Paper short abstract:

This article examines the construction of agency in development projects. I adopt a historical perspective on the cotton sector in Benin, host of many development projects since the 1960s. I conclude that agency within projects depends more on changes occurring outside than within project spaces.

Paper long abstract:

Since the consolidation of aid, the failure of development projects has been justified by its inability to fully comprehend the complexities of the host context. Progressively, practitioners and researchers have successfully transformed the project experience. They made the project space more participatory, flexible, and responsive to the context specificities. Yet, unequal power relations between donor and recipient, project and context remain widespread within development encounters. Local institutions, elites, and underlying interests instrumentalise project mechanisms. Thus, this article challenges the idea that the project framework is the most relevant object of study to understand the construction of host actors’ agency within it. I draw from my doctoral research on the history of development projects in the cotton sector in Benin. I conducted focus groups, participant observations, archive research, and collected oral histories through interviews. In my longitudinal study, projects appear as short-lived and specific interventions, when compared with the lasting temporality and dynamics of the host context. From the perspective of host actors, projects are secondary events in which actors engage based on pressing issues defined by interactions in other domains of action, in which projects have none or little leverage. Therefore, I demonstrate that the understanding of host actors’ agency within projects is better understood by analysing long-term power relations in tangent social spaces. Finally, I contend that instead of focussing on agency within development encounters alone, we shall rather assess projects based on their capacity to empower actors to act outside of project boundaries.