incentives and disincentives correspondingly shape the types of routines used by groups in conflict.

# _4.2 Countervailing versus Autarchic Power_

As suggested by a long line of anthropological research associated with Geertz and Horowitz, our ethnographies of local level conflict show that power is as much about generating shared meanings in a particular context of social and cultural norms and institutions than it is anything else. Lacking influence involves a vicious cycle: those unable to purposefully navigate in shared worlds of meaning-making are precisely those who lack the opportunities for the kinds of conjecture, refutation, inquiry, and criticism, which might result in greater influence. Said differently, marginalization is about lacking both the capability and the occasions on which to engage in productive conflict. With this debt, marginalized actors struggle to “get recognized” in these contexts and tend to oscillate between intense “loyalty” to core cultural values and “exit” from them, often manifest in violent protest or total apathy (Hirschman 1970, Appadurai 2004). Finding the middle ground amidst these two extremes typically involves negotiating meta-rules, intermediaries, and approaches to interest formation and defense, all of which make the prospect of finding resolutions to conflict more palpable.<sup>65</sup> But even adaptive conflict management routines—within or outside of KDP processes—are insufficient to reach the poorest of the poor. The most troubled need the most help to develop the countervailing power to challenge dominant norms of communication. Here, small experiments suggest that such efforts need to speak in deeply symbolic cultural and social languages to become actions of resistance. A small KDP pilot program that targets widows in four provinces provides a good example. Run by an NGO, the program helps organize widows by organizing them to the point that they can collectively rejoin group decision-making.<sup>66</sup> A major tool it uses is training in documentary photography, which some participants have used to express a range of sensations and impressions of village life. Such targeted attempts are in many ways the missing link to a more comprehensive empowerment strategy because they complement the program’s deliberative spaces and incentives for inter-group collaboration with tools for intra-group mobilization. Without such a tool for lowering otherwise high opportunity costs of collaboration, marginalized groups find little incentive to participate in deliberative forums, project planning, or in the project more generally.

Part of what this demonstrates is that broad, far-reaching collaboration may require marginalized groups to find new ways of speaking and acting outside of inter-group collaborations. While KDP proposes that villagers learn about democracy by practicing it, its most marginalized participants may need more practice outside of the program. That practice, moreover, may come in surprisingly creative forms that speak highly contextualized and often personal languages of context revision. This should all confirm that countervailing power and context-revision do not refer to the unrealistic notion that institutions rise and fall monolithically and suddenly. Rather, revision is incremental and gradual, and may mirror what the psychological literature calls “small wins” (Weick 1984) and the legal institutional literature calls “small steps” (Sunstein and Ullmann-Margalit 1998). In short, context-revising routines of collaboration may become most

> 65 See Barron, Smith, and Woolcock (2004). 66 Guggenheim (2004: 30).

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