ABSTRACT
At the same time, there is a certain consensus among some people with a long and direct experience of working on infrastructural projects in the ‘Third World’ that this situation arises because of the absence of any real, or genuine, stakeholder participation. This absence of most of the true or genuine stakeholders, who have the most direct stake in the outcome of the project concerned, is due to their not being represented at all, having been disenfranchised by a richer and more influential minority. There have, of course, been many attempts to change this situation by direct interventions on the part of international and non-governmental organisations, primarily financed by ‘First World’ societies but directed towards the enablement of specific communities in the ‘Third World’. Whatever the good intentions of community enablement, however, the autonomy of the stakeholders concerned is much too often compromised within this construction. This is in the first place because, beyond these interventions, there lurks a further hindrance, in that the introduction of a genuine stakeholder participation, in which the poor and oppressed could take a major and indeed leading part in a project, necessitates the taking of a sociotechnical position that is way beyond the capacities of most of those who are established in this area. This situation can in turn be traced at least partially to the long-ongoing struggle for the control of the development agenda between the various organisations involved, which has actively discouraged the development of any serious capacity in the socio-technical leadership of civil engineering projects within the third world (Abbott & Thein 2003). Instead there reigns a technocratic attitude that is largely dismissive of such initiatives. There are singularly few persons who are prepared to grasp the nettle of genuine stakeholder participation, and, inseparable from this, stakeholder empowerment, in the third world.
