The political economy of public participation in decision making in rural development in Malaysia

Public participation in decision making is commonly proposed and implemented by international governmental organisations, development experts, policy makers and leaders in less developed countries as a feasible approach to encourage people’s involvement in their own economic and development affairs. This has led to the development of various strategies to understand the extent of public participation in decision making. However, the common strategies used are inadequate to explain the lack of public participation in decision making in the context of Malaysia. This thesis investigates the process and extent of public participation in decision making in a rural development programme, the Visionary Capability Movement Programme or Gerakan Daya Wawasan (GDW). A political economy methodology is employed along with power and empowerment theories for analysing the ways in which policies can be influenced by the choices made between institutions and the study focuses on locating policy development and its implementation firmly in the context of Malaysia from the economic and political perspectives. Qualitative in-depth interviews were conducted with twelve policy makers and implementers at the macro- and meso-levels, and with thirty-nine local villagers at the micro-level. The findings show clearly that the lack of public participation occurred at these three crucial levels and was ultimately due to the failure of the central government - which had not pursued policies which would guarantee participation, but wanted to avoid the responsibility by transferring power to the local villagers. It also failed to address the highly top-down implementation at the meso-level because all decisions were made without any consultation with the local people. The findings also show that the highly unequal power relations within the villages allowed the leaders of the villages to use the GDW to reinforce their own power which contributed to the lack of public participation. The thesis contributes to bridging a theoretical gap by using power and empowerment theories to understand public participation in decision making and in emphasising the three critical levels - macro, meso and micro – based on a political economy perspective as a framework for understanding public participation in decision making. Empirical evidence from two case-study villages is set out, exposing the extent to which local villagers participated in decision making which puts much emphasis on the important roles of public officials, the local leader (the VDSC) and local villagers.