Forgetting the Irony of Participation and Empowerment in Participatory Development: How Failed Projects Turn into Exemplary Cases in an Urban Slum District in North Jakarta, Indonesia

Abstract

Local participation and empowerment have become crucial goals in anti-poverty projects, and these values also work as guiding principles in individual projects. In this article, I examine how these ideals and principles operate and directed by experts and intellectuals from outside of the poor community. In this context, the existence of the guarders themselves becomes a token of participatory development and local empowerment, although their positions and roles are still based on the distinction between residents who participate and those who do not. perform in various water management programs in a local community of Northern Jakarta. I explore what I call the irony of participation and empowerment, which includes the following two characteristics. First, both concepts of participation and mobilization assume the distinction between those who plan and make designs and those who only have to follow them. Secondly, the target group of empowerment is always delineated and defined as a group of people who lack something important, such as independent agency. In recent decades, community water management projects in Village P in North Jakarta have aimed to connect the poor to the urban water distribution network, but they have invariably failed. The village, however, has become a good example in terms of local participation and empowerment. By analyzing project cases such as the Waste Bank and village guarders, I highlight the change of meaning of the ideals of resident participation and empowerment. In this process, what I call a form of future anterior tense in local discourses conceals that immediate results of the project cannot solve the water problem, especially seasonal floods. On the other hand, the guarders in the local community participate in activities designed and