Negotiating alternative economic strategies for regional development

Introduction Moves towards decentralisation in government have created new challenges for local authorities in the Philippines and Indonesia, and have exposed a need for new ways of approaching local economic and community development. For aid donors, these changes necessitate innovative ways of conceptualising relationships with newly empowered local government authorities. In the context of the recent decentralisation of government functions in the complex archipelagic nations of Indonesia and the Philippines, we have embarked on an innovative model of partnership between communities and local authorities, aimed at generating new pathways for regional development. This research program explores a key issue in economic development: how to re-present locality to enable local people-centred development in the face of globalisation? The approach builds on an application of the Community Partnering approach developed by one of the authors in a depressed regional economy in Australia (the La Trobe Valley). 1 The current research is being funded by an Australian Research Council Linkage Project Grant (funded for 20032006) and by the industry partner, AusAID, the Australian Agency for International Development.2 The action research strategy employed in this project resonates with the current, area-focused approach to the delivery of Australian bilateral aid in both countries, and AusAID are interested in the lessons to be learned from an approach which has a research, rather than a funding focus. The theory behind this project draws on recent debates in anthropology and geography on the nature of a postdevelopment project and the status of place in the context of a global economic order (Rahnema and Bawtree 1997; Prazniak and Dirlik 2001). A post-development project is one in which the concept of development is unhinged from notions of economic growth (especially of capitalist expansion). Anthropology has led the way in critiquing uni-linear trajectories of change and hierarchical valuations of cultures and economic practices (Escobar 1995, 2001; Ferguson 1999; Gudeman 2001). Economic geographers have joined in with conceptions of multiple and diverse economies and the identification of noncapitalist economic subjectivities (Gibson-Graham 1996, 2003; Thrift and Olds 1996; Leyshon et al. 2003; Pred and Watts 1992). These new approaches are committed to redressing the marginalisation of localities in a dominant discourse of globalisation which situates all of us as subordinated to, indeed subjected by a global capitalist economy. As Julie Graham has put it, the question has become how to produce ourselves and others as local agents who are economically creative and viable, who are subjects rather than objects of development (2002, emphasis added). This approach involves participants in a research conversation, initiating a process of becoming that acknowledges the power of representations to constrain or enable action. This contrasts with traditional models of action research (for example Frieres 1996 conscientization model) which teach a language of emancipation, aiming to uncover a pre-existing basis for community rather than creating community.3