Participation as tyranny! : struggle for social control in rural Uganda

Abstract

This thesis critically examines the role of peasant participation in development processes in Uganda, as embodied by the 'good' governance agenda. The historical nature of the struggle for social control and peasant resistance to control in Sub-Saharan Africa was explored along with literature concerning contemporary manifestations of this struggle as found in the participatory processes of the 'good' governance agenda. A qualitative case study using Marxist dialectical materialist methods was performed to determine the nature of the relationship between 'good' governance defined participatory processes and the struggle for social control in Uganda. The study found Ugandan peasants to have historically resisted elite control, and that elites have responded with limited democratic and economic concessions while struggling to expand social control. An analysis of Uganda's version of the Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers, and the role of local government units and civil society organizations, as part of the framework for participation provided by the 'good' governance agenda, found the trend of granting limited democratic concessions while obscuring the struggle to expand elite social control continues. The thesis concludes that participatory 'good' governance models are best understood as a sophisticated tool of class struggle, wherein bourgeois classes (domestic and international) struggle to socially control and subvert popular classes, and is therefore a system of tyranny.