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- Convenors:
-
Marie Deridder
(UCLouvain)
Philippe Lavigne Delville (Institut de recherche pour le développement)
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- Chair:
-
Benjamin Rubbers
(Université de Liège)
- Format:
- Panel
- Streams:
- Anthropology (x) Inequality (y)
- Location:
- Neues Seminargebäude, Seminarraum 15
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 31 May, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Berlin
Short Abstract:
Since the 1990s, the world of international development has expended. New processes are shaping the twenty-first century. This panel explores the new boundaries of the anthropology of development and social change in Africa, in relation with its contemporary socio-political and economic dynamics.
Long Abstract:
The contemporary post-9/11 Africa is analysed through the lens of disruptions and crises, while global capitalism deepens inequality at all scales. The development industry in Africa has gone through important changes in recent years. More bureaucratic and technocratic than ever, it has integrated a growing number of management tools and practices. Internal and external criticisms or radical initiatives have been co-opted, absorbed, de-politicised and neutralised without significantly challenging existing power relations. Meanwhile, development projects are increasingly funded, or carried out in partnership with non-western actors and/or non-traditional organizations such as private funds, corporations, charities and churches, and focus on issues that did not strictly enter the purview of development in the past (peace, climate change, migration, security, mining, etc.). As a result, the boundaries of “development” – what it is, who brings it, where and to whom – have become blurred.
This panel invites contributions based on ethnographic research in Africa that provide fresh insights on (1) these transformations in the development industry; (2) their interrelations with the new economic, political, environmental, security and sanitary changes confronted by the African continent in recent years; (3) and/or their consequences for the anthropology of development and social change. The aim of the panel is to reflect, and engage a discussion, on the new boundaries of the anthropology of development and the aid industry, in terms of issues, actors, concepts and objects, that will contribute to shape African futures.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 31 May, 2023, -Paper short abstract:
Building on ethnographic research, this paper explores how lawyers can act as brokers of the state at the local level: first, by questioning or furthering policies while arguing cases that involve public institutions; second, by shaping their clients’ representations and expectations of the state.
Paper long abstract:
Over the last few years, the anthropology of development has moved from the study of projects to the implementation of public policies, exploring the various practices and logics involved in making the (African) state. We studied the elaboration of reforms and insisted on public servants’ discretion in implementing them. The place of law and legal strategies in designing, enforcing, or questioning these reforms, however, remained relatively under-explored. This paper aims to fill such a gap by analyzing how the daily practices of lawyers at the Beninese bar contribute to making ‘the state’. It furthers the idea that lawyers can act as brokers of the state – not only at the global level, but also in their daily practices such as advising clients and arguing cases at the national level. In the last few years, new policies have been adopted at an unprecedented pace, increasingly involving criminal courts in matters such as taxes, corruption, or free speech. This presentation builds on ethnographic fieldwork amongst lawyers to examine whether, and how they can further or question these reforms. It then asks how litigants’ images of the state, feelings of trust, and impressions of due process are constructed in their interactions with lawyers, and seeing them argue in court. In a context where both national and international observers worry about the future of democracy and the rule of law in Benin, both the place of lawyers as a contesting force, and citizens’ images and expectations of the state, are important questions.
Paper short abstract:
As the government’s failure to deliver development is increasingly framed as unconstitutional, Public Interest Litigation Organisations (PILOs) emerge as prominent actors in South Africa’s development industry. An ethnographic focus on PILOs offers key insights for the anthropology of development.
Paper long abstract:
South Africa’s 1997 Constitution locates socioeconomic development within the remit of law both through its inclusion of socioeconomic rights, and the onus on government to realise these rights subject to “available resources”. A Public Interest Litigation Organisation (PILO) industry has thus developed, assisting the poor and marginalised to access the Constitution’s transformative aspirations. It accomplishes this through litigation, and commentary on policy bills related to housing, education, healthcare, basic services, land reform, and enforcing standards of good governance. PILOs thus take on issues that traditionally fall within the ambit of the “development industry”, extending its institutional fabric.
Based on ethnographic research in several South African PILOs, this paper argues that PILOs are key actors in South Africa’s development industry. Their work intervenes in the tension between the government’s constitutional developmental obligations and its (in)capacity to fulfil these. As PILOs’ work is also underpinned by their own ideologies of development, informed by the communities they represent, they highlight contestations regarding both the substance and delivery of development.
As rights represent part of the political ontology of the present and an ideational assumption about the future, PILOs and the law mediate the tension between imagined constitutional ideals and the material realities of “development” by a range of actors, including the government, the judiciary, PILOs, and PILO clients.
Engaging with PILOs highlights the need for the anthropology of development to consider previously underemphasised institutions, actors, and ideas around state power, thereby forging new avenues of inquiry and cultivating creative reconsiderations of development itself.
Paper short abstract:
Our paper empirically explores the complex web of public policies and health action mechanisms during the covid-19 crisis in Congo-Kinshasa. It is part of the anthropology of development and the aid industry, extended to two of its 'new frontiers'
Paper long abstract:
Our paper empirically explores the complex web of public policies and health action mechanisms during the covid-19 crisis in Congo-Kinshasa. It is based on a field study and is part of the anthropology of development and the aid industry, which has been extended to two of its 'new frontiers': public action (Olivier De Sardan, 2011), which operates over the long term and discreetly, and humanitarian action, which is 'marked by urgency and media coverage' (Goamere and Ost, 1996). From this dual perspective, we will examine the economic and health responses of the Congolese public authorities during the state of health emergency declared during the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic (March to July 2020). We would like to emphasise the rapidity of the Congolese government's reaction to curb the spread of the coronavirus. This promptness is remarkable in a context where state services are generally seen as weak, failing or absent, and where the various public actors, whether political or administrative, tend to act without coordination. However, the day-to-day governance of the state of health emergency was sometimes faulty and chaotic, thus contributing to the generalisation of risk denial in the population. Resistance by citizens to the restrictive measures prohibiting their daily survival activities has fostered the emergence of competing risks and created new vulnerabilities, aggravating the situation of precariousness and socio-economic vulnerability of workers in the informal economy.
Paper short abstract:
Committees have become increasingly important as the governance vehicle through which development is delivered. How can we best organize as a community to keep watch over and better understand this powerful institution mediating African development in the name of democracy and deliberation?
Paper long abstract:
A major transformation in the development industry has been the rise and dominance of community-based approaches and with it the “committeefication” of collective action. Committees have become increasingly important as the governance vehicle through which development is delivered. Throughout the continent, they have come to preside over everything from natural resource management to cultural life, and from peacebuilding to community consultation. In a recent publication (World Development 2022) we justify and launch a call to research, arguing that it is imperative to turn more systematic analytical attention to committees, and assess the extent to which they are delivering development or crippling collective action in the guise of democracy and deliberation. In this paper, using concrete examples from the field, we explore how to organize this collective endeavor. How do we observe and analyze the forms and functions of committees? What concepts do we need to operationalize committees as objects of inquiry and development as their consequence? Which methods are most suited to their comparative study across time and space and in the various systems of collective action that they are part of? As a research community how can we work together, designing and coordinating our research and centralizing our findings. Given their remarkable prominence, much of Africa’s future development seems to be in the hands of committees. Let’s turn a collective eye towards these institutional forms and build a better understanding of how they shape processes of development and social change.
Paper short abstract:
This paper proposes a renewed theoretical approach to study development from workers’ perspectives, rather than teleological ones. It argues that work and workers produce the contingencies that make development happen. It is based on a literature review on theory and ethnography of development.
Paper long abstract:
Many scholars have defined development in terms of ideologies, freedom, modernization, economic growth, quality of life, or other qualitative and quantitative aspects. Others have looked at the mechanisms and processes of development, through ethnography of development, practice theory, theories of change, macro- or micro-economic modelling, or follow the current gold standard – impact research and Randomized Control Trials. To renew ethnographic approaches and to complement these perspectives on development, this paper proposes a qualitative study of development as work and from workers’ perspectives. The goal of this approach is to understand the decisions, motivations, contingencies that define development in an everyday sense. In doing so, it attempts to counter grand narratives and the weight of ideology in development with a firm grounding in realities of workers – a world that has so far been largely overlooked.
This paper places ‘development’ in the daily work of each worker and their own experiences, decisions, as well as embeddedness in, collaboration with, and orders received from organisational layers in development projects. It adds to ethnography of aid and development, interfaces and practice theory. This allows for questions about organisational boundaries and it includes those who do work but risk to be overlooked as part of the organisation. It is based on ethnographic research with two development organisations in Uganda and it forms the theoretical foundation for an ongoing PhD project. This project uses ethnography of development, interviews and solicited diaries as a methodology.
Paper short abstract:
The paper argues that externally induced arms control projects can foster the militarization of development by legitimizing and expanding the capacities of security institutions. It draws on interdisciplinary political economy theory and is based on interviews and field research in Nigeria.
Paper long abstract:
Weapons are a central tool to both enable and undermine state control. As a result, arms control measures to foster the ‘good governance’ of weapons within states have increasingly become a focus of donor-recipient cooperation. This applies to Nigeria in particular, where a multitude of externally funded and internally launched projects promise to unfold a transformative influence on security institutions. Accordingly, development cooperation projects in the field of arms control are dominated by technical capacity-building measures. This follows the rationale that arms control can pave the way for more stable societies and thus promote development. In this context, security institutions function as both executing agencies of arms control as well as institutions that are to be transformed by arms control. However, such a view depoliticises the respective institutions by disregarding their social and historical configuration. Against this background, the paper argues that legitimizing and extending capacities of security institutions in the name of development bears specific pitfalls. It finds that these institutions, or more specifically their implementing bureaucrats, have a strong influence on whether the control over the means of violence fosters social power relations that undermine egalitarian development. Hence, the transition dynamics of security institutions seem less guided by linear causal transformation but more by an ongoing competition over goals and competencies. The proclaimed positive effects of arms control on stability and development can therefore be undermined by a militarization of these very goals; a process that is externally supported when common interests are perceived. The analysis draws on interdisciplinary political economy theory and is based on interviews with national and international arms control implementers as well as field research in Nigeria. It unites the study of the goals and practice of externally-induced arms control projects with the governance of weapons and implementation practice within its socio-political context.
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines the construction of the SDG indicators from an ethnographic perspective. It explored what world view is perpetuated by these statistics, established economic boundaries, errors and internal contradictions and complementarities within the data and Tanzania’s green economy vision.
Paper long abstract:
The Green Economy is touted as a solution to address the adverse impacts of climate change resulting from the capitalist economic system. It is often linked to the implementation of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Like the SDGs themselves, the debates around and promotion of the green economy gained traction around 2012, mainly as the response from multinational organisations to the financial, fuels and food crises. But moving to a green economy requires changes in the way we make things, move, allocate resources, produce energy and consume goods and services. It requires governments to do things differently, especially developing and promoting policies that encourage citizens, businesses and civil society to change their behaviour and aspirations. Once the policies are implemented, they must be monitored and measured to determine whether they are having the desired impact. However, the SDGs and Green Economy ideas perpetuate a particular world view, determine what economic boundaries are acceptable. As such they contain contradictions and complementarities. Based on analysis of intensive interviews with the people who produce and compile these statistics, those who work in quality control and evaluation, and those who use them, the paper explores the implications of the world views, contradictions and complementarities of the SDGs for the Green Economy concept as envisioned in Tanzania' green economy plans.