for the particular skills of less educated and less able villagers in other committees and roles. This may also result in a sense among participants that potential benefits of participation do not warrant the time and energy required to participate. Thirdly, the ways in which groups (their leaders, and constituent individuals) interact with each other and define, defend, and reconstruct their identity—or, more accurately, particular forms of identity in response to particular circumstances—ultimately shapes the power of groups.<sup>71</sup> For example, norms of decisionmaking in KDP forums may militate against women, the poor, and individuals from certain cultural traditions. Where these individuals are not encouraged to participate, the (il)logic of their membership in a particular identity group may preclude quick involvement in a novel associational setting. Such problems are well known to facilitators of participatory processes in developing and industrialized nations alike.

Thus another key question is whether—in addition to providing inclusive decision-making forums—such participatory collaborative processes can help generate such points of strength for coalitions of marginalized groups to develop countervailing power, and if so, how? Does KDP in fact empower villagers in this way? We argue that KDP can over time, but the initial stage of this brand of empowerment may be neither flashy nor definitive in their observable implications. Our case studies do suggest that typically KDP forums catalyzed formal associational interactions and sustained deliberation between diverse groups of women and the poor who may otherwise have found no reason to interact with one another. Key informant surveys from wellfunctioning KDP districts reveal that villagers find its deliberative forums more democratic than most other forums in their villages.<sup>72</sup> In addition to these findings, a good indicator of empowerment is whether or not KDP provides forums for the management of the conflict it necessarily introduces to villages and neighborhoods. By this measure, it does exceptionally well. In none of our case studies did we find evidence that conflicts caused by KDP forums (for example, competition between neighborhood groups vying for the ability to submit funding proposals to the sub-district forum) went unresolved or became violent. The fact that the program provides and encourages a series of routines for allocating the time, resources, and spaces required to peacefully resolve the conflicts it inevitably introduces is an achievement in and of itself.

# **5. Conclusion**

KDP in Indonesia represents a very self-conscious movement away from the notion of development agencies as the deliverer of “the project” and toward a vision of development projects as ways to trigger and support processes in which villagers exercise discretion in solving self-identified development problems.<sup>73</sup> Thus, a natural and indeed purposeful product of this approach is conflict. But beyond simply inducing conflict in this way, we have argued that KDP also cultivates a set of collaborative routines of conflict management that villagers can use to interface with more organized and influential actors. Within sets of facilitated forums extending from neighborhood to village to sub-district levels, the simple act of participating in KDP planning and decision making forums often becomes the first occasion in which villagers from

> 71 Diprose (2003) and Barron, Smith, and Woolcock (2004) develop this notion as the “dynamics of difference.” 72 Clark, Marwardi, and Barron (2004) 73 Guggenheim (forthcoming)

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