Slum Improvement Committees are neighborhood associations created by the organization PRIA in the slums of Patna, India, in order to empower marginalized citizens through their participation in the public sphere. This paper argues that local communities and social workers do not necessarily share the same conceptions of development, and that their contradictory interests alter the very objective of empowerment. In the case of slum populations, while displaying in public a certain docility, a minority of inhabitants have nevertheless in parallel diverted Slum Improvement Committees from their original collective purpose in order to serve more individualistic interests – by doing so, they have managed to generate in their own profit new forms of empowerment. At the same time, the social workers hired by PRIA to supervise slum-dwellers have also transformed the raison-d’être of Slum Improvement Committees, using them more as professional instruments of career management rather than tools of development. Hence, bottom-up structures like Slum Improvement Committees might indeed offer opportunities for marginalized citizens, but they are also likely to generate new top-down dynamics of domination coming from both within and outside the community.
