In this paper Mosse addresses the contradiction of participatory development which implies that the agency of the poor can be accomplished only through imported structures for participation, so that it simultaneously confers and denies agency to the poor. While participation have been incorporated into the discursive practice of major development organisations, such participatory theory may have little to do with field practices. This concerns, then, how development practices produce and re-affirm their legitimising theory, models and ideas. Participation is seen as one legitimising idea. To explore how it survives as a policy despite contradiction in practice the example of the Indo-British Rainfed Farming Project is considered, which had the aims of improving agricultural technology and enhancing capacity through participation.
The findings of the analysis are:| Participation will be determined by organisational goals and interests, and that as an ambiguous policy it allows both the formulation of a single coherent model, and the existence of multiple models;| The more interests that are tied up with affirming and protecting a project idea, the greater its stability;| In official development programmes, participation has more to do with projects as a system of representations than as operational systems;| Preoccupation with elevated principles of participation as self-determined change ignored important achievements of the project.| Development interventions have to reproduce and stabilise policy representations, but these also have to be transformed in practice.