These two voices, while coming from radically different backgrounds, present us with quite similar perspectives on the disempowerment of local communities, the importance of who «owns» development processes, and a sense of the mistrust and obstacles to communication that have been created by colonialism, modernisation and globalisation. Grazia Borrini-Feyerabend et al. tell us of a series of external impositions on local communities through colonial or state rule, the discounting of local knowledge in favour of «scientific» knowledge, and in some cases the stripping away of local control in a process they call «deresponsibilisation». These forms of disempowerment stripped many local communities of the capacity and even the right.
