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Paper short abstract

This paper proposes projectocracy and the projectariat as analytical concepts for studying the project as a dominant mode of governance, future-making, and labour extraction. Drawing on an ethnography of EU-funded development in Romania, it sets the conceptual scene for the panel.

Paper long abstract

In a village bar in eastern Romania, a field-worker for an EU-funded project spends his morning persuading a working mechanic to register as unemployed. The project needs inactive youth. The statistics say they exist. But here, there is just life.

This paper departs from that gap to propose two concepts. Projectocracy names the governance rationality that turns social change into auditable, time-bound procedure — evaluated by logics that originate elsewhere, successful when compliant, not when transformative. The projectariat names its shadow: the brokers, consultants, field-workers, and managed subjects whose expertise accumulates across funding cycles yet translates into neither recognition nor security.

I develop both through ethnographic fieldwork on a youth employment project in rural Romania. Three mechanisms structure the argument: administrative alchemy — the brokerage through which persons are converted into fundable categories; application prose — the technocratic language that disciplines what problems can exist and what solutions are thinkable; and the emergence of post-socialist strategists — subjects who learn to inhabit the project's fictions rather than believe them.

But the Romanian case is offered as heuristic, not diagnosis. These mechanisms operate wherever persons must become legible to funding apparatus — in humanitarian camps, universities, creative industries, state reform. The paper opens three lines of inquiry the panel takes up: the gap between project promises and lived realities, the reshaping of knowledge under project-based regimes, and the central question — whose futures get projected, and whose get foreclosed?