Knowledge Democracy
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Item Land and people No. 3, July-September 1988(Participatory Research in Asia (PRIA), 1988-09) Participatory Research in Asia (PRIA)This report covers the third issue of Land and People, a PRIA newsletter on land ownership and alienation, published between July and September 1988. It opens with the Supreme Court's August 1988 ruling ordering the closure of limestone mines in the Doon Valley after nearly three decades of local resistance. It examines India's National Water Policy, questioning whether its emphasis on river-basin planning and large-scale groundwater recharge benefits marginal farmers or reinforces their exclusion. The focus article revisits land reform four decades after independence, highlighting the gap between legal provisions and the land held by small and tenant farmers. A review of Vijay Paranjpye's study of the Tehri Dam questions official estimates of economic returns, displacement, and ecological risks. It also reports on protests against the Narmada Valley Project in Bombay, a fast at the Sardar Sarovar dam site, and a march in North Bihar over recurring floods and drinking water scarcity. It concludes with a letter from Thailand's Project for Ecological Recovery on the shelving of the Nam Choan dam following sustained cross-border solidarity, and a report on the first International Rivers Network conference in San Francisco.Item Non-formal adult education as an entry point for community organisation(0000) Ginny; Shrivastava, OmHow can adult education be leveraged to organise communities? Non formal adult education, by virtue of its flexibility and close alignment with local needs, offers a strong entry point for community organisation. In this article, Ginny and Om Srivastava outline how adult education can be operationalised not merely as a literacy intervention but as a participatory process rooted in people’s lived realities aimed towards individual and social development. They emphasise that the core aim is not limited to reading and writing, but to enable individuals to understand their social conditions, develop critical awareness, and begin to act collectively. Literacy, functional knowledge, and consciousness raising are seen as interconnected pathways through which people can recognise their own potential and organise for change. The article further details how such programmes must be grounded in the community through immersion, participatory methods, and locally relevant materials. Adult education centres, when designed as shared spaces of dialogue and reflection, can evolve into forums for collective decision making and action. In this sense, adult education becomes not an end in itself, but a starting point for building confidence, leadership, and sustained community organisation.Item Seeing like a citizen’ re-claiming citizenship in a neoliberal world. November 28-29,2005(Institute of Development Studies, 2005-11-29) Gaventa, JohnWhat does it mean to be a citizen, and how is that meaning shifting under neoliberalism? In this paper, Prof. John Gaventa discusses how citizenship has increasingly moved away from a rights centered approach towards a more consumption-based approach. Depoliticised notions of citizenship have taken precedence under neoliberalism, where individuals are framed as consumers, users, voters, or beneficiaries rather than as rights bearing actors in their own right. He situates this shift within broader transformations of the state as well, which is not simply withdrawing but is being reconfigured to actively advance market logics, often weakening its role as a guarantor of rights. Through this paper, Gaventa proposes “reversing the telescope” by centering the perspectives of citizens as actors in development processes. This approach foregrounds what he terms thick forms of citizenship, where participation, contestation, and collective action are central. Moving beyond market, state and democracy first forms of citizenship, he argues that placing citizens first enables a re-politicisation of citizenship, strengthening claims to rights, accountability, and more meaningful democratic engagement.Item Participatory research as a methodology of development(Participatory Research in Asia (PRIA), 0000) Tandon, RajeshItem Knowledge as a commodity and participatory research(UNESCO, 1979) Hall, Budd LWhat is knowledge? How is it formed? Who has the authority to “make” it? and who does it ultimately serve? These are the central questions Dr. Budd Hall raises in this article. He critiques the way traditional intellectuals such as scientists and scholars, often trained in elite universities and supported by international funding agencies, are institutionally positioned as the legitimate producers of knowledge. Embedded within particular class locations, this group often produces knowledge that serves its own class interests and maintains dominant social relations. In this process, organic intellectuals engaged in critical reflection and grassroots organising are sidelined as knowledge makers. Drawing on the works of Freire, Mao and others, Hall reflects on the role of intellectuals. He advances a systematic critique of survey research and outlines the guiding principles of participatory research. The article is a critical inquiry into the nature of knowledge within the new international order. It calls for moving beyond viewing knowledge as intellectual commodities such as papers and conferences and toward recognising and valuing local and indigenous knowledge systems, while developing more decentralised ways of legitimising people as producers of knowledge.Item Creating Knowledge: A Monopoly? Participatory Research in Development(Participatory Research in Asia (PRIA), 1982-06) Hall, Budd L; Gillete, Arthur; Tandon, RajeshItem The democratization of the production of knowledge(1988-05-03) Hall, Budd LDr. Budd L. Hall delivered the opening address at a participatory research workshop held at the University of Calgary in May 1988. In this address, he reflects on his journey in participatory research, beginning with his work in Tanzania in the early 1970s, where he met Paulo Freire, to his role in founding the International Participatory Research Network in 1977. By the time of the address, he headed the International Council for Adult Education. . Participatory research is framed through three connected dimensions: a theoretical grounding aimed at building popular hegemony rather than serving ruling classes, an epistemological understanding of knowledge formed through the interaction of research, education and action, and a political practice built on working directly with communities. Feminist, Indigenous, and worker perspectives run through the address, including a Montreal poultry workers' union that studied its own workplace health conditions instead of relying on outside experts, illustrating that there are many ways of knowing beyond formal Western science. John Gaventa's observation appears too that social movements often falter either by rejecting research altogether or by depending too heavily on outside experts. A six-step method developed by Joao Francisco de Souza runs from context and justification through to the collectivization of the knowledge produced. Participatory research is presented, in the end, as a difficult but necessary strategy within the larger struggle over who controls knowledge and powerItem Higher education, the politics of knowledge and the challenges of popular education and social movements(1993) Hall, Budd LDr. Budd L. Hall reflects on the politics of knowledge in higher education, drawing on his own experiences across adult education, participatory research, and academic life. The paper departs from conventional academic arguments. It moves through personal narrative and engagement with other scholars to examine how universities continue to decide what counts as legitimate knowledge. Hall grounds these reflections in specific encounters from his career, particularly the 1991 Paulo Freire Birthday Conference in New York, where a question from a Latina community educator pushed him to rethink how universities relate to the communities they claim to serve. He traces participatory research back to challenges against positivist paradigms in adult education and international development research, noting that even as the field gains recognition inside universities, systems of tenure, promotion, and academic reward continue to favor individual scholarship over collaborative and community-rooted work. Eco-feminist, cultural-historical, and adult education voices, including Vandana Shiva, Mechtild Hart, and Edmund Sullivan, widen the critique further. Hall also points to community-based research centres, PRIA among them, and popular education networks across Latin America as spaces sustaining knowledge outside university walls, closing with a call to reinvent the academy in more democratic and non-extractive termsItem African studies, the formation of knowledge and political commitment(University of Ottawa, 1978-05-04) Hall, Budd LThis knowledge resource is a keynote address delivered by Dr. Budd L. Hall at the University of Ottawa in May 1978, at the joint conference of the Canadian Association of African Studies and the Institute for International Cooperation. Hall raises two central questions: what responsibilities do African studies scholars carry within the Canadian political economy? And how does a genuine commitment to oppressed peoples reshape the practice of research? In his view, academic knowledge production has largely come to serve state and market interests, at the expense of the knowledge systems held by working and indigenous communities. Based on Gramsci, Cabral, and Freire, Hall challenges the neutrality of mainstream research and points toward participatory and activist alternatives, citing community-led examples from Kenya and Tanzania. The address stands as an early and enduring contribution to participatory research thought, speaking directly to present-day debates on knowledge democracy and the decolonization of research practice.Item An emerging global civil society? Implications for learning and work(2000) Hall, Budd LWhat role can adult education play in strengthening global civil society and democratic social change? In this paper, Dr. Budd Hall explores the meanings, uses, and utility of global civil society as both a concept and a lived political practice, tracing its emergence alongside the deepening contradictions of economic globalization. The author argues that global civil society is not an actor itself but a space where social movement organizations, international advocacy networks, non-governmental organizations, and citizen groups interact, resist, and reimagine world politics. Based on theorists including Lipschutz, Hyden, Boulding, and Gramsci, the paper examines why this concept has gained urgency now, pointing to the erosion of state sovereignty; the proliferation of NGOs across the majority world, the growing disillusionment with market-driven globalization, and the shipwreck, as Latouche puts it, of the grand society that has left hundreds of millions as castaways. Networking emerges as the defining practice of global civil society: informal, flexible, decentralized, and capable of rapid mobilization across borders. The paper then turns to adult education, arguing it has a distinctive and underutilized role in strengthening the learning dimensions of global civil society. Transformative adult education, the author contends, supports shifts away from consumerist growth models toward life-affirming, democratically produced visions of collective life, making it not peripheral to global civil society but central to its survival.