Can Participation ‘fix’ Inequality? Unpacking the Relationship Between the Economic and Political Citizenship

Professor John Gaventa is a political sociologist, educator and civil society practitioner with over 30 years of experience in research, teaching and facilitation, and organisational leadership in North and South. He is currently Director of Research at the Institute of Development Studies, This paper, based on a lecture given at the University of Sussex, UK, takes on the issue of growing inequality. Arguing that we know more about how economic inequality affects political participation than we do about how participation and voice (for greater civic and political equity, for example) affect economic inequality, he describes on going work to identify participatory practices that offer some precedents for linking strategies for narrowing political and economic gaps from below. These combinations in turn contribute to challenging these intersecting inequalities and hold promise for transformative solutions across the global North and South. Many years ago, as a young graduate student, I found myself living and working in a mining valley in the rural United States. The situation was one of glaring inequality: one company owned 90% of the land, through a secretive corporate empire, based in the UK, at the top of which sat a Lord Mayor of London, then one of Britain’s wealthiest men. In the Valley itself, I saw glaring poverty, poor schools, lack of health care, a degraded environment through unchecked practices of fossil fuel extraction, a generally poor quality of life—all of these amidst enormous concentrations of wealth in the hands of a few. In my PhD dissertation, later to become my book Power and Powerlessness (1982), I asked the question: in a situation of glaring inequality, why does challenge to that domination not occur? Under what conditions and against what obstacles does rebellion through citizen action begin to emerge? In that study, I traced how concentration of economic wealth in the hands of a few was translated into political power, which allowed the rich absentee landlords, through their local elites, to shape decisions and the rules of the game to their advantage over a period of a hundred years. Building on work by my supervisor Steven Lukes on the three dimensions of power (Lukes, 1974/2004), I argued that over time, power was exercised not just in the visible public sphere but also through hidden means, creating obstacles to participation of the powerless, and over time, contributing to their internalization or acceptance of an unjust and unequal status quo. That work on power has continued to shape my thinking about the relationships between power and participation to this day. Growing attention has been paid to concentrations of wealth and growing inequality. By now the data is familiar to us all. As the Oxfam study Even it Up (2014b) reported: 7 out of 10 people live in countries where the gap between the rich and poor is greater than it was 30 years ago; worldwide the 85 richest people owned as much as the poorest half of humanity; there are 16 billionaires in sub-Saharan Africa, alongside the 358 million people living in extreme poverty; and absurd levels 1 This paper is based on a lecture given as part of the Sussex University Development Lecture Series,