to become a class for itself without questioning the very idea that such class analysis is appropriate to the changes experienced by poor people. What about bringing back politics into development: well, as Evita Peron sings in the show Dont weep for me I never left you; if the account given above has any meaning then it is that politics has always been there, and that politics in these cases has been overwhelmingly, putatively, radical. Hence, why is Hickey calling for the return of political analysis and politics? It seems that two obvious strands of politics in development policy are being ignored; firstly that of policy actors promoting and living off fashionable policy agendas, such as livelihoods, participatory development, governance, and so on, and secondly the evident role of strongly politically committed actors in the development arena, including Geof Wood, but also many others, some among the class of 68 and from other political neo-liberal perspectives. Our narratives surely show that both politics and politicised analysis have been present, and influential, with unintended consequences including mystification of rural society and economy, and quotidian alienation of NGOs from their supposed constituencies among the poor. Thus, returning to the question that Hickey asks about the formulation of an analytical base to understand politics in development, we suggest that the first aphorism would be to know thyself, in other words to have an analysis of the politics of ones own and peers interventions in development. This need not itself be depoliticised, but can be catholic in drawing the different politicised frames available, be reflexive, and perhaps less judgemental as to the politics of interventions that do not have the same explicitly political stance.

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References: The Water Sellers

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Wood, Geoffrey D., 1984, Provision of Irrigation Services by the Landless - An Approach to Agrarian Reform in Bangladesh, Agricultural Administration, 17:55-80. Zhenmin, Z. Analysis of Sustainability System Associated with the Ground water FMIS in the Lower Reaches of Yellow River. Dhaka: IIMI; 1992.

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