Paper short abstract:

This paper examines discourses in Ghana, suggesting that these problematise both the vision of development as a form of globalisation and the opposing idea that such ostensibly Euro-American understandings conceal specifically ‘African’ forms of patrimonialism.

Paper long abstract:

The recent proliferation of Non Governmental Organisations in Ghana, as in other parts of Africa, has tended to be seen either as the inappropriate application of European norms, values and ideas or as the strategic adaptation of elites to new kinds of resources. In the former position, NGOs are seen as conduits of the globalization of originally European political values, whilst in the latter such values are imagined to be a tool that elites simply employ and exploit in the pursuit of resources that feed distinctly 'African' forms of patronage. In this paper, I call into question both approaches, through an analysis that draws on participant observation amongst a variety of NGOs in Ghana. The paper suggests that whilst the discourses that accompany such NGOs appear to turn on familiar western terms, the meanings and uses attached to these are always specific. For example, the apparently globally inspired concept of 'indigenous knowledge' plays into longstanding disputes about the political and economic role of chiefs, whilst ideas of 'civil society' are appropriated to longstanding political projects within the country. This however, is not to suggest that such practices, understandings and relations are distinctly 'African'. Whilst an opposition between 'African' and 'Western' or 'European' was often employed in NGO workers own accounts, the social and cultural use of this opposition is not reducible to the opposition itself.