Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant: Decentralizing Democracy: Urban Participation in Chavez's Venezuela

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Doctoral student Kendra Fehrer Ponniah (Brown University), supervised by Dr. Kay B. Warren, will undertake ethnographic research on citizen engagement in participatory community development programs. The researcher aims to understand how these programs shape the way people, particularly poor people, think about politics, citizenship, and the state.This researcher will conduct 12 months of field research focused on a program meant to foster grassroots participation in neighborhood development decisions in a low-income urban neighborhood in central Venezuela. The researcher will use the results of social history interviews, participant observation, in-depth interviews with participants and public officials, document analysis, and comparative case study to explore (1) how community actors frame their demands for material and cultural resources; (2) how community actors' demands intersect with local and national government priorities; (3) how these new venues for participation influence community access to resources; and (4) how these initiatives shape who gets to "count" as a citizen in Venezuela.This research is important because it will contribute insight into the relationship between decentralization, democratic participation, and development by adding an ethnographic study of practices of civic participation. This research will contribute to academic and policy discussions of civic participation in public programs, as well as understandings of how conceptions of citizenship are produced in different social, political, and historic contexts. Funding this research also supports the education of a social scientist.