Paper short abstract:

This paper is a study of the micropolitics of a development intervention in rural Ethiopia. It assesses two different dynamics of the intervention’s micropolitics: firstly, struggles to control its resources, and secondly, its interactions with discursive understandings of power and the state.

Paper long abstract:

This paper is a study of the micropolitics of a development intervention implemented by a German NGO, Menschen für Menschen, in a single district of Amhara Region in Ethiopia. It explores the complex ways in which the intervention interacted with the local government and its officials, focusing on the question of whether the government was strengthened or weakened in the process. The paper makes the case for combining and comparing two different approaches to the study of power relations in development interventions: firstly, tracking flows of funds and material resources, and the struggles of particular actors to control these resources; and secondly, exploring how people’s everyday, discursive understandings of power and the state were reified or shaped by the intervention. The methodology is based in oral history and involved a combination of archival research, life-work history interviews and informal conversations gathered through frequent visits to the intervention site. The paper concludes that the government was both strengthened and weakened by the intervention. It was strengthened by its acquisition of a network of roads, schools, clinics and offices, as well as through officials’ control over training opportunities; but it was weakened because of the way the intervention interacted with people’s ideas of government (mengist). People came to see the NGO as representing ideals of mengist that the government itself failed to live up to – and this became particularly problematic for the government around the contested 2005 elections.