Short Abstract

Who makes incomplete development work, through what labour, and at whose cost? This panel examines how people repair, sustain, desire and negotiate partial institutions and infrastructures, using African worlds to rethink failure and development itself.

Long Abstract

Development in Africa is routinely narrated through failure: weak institutions, incomplete infrastructures, interventions that fall short. Yet development rarely vanishes when it "fails." Irrigation schemes still organise production, roads still redirect mobility, welfare systems still distribute uneven entitlements, and unfinished projects continue to shape authority and aspiration. This panel moves beyond failure as a verdict, treating incompleteness instead as a socially produced and unequally sustained condition.

We ask: how does incomplete development endure, who makes it work, through what labour, and at whose cost? Papers may examine how people maintain infrastructures, bridge institutional gaps, broker access, mobilise collective resources, and absorb responsibilities displaced from states and development agencies—and how gender, generation and class distribute the capacity and obligation to sustain partial arrangements. Endurance, however, cannot be reduced to repair: development also persists through desire, debt, mobility and imagined futures, so that people may simultaneously depend upon, contest, repair and aspire through the same arrangement.

Taking "African Prisms" as a methodological provocation, the panel invites grounded empirical work—on agrarian systems, infrastructure, welfare, urban services and digitalisation—that unsettles inherited categories of success and failure. Together, papers will ask when everyday practices reproduce authority, when they generate capacity to renegotiate it, and how African experience can reshape development theory more broadly. The panel is envisaged as a foundation for a collective publication.

Keywords: incompleteness, infrastructure, labour, brokerage, African prisms

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