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Participation" has three uses and meanings: cosmetic labelling, to look good; co-opting practice, to secure local action and resources; and empowering process, to enable people to take command and do things themselves.Its new popularity is part of changes in development rhetoric, thinking and practice.These have been shifting from a standardised, top-down paradigm of things towards a diversified, bottom-up paradigm of people.This implies a transfer of power from "uppers"people, institutions and disciplines which have been dominant, to "lowers"people, institutions and disciplines which have been subordinate.The many labels and schools of participatory approaches in research and development tend to hide underlying changes in philosophy and practice.Rapid rural appraisal leading to participatory rural appraisal (PRA) is one example of a shift from data collection to data sharing and empowerment.With PRA, poor people have shown far greater capabilities to appraise, analyse, plan and act than professionals have expected.Empowerment of the poor requires reversals and changes of role.Some of the new approaches and methods, especially of PRA, make reversals less difficult and improbable than they used to be.PRA faces many dangers.For it to be used on any scale in an empowering mode implies widespread changes in bureaucratic procedures and cultures, including more participatory management. A. "Participation"The language of development rhetoric and writing changes fast.The reality of development practice lags behind the language.Sometimes the language lapses into history, as with "take-off into self-sustaining growth" which took off into self-negating decline.In other cases words persist and prevail, whatever happens to the field reality."Participation" is one such word which is experiencing a renaissance in the 1990s.So widespread is its use that some talk of a paradigm shift to participatory development.This chapter examines this view, arguing that reversing power relations is the key, and the weak link, in achieving participation.Three ways in which "participation" is used stand out.' Other reasons include: * normal professionalismthe concepts, values, methods and behaviour dominant in professionswhich seeks and values controlled conditions and universal truths (Chambers 1993 chapters 1 and 6)* normal bureaucracythe concepts, values, procedures and behaviour dominant in bureaucracies, with their tendencies to centralise, standardise and control * normal (successful) careers in which promotion separates power from field realities * normal teaching which reproduces normal professionalism, transferring knowledge from the teacher who knows, to the pupil who is ignorant.Normal professionalism, bureaucracy, careers and teaching combine in top-down standardisation and pressures for speedy action.Most importantly there is power.Participation as empowering process implies loss of central control and proliferation of local diversity.The powefil are threatened with loss of power.* changing to a more participatory and open-ended social science research, with more of the agenda, appraisal and analysis by local people, and the outcomes owned and shared by them.This implies also changes in relationships between funding bodies and researchers, and between supervisors and those conducting research for theses.* determination of priorities in agricultural, forestry, fisheries and other natural resource research much more by and through the analysis and experience of local people, weighted to give voice to women, the weak and the poor * changing approaches and methods in teaching and training away fkom the lecture mode to shared learning, peer instruction, problem solving, and social settings in which the shy and retiring feel able to contribute, and in which all teaching and training includes experiential learning concerning upper-lower behaviour and attitudesAll this means that the new challenges for the 2 1 st century face the rich and powefil more than the poor and weak, for they concern reversals, giving things up.For the rich to give up their wealth, without being forced by countervailing power, is difficult and improbable; but for uppers to give up dominance at the personal level, putting respect in place of superiority, becoming a convenor, and provider of occasions, a facilitator and catalyst, a consultant and supporter, is less difficult; for these roles bring with them many satisfactions and non-material rewards.Perhaps one of the biggest opportunities now is to enable more and more uppers to experience those satisfactions and then themselves to spread them, upwards, downwards, and laterally to their peers.For participation, in the fill empowering sense of reversals, is not for one place or one set of people, but is itself a paradigm -a pattern of ideas, values, methods and behaviourwhich can apply to almost all social activity and spread in all directions.