ABSTRACT
The chapter explores how China’s first participatory project affected Yunnan’s provincial governmental scientists. In the aftermath of the military suppression of the Tiananmen Square protest of 1989, the Ford Foundation, a U.S.-based philanthropy, launched the Yunnan Uplands Management Project (YUM) in 1990, at the request of the Leading Group for Poverty Alleviation and Development of the Chinese central government. The project ran until 1995. One of its key unintended consequences was the emergence of NGOs in Yunnan from the mid-1990s onward.
While the Ford Foundation did not attain its main goal of making YUM a national model for poverty alleviation, YUM led to the unintended outcome of nurturing entrepreneurial-minded Chinese governmental scientists who would build roles for themselves as development actors by practicing and disseminating the participatory methods they had learned through YUM. Building on this unintended outcome, the Foundation encouraged and funded YUM graduates to establish NGOs in the hope of nurturing China’s emerging civil society. Thus, the case study expresses horizontal global-local relations in which local dynamics influence the goals of donors and the ways in which they seek to disseminate development discourses and practices to local actors for the sake of mutual benefit.
