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- Convenors:
-
Lynn Schler
(Ben Gurion University of the Negev)
Anat Rosenthal (Ben Gurion University of the Negev)
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- Discussant:
-
Nurit Hashimshony-Yaffe
(The Academic College of Tel Aviv Yaffo)
- Stream:
- Economy and Development
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 12 June, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This panel proposes to engage with the afterlife of development projects. We will examine how communities and individuals engage with and reinvent schemes in the years following their abandonment. The focus will be on both continuities, as well as ruptures and reversals that emerge over time.
Long Abstract:
After decades of poor performance and disappointments with the outcomes of development schemes, scholars are increasingly engaged in efforts to understand the long-term impact of failure in development. The quest to understand what has gone wrong has unearthed immense complexity, and it is acknowledged that the binary division into "success" and "failure" is simplistic. The notions of "failure" or "success" can distort more ambiguous and complex results. A more appropriate approach should take a broad view of outcomes that include impacts, sustainability, and long-term relevance for individuals, community, and country, both intended and unintended. Development interventions can produce unplanned consequences that involve multiple forms of social, cultural, spiritual and ideological change. Processes that involve reinterpretation and reclaiming of both failures and successes are clearly brought into focus when we examine the lifespans of development schemes beyond the intended scope of the projects. We have much to learn from how local communities and individuals experience, respond to, and reinvent initiatives in the years following the end of development initiatives. This panel proposes to engage with the afterlife of development projects. We will examine both continuities with the original goals of schemes, as well as ruptures and reversals that emerge over time. We seek to understand how local imaginaries, initiatives, and criticisms engage in dialogue with the agendas of both development organizations and state actors to reshape and reinvent the impact and significance of schemes after they are abandoned.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 12 June, 2019, -Paper short abstract:
This paper looks at perspectives and standards of living among those resettled by Mali's Manantali dam in the mid-1980s. Many elderly still lament their losses, but the standard of living has improved. National changes enhanced the effects of resettlement, leading to greater political voice.
Paper long abstract:
In 1986 and 1987, 8000 people were resettled by the Manantali dam, built in an isolated part of rural Mali. A resettlement project provided people some land, built new villages and housing, and deep wells. A research project carried out by this author and scholars at Mali's Institut des Sciences Humaines in 2016-18 looked at the question of how people's lives have changed in the interim. Approximately 110 households were followed through studies in the mid-1980s as people were moving, in 1993-94 several years after people had resettled, and again in 2016-18. Thirty years later, many people still do not conceptualize resettlement villages as their homes, and many elderly people lament what they see as the loss of lives of abundance in the old sites. At the same time, it is quite clear that the standard of living, measured by commonly used indicators, such as education, income, health, and access to goods and markets, has improved. Some changes were brought about by dam construction and resettlement, but many are the result of larger changes instituted by the Malian government, occurring throughout the country. In Manantali, they interacted with changes brought about by the resettlement to transform local conditions. The road built by the dam construction company opened the zone to markets and transport; recent government initiatives paved the roads, enhancing national integration. Constant negotiation with resettlement authorities honed local political skills, and national decentralization some 10 years later gave people a forum to express their new political voice.
Paper short abstract:
This paper will present ongoing research into a large rural development project implemented by a German NGO in Ethiopia from 1992-2007. It will seek to outline the particular contribution that historical methods can make towards a better understanding of development projects and their consequences.
Paper long abstract:
Enquiries into the afterlife of development projects have the potential to contribute, on the one hand, to critical scholarly debates on development and its hegemonising effects, and on the other, to development agencies' interest in the long term 'impact' and 'sustainability' of their work. But there is little consensus on the best methodology(ies) for studying projects in the recent past. There appears to be a gulf between aid evaluators' methods, which foreground supposedly 'objective', often quantitative data, and critical scholarly approaches, which emphasise particular theoretical frameworks of interpretation and the subjective understandings of individual actors.
This paper will engage with these debates in presenting ongoing research into a single development intervention: the Merhabete Integrated Rural Development Project, implemented by the German NGO Menschen für Menschen in one woreda (district) of Amhara Region, Ethiopia, between 1992 and 2007. The paper will make a case for historical methods which can integrate critical theoretical insights and subjective understandings into a broadly empirical account. Careful use of archives, combined with oral history material gathered from different actors - NGO staff, drivers, security guards, migrants, government officials, and the range of men and women who lived in the woreda during project implementation - have the potential to provide a rich, textured and detailed picture of a development project, and the different understandings of its long-term consequences.
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines the legacy of Mandela Soccer Academy, a Ghanaian development initiative. Detailing the shifts it went through following the abandoned by its founder and sole funder, the paper analyzes how the academy has managed to survive and maintain its state of precarious sustainability.
Paper long abstract:
In 2016, a new development initiative was adopted by the members of the UN, The Sustainable Development Agenda. It reflected a growing understanding among development agencies that reducing poverty has to be sustainable to ensure that its effects are not short-lived. But while sustainability is a much-sought-after goal, achieving it is more elusive. If we are to have a better understanding of how development schemes manage to have long-term impacts, it is vital that researchers pay attention to examining how schemes cope with political, economic, and social vicissitudes.
The following contribute to this understanding, by analyzing the legacy of Mandela Soccer Academy (MSA), a Ghanaian development initiative. MSA was established in 2012 but yet only four years later its founder, who was also its sole funder, judged the academy as a failure and abandoned the project. Based on the ethnography conducted at the academy, the paper reveals two central aspects. First, that MSA had in fact improved the lives of many of its participants, thus illustrating that notions of success and failure are subjective and depend on the participants' visionaries. Second, that in order to survive as a development program, MSA had to be transformed from an NGO with a primary goal of educating children, to a commercial venture that is focused on generating income through the making of footballers. This shift embodies broader acknowledgments among development practitioners, agencies, and scholars, many of whom recognize the vitality of development programs to generate profits if they are to have sustainable impacts.