In this research undertaking, Dr. Julia Paley will investigate the local effects of five different organizations that are trying to promote democracy in Ecuador. The organizations include USAID, the World Bank, two Ecuadorian indigenous organizations, and an Ecuadorian municipal government. Democracy promotion has been an important consideration in American foreign policy and also at the forefront of demands by social movements in many parts of the world. But because the democracy literature focuses primarily on formal regime change and political institutions, it leaves largely unexamined local meanings and everyday practices. This project is designed to fill that gap by examining the many meanings of participatory democracy.
In this multi-sited and multi-year project, the researcher will employ use ethnographic and historical approaches to examine three key dynamics: 1) how USAID and World Bank discourses and policies are interpreted and deployed by the aid agencies working in Ecuador; 2) how the indigenous movement and local indigenous organizations are understood among the World Bank and USAID staff, and conversely how these social movement organizations view and interact with the development agencies; and 3) how the municipality of Cotacachi makes sense of and seeks to transform these circulating discourses and policies as it collaborates with agency staff on local projects. Her research methods include participant-observation, interviews, cultural consensus analysis, and archival research. This research is important because it has direct implications for clarifying the aims, methods, and approaches of foreign aid, public policy, development programs, and social movements oriented toward promoting democracy. It also will contribute to contemporary social science research that tries to integrate data on a single issue but at different levels of scale. This is important because social scientists today frequently must work at the local, national, and international levels simultaneously.
