Grassroot horizons

In this multicountry work, grassroots activists and researchers build on their varied personal experiences to clarify and strengthen the effectiveness of participatory group action in overcoming impoverishment, oppression, and exclusion. The work's origins are in personal bonding and shared insights gained in a 1989 workshop at the East-West Center. The authors focus on pre-political and political issues: relations between self and other; group identity and solidarity; organizing against vested positions and structures; knowledge and value systems, pre- and post-independence; violence and non-violence; and relationships of work, resource access, market organization, and global environmental concerns. These issues come to life through first hand accounts of participatory development in diverse, often conflictual situations: rural women's groups organizing for water, forest, and social rights in Bangladesh; single mothers uniting to overcome poverty in Newfoundland, then extending Canada-wide; the deaf in Thailand achieving international recognition and at least temporary unity by creating the Thai Sign Dictionary; farmer and farm family education and organization in the Philippines; formation of credit societies and other organizing initiatives by suppressed, low income rural caste groups in northern India; university curriculum change led by Native American communities in the Pacific Northwest of the United States; contributions of Bangladesh environmental NGOs to democratic processes; villagers' direct action to restore forest in southern Thailand; community-supported agriculture in Japan, Europe, and the U.S.; and Hawaiian initiatives for economic and political self-determination. Editor's reflections span the horizons of action and thinking. Integrative chapters present an alternative development paradigm, offer techniques of coalition-building in diversity, and propose a conceptual design of values and ethical principles toward socially-just, sustainable development.