La participation, une légitimité en question

Abstract

Participatory approaches are widely used nowadays, but some questions regarding their legitimacy remain poorly addressed. The legitimacy of participatory processes involves several dimensions: legitimacy of the persons driving the processes, legitimacy of the tools they use, legitimacy of the knowledge they produce, etc. This paper aims to question the social legitimacy of these participatory processes, considering that their neutrality is illusionary, especially regarding the way to deal with power asymmetries among stakeholders. On the one hand, those who adopt a neutral position run the risk of being manipulated by the most powerful local stakeholders while on the other hand those who voluntarily empower the powerless stakeholders rarely have the legitimacy to do so. In the face of this dilemma, our paper examines the testing of a "critical companion posture" which recognizes the need to take into account the local stakeholders' power games to avoid the risk of increasing initial inequalities, and which considers legitimacy the result of a co-construction process: the designer should attempt to make explicit all his/her underlying assumptions so that local stakeholders can choose to accept them as legitimate or to reject them. The paper draws on the experimentation and reflexive analysis of two companion modelling processes conducted with this critical posture in the highlands of Northern Thailand. The discussion about the limits of this posture allows us to delve further into the question of the social legitimacy of participation. These two experiments also enable us to address the cultural and scientific dimensions of this legitimacy. © NSS-Dialogues, EDP Sciences 2013.